Review #312: CrossBones (2005)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #29 - CrossBones (2005)

Watch CrossBones on YouTube here!

Okay, we're getting to the bottom of the barrel here. (No pun intended.) I first rented CrossBones around 2010 or so, and it was clearly part of a movie trend of trying to tie some unrelated plot to the Caribbean somehow (due to the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean series just a couple years earlier). Many years after seeing this for the first time, I don't remember exactly what, but something reminded me of it and I brought it up to my wife- we had a good time laughing as we remembered how ridiculous it was, so she surprised me with a copy of this terrible movie for my birthday while we were out at a restaurant with family. Since I knew nobody else in the world had ever seen this, I definitely knew I had to review it.

CrossBones starts off with a (extremely long and boring) tale about Redblood, a pirate who buried some treasure and then was killed by some (totally not at all incredibly racist portrayals of) Caribbean natives and cursed to... live forever? Or something? I don't know. Fast forward to present day, and a ragtag group of twenty-somethings have been gathered on a desert island to be on a reality show. Bingo bango bongo, one of them accidentally bleeds all over Redblood's grave, and he comes back as a zombie, intent on getting his treasure back. He kills almost everybody and then the Final Girl kills Redblood and leaves him behind, but can you kill that which is already dead?

The first thing I want to mention is that the Reality Show plot feels VERY similar to Camp Blood 2 and Within the Woods (the latter of which came out this same year), to the point where I couldn't help but draw comparisons in my head back when I was watching those movies weeks ago. The host of the show in this movie thought it a good idea to set up this entire operation with ONE SINGLE CAMERAMAN, and none of the contestants seem to have any interest whatsoever in actually being on the show. One girl insists that she's going to be the one to win the prize money because of how pretty she is (despite the fact that the prize money is to be won by whoever finds the clues and digs up the producer's buried treasure, and she has open disdain for anybody expecting her to do any sort of work whatsoever) and even the most level-headed contestant outright refuses to do a second take for the cameraman. As I said back when I was complaining about Camp Blood 2, did the makers of this film not know what an actual TV shoot was like? Or did they intentionally portray it as unrealistically as possible? It would have been so easy to both make it accurate AND good (there is one sequence of CrossBones where the characters are doing confessionals, that is accurate AND is without question the most entertaining part of the movie) but instead they made this pale imitation of a TV show and the end result is boring and bad.

Speaking of bad, the acting in this movie is atrocious. From every single character. Redblood is a terrible actor despite having tons of screentime, Tony seems to be intended as the male lead but is written as and acted by a piece of wood, and Greedy G is the most memorable character by a wide margin but is a cartoonishly racist caricature of a black rapper and the actor similarly couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. It really is a shame how there isn't even one person in here that actually does their job well.

And although it has its fun moments, the vast majority of its runtime is BOOOORING. The opening story about Redblood goes on for more than ten minutes despite being possible to sum up in thirty seconds, and the final ten minutes similarly just drags and drags. The reality show stuff is entertaining I guess, but nothing remotely horror-themed happens until fifty-two minutes into the movie, and even after that point certain shots go on for several minutes as if the director was trying to fill time. I make no exaggeration when I say that you could probably cut literally half of this movie's runtime and not lose anything of consequence (and then you'd be left with a 42-minute episode of television that, bad acting aside, would actually be pretty good).

So, this movie is bad. It's racist. It's misogynist. It pretends not to know its own medium and instead dumbs down an entire industry likely to appease a similarly dumbed-down audience. But worst of all, it's boring.

And yet, here I am still wanting desperately to get more people to watch it.

Greedy G 4 Lyfe!

Overall Rating: 2/10 Perfectly-Placed Static Cameras

Nostalgic Rating: 6/10 Bullets in Greedy G's Gat

Rest in Peace: According to IMDB, cinematographer Neal Fredericks died in a plane crash during the production of CrossBones, making this his last film (though he has credits for a couple movies that came after this, presumably that had already finished principle photography). You probably don't recognize his name, but he was the director of photography on The Blair Witch Project- granted I don't know exactly what that means considering the three actors were doing the actual filming, but come on! He worked on Blair Witch! Moment of silence in memory of this man's influential career.