Bone Sickness

2004, Dir. by Brian Paulin.

It's been a long time (about 6 months, maybe) since my good man Zach S. from over at ZforZombies.com recommended that I check out Bone Sickness. I didn't really know Zach at the time, as I was just starting to mingle with other horror bloggers and only knew him as one of the few followers I had on this site. When I took a look at the movie's IMDB page, where I quickly found some unflattering images and a low overall rating from users...I kinda thought that he might have been doing what the British call "taking the piss".

But when Zach (who I now know is definitely legit...possibly too legit to quit) recently recommended the film to me again, I figured I'd take the plunge. This, Bone Sickness happened to me today. Am I down with it?

We'll start with the plot. Kristen is married(?) to Alex, who's very sick. Her friend Thomas (played by writer/director Paulin) works with the dead, and offers her some "herbs and stuff" that should cure Alex while his hot wife is away. we quickly learn that the items he's been giving her, which look like a McRib Sandwich when removed from a corpse, are turning him into a "necrojunkie" who needs more flesh and becomes kind of a zombie. In the meantime, actual zombies happen. Are they upset because he has been (unknowingly) eating them? I think so. Carnage follows.

Let's get straight to the point of this one. Bone Sickness, which appears to have been produced on a budget of approximately "last week's left over cans and bottles", is about as inventive with its gore as any super-low budget zombie film I've seen. This isn't one of those "just cut away because we can't afford effects" films, nor is it one of those "we'll say it's a zombie movie but not actually have zombies until the final minute" (Zombies Gone Wild, anyone?) films. There's a lot of splatter. It's not long into the 98 minute runtime that we've got Alex puking up worms (while I was eating fish sticks, too!), and later we get people ripped apart, full on eaten, and dismembered in plenty of ways. There are entire segments of the film which are just gore. We're talking minutes upon minutes of gore in a row. None of it looks too great - as I said, the budget is a constraint - but they at least offer it.

The gore doesn't hold up too well, and this definitely isn't Fulci, but it did get to my stomach based simply on the amount of gore and how it combines with fish sticks. Since we're comparing, I could say that there are shades of Romero too, with some really brief social commentary in the final scenes, though comparisons to horror maestros must end there.

Bone Sickness is as amateur as it can be in almost every category (the women do look pretty good in the pre-zombpocalypse gratuitous nudie scenes). The plot offers some new stuff with Alex's dilemma, but is paint-by-numbers in every other regard. None of the actors seem too interesting, and the film could definitely have been pared down a bit by the director and editor. None of it really seems too worthy of ridicule, either, and it didn't seem like the kind of film you could sit down and riff with friends for fun.

If you're interested in a film that's all about gore, you can do a lot worse than Bone Sickness. And it's far above a lot of zombie drivel I've seen lately. I'm not a splatterhound, so I grew tired of the film at points, but in the end found myself glad to have seen it. I'm not sure if I really recommend it based on my personal preferences, but I can see why it could gain a cult following.