Shot-on-video splatter fest Bone Sickness reportedly cost somewhere between $3,000–$4,000. Every dollar seems to be money well spent. The film is dreamlike in places and downright nasty with its gross, gnarly, realistic practical effects. Based on the amount of gore featured in Bone Sickness, it’s not hard to see where the budget went, and that is a compliment. These guys threw buckets of blood at the wall and it made a bizarre, gross mess. The film’s narrative is simple but effective, focusing around a young woman and her terminally ill husband.
She wants to help. She wants to save him. But how do you save a man who is rotting from the inside out? The magic of Bone Sickness is its incredible gross-out gore effects. Faces peel off as flesh rots whilst the dead rise. There’s so much fake blood it’s surprising the cast didn’t suffocate in the oceans of on-screen blood and guts. Then there’s the worms. Oh, the way people in this movie regurgitate squirming worms is absolutely yuck. Be careful if you eat whilst watching.
The zombies are ghastly ghouls that tear through flesh in the most graphic manner. The graveyard scenes throughout Bone Sickness are masterful, showing the moonlit cemetery as it glows in green lighting and personifies dinginess. These shots are scattered all over the film and effortlessly, cohesively layer the atmosphere in bleak, creepy undead dread.
The undead themselves are like a mash-up from hell. Imagine the zombie ghouls from Burial Ground (1981) crossed with the undead Templars featured in The Blind Dead series. They are skeletal, expressionless, empty vessels. Bone Sickness brings exactly what you’d expect, shot-on-video carnage resembling something from the early nineties. The atmosphere is captured perfectly and the whole thing feels like a nerve-shredding, gruesome nightmare that’s choking on its own guts. No polish, no mercy, and zero happy endings.
No gloss, no glamour just rot, worms and buckets of blood. Exactly how it should be.
