213 Bones (2025) FRIGHTFEST Review
213 Bones (2025) FRIGHTFEST Review
A group of anthropology students discover studying the past can be deadly in a slick and smart whodunnit horror. When they begin finding human bones scattered around their campus and personal property, it becomes clear they are being brutally targeted by a gruesomely masked maniac and late-night study sessions turn into a frantic race to solve the attacker’s identity before they all end up as a textbook homicide case. It’s left for Sheriff Bracco, Laurie the County Coroner and their teacher, Kelly, to help find out who the real bone crunching assassin is before another innocent becomes the next victim.
From the handful of films, I have been privileged to see in advance of their screening at this year’s FRIGHTFEST in London’s West End, director Jeffrey Prim’s whodunnit-slasher 213 BONES is one the best. It recalled 1997’s I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER where a group of likeable youngsters are targeted by a killer and then details their subsequent attempts to work out who the killer is before another of their number die.
Aside from the dodgy opening credits that make the film look cheaper and tackier than it is I have no complaints at all even if I did guess the identity of the killer early on. Unusually for me I failed to second-guess the killing order of the youngsters, and I also failed to guess who would be the last one(s) standing at the end of the film. I suppose what I am saying is you may think that you have seen it all when it comes to slasher flicks, well, guess again!
Nowadays one’s gage for whether a film is holding one’s interest is whether you’re tempted to check for messages on your phone or social media and if you do, how long into the movie it took before you did. That did not happen once with 213 BONES which is a treat from start to finish, the very definition of a crowd-pleaser. I loved it.
213 BONES received its UK Premiere at FrightFest 2025 on 24th August.
