Ash and Bone, comes from a director known for a bunch of movies in which he mostly also stars. Harley Wallen is also amongst the cast of Ash and Bone, his 2022 horror and thriller movie. It’s rare to find a horror movie with content relating to snuff, incest, rape, cannibalism, and torture with off-screen violence. But if you’re looking for a story with all the grisly details and none of the visceral torment then indie backwoods, “Ash and Bone” might very well become your new favorite movie.

Slipping away from the city, Lucas and his new wife Sarah decide a change of scenery will snap whatever his daughter Cassie has wedged firmly in her teenage angst. Not only that but the three of them cooped up in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere will surely bond them closer than any family before. Despite a pie-in-the-sky attitude, Lucas means well and is just trying to get over his wife’s passing and get his struggling daughter to snap out of it.

Ash and Bone Movie

It doesn’t take long for Cassie to take off in the family van and find her trouble. She hits the local bar with some fake ID and meets two locals Anna and Tucker. They talk to Cassie about a house in the woods known for all types of eerie and weird occurrences. In the bar is a wall adorned with loads of missing faces too, but that only makes Cassie more intrigued to check it out. This is where Ash and Bone begin to hit some narrative foibles with logical decisions and rationale. But you can’t hate a horror film for having characters decide that a house is safe to break into because there are no lights on inside.

And that’s exactly what Cassie does with a less-than-enthusiastic Tucker and Anna close behind her. Rather than discover an abandoned house, they realize rather quickly that there is much more going on in the home than they could imagine. As brother and sister Edna and Clete return from whatever they’ve been up to, everyone instantly knows everyone’s business and a chase ensues.

Independent Movies

Of course, like any mildly entertaining storyline, no one tells anyone about anything they discovered. This is despite the two miscreants having so much evidence in and around the house of their crimes that a sneeze in their general direction would see a fleet of badges on their doorstep. The Ash and Bones movies’ story ambles along nicely for the most part. None of what happens is a surprise though. Add to that, the tension is far below where it needs to be and you’ve got a pretty un-horrific horror movie.

Performances, set pieces and the locale of the film itself do give the movie a good dose of realism. For an independent production, Ash and Bone looks good and is not hard to follow. Cassie (Angelina Danielle Cama) as a character is a little hard to like however this is purely from an objective opinion in that the role she plays doesn’t get the time to make the audience love her enough to care. What I did like, seeing as she is the most fleshed out of the cast, is that for the movie, Cassie goes through a few nice character arcs. After the finale, the story of what Cassie does next might have been more interesting than what she did here.

Ash and Bone is rated

2.5 teens wielding pickaxes out of 5

Mother of Movies score