Alex is suffering from a degenerative bone disease and his wife Kristen is doing everything in her power to help her poor husband. Morgue attendant Thomas Granger, who's Alex best friends is also doing everything he possibly can to save his buddy and gives Kristen a combination of corpse marrow and red meat mixture to add into her husband's food. Too bad for Alex that the marrow wasn't fresh enough and it doesn't take long before the sick man becomes a flesh-craving Necro-junkie.
Ok, so obviously Bone Sickness is not a film for anyone and saying that it's just another gore flick would be to take things a little to light - it's THE gore film. Remember Peter Jackson's Braindead/Dead Alive? Bone Sickness goes beyond what that film did, gore-wise that is. Good things with Braindead though was that it was funny, the gore was funny and Bone Sickness is nothing like that, and that was why it didn't work for me. If I were to describe Bone Sickess I would go something like 'gore, gore, more gore and then some' and that would pretty much summarize the film up. It's not that I don't understand what the filmmakers wanted to do with their film, because I'm pretty sure that I do and that is to have fun and create one helluva gory film - so gory that you need a raincoat when watching it. And the fact is that they do it well, they succeed with what they set out to do so I'm not saying that it's a bad film, what I'm saying is that it's not my type of film.
Horror fans are different and what it all comes down to in the end is just a matter of taste. Some like disgusting stuff, some like mindless fun slasher flicks and some requrie a strong and scary story and you can count me in on the last one, even though I'm a sucker for goofy 80's horror among other things too. While I have nothing against gore, I wouldn't label myself a gorehound and I believe that gore is all right if justified. I can usually sit through practically anything and while I thought I would never say this about a movie - this one just has too much gore in it. Let me put it like this, if you call yourself a gorehound, go buy this film right now because Bone Sickness is your wet dream come true. Me, I'm not a picky kind of guy, but I prefer when focus is set on the story.
 
The story of the film is quite promising at first where we're introduced to Alex who is suffering from a degenerative bone disease. His wife, Kristen McNetti is doing what she can to help her husband out as his condition just keeps getting worse. This is something that we can all somewhat relate to I guess, not bone disease per say, but people getting sick, people needing help, just turn on whatever news channel, visit a hospital or go out and interact with people - the world's a mess and sometimes we feel bad for certain people. Alex is one of those people and you're just bound to feel some sympathy for the guy. Thomas Granger though, Alex best friend is determined to help Alex out and gives Kristen a combination of corpse marrow and red meat mixture to add into her husband's food. This is of course supposed to make the guy better, but it only makes him worse. Granger figures that what was wrong was that the marrow wasn't fresh enough, but it's a little to late since Alex has developed a taste for the recently deceased and is now a so-called Necro-junkie.
After that there's really no more new parts of the story to take in as the whole film just becomes a bloodbath, and what a bloodbath it is. Zombies, ghouls, naked chicks, limbs, flesh, tons of blood and gore and chaos all the way till the very end. The zombies are dry as hell, decaying corpses that moves very slow and that likes to feast on human flesh. I gotta say that the zombies were pretty great and had this genuine zombie-like feel to them and the filmmakers manages to portray them in an excellent and bone-chilling way. It must've been fun making a movie like this, working with all the make-up and gore and the filmmakers love for the genre definitely shines through. Paulin has his heart in the right place and gorehounds should really keep an eye on this guy, but for me personally, I'm just more into the psychological kind of horror.
This was a very hard movie to review due to the fact that I didn't really like it, but at the same time it's easy to see that the filmmakers have done things right. Bone Sickness definitely has the heart, the genuine zombies and more gore than I've probably ever seen before, so if you're into that kind of stuff, this would be a great pick.
Note: The review for Bone Sickness is for Unearthed Films' 2006 re-release of the movie that were originally released independently in 2004.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Brian Paulin
WRITING CREDITS: Brian Paulin
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Rich George, Darya Zabinski, Brian Paulin
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 104 min
RATING: 5/10
Bone Sickness Website/IMDB Click here
Bone Sickness Trailer Click here
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