6 | / 10 |
Users | 2.2 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.2 |
A pair of creepy Clive Barker stories--"Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street"--provide the spine for this chilling horror film. In 'Book of Blood', a woman studying paranormal phenomena and a college student with a gift for talking to the dead team up with unexpectedly erotic and unsurprisingly horrific results.
Starring: Sophie Ward, Jonas Armstrong, Paul Blair, Simon Bamford, Clive RussellHorror | 100% |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English, English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 2.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
To answer my own question, it was Clive Barker—titan of terror, viceroy of viscera, memento mori magistrate, and sovereign monarch over the realm of underwhelming book-to-film horror adaptations. I mean, aside from Hellraiser and Candyman—genre classics, I’ll admit —Barker’s stories haven’t exactly soared in their leaps to the silver screen. Yes, I’m looking at you, Midnight Meat Train. While five previous movies have been made from stories in Barker’s six-volume Books of Blood collection, apparently the maestro of malevolence himself is personally overseeing a new line of film adaptations, starting with this nasty little number, the titular Book of Blood. How does it fare? Go on, make an educated guess.
Simon looks like he just finished watching Book of Blood.
More like Book of Blah. I can't tell you how many times I audibly asked the film why it persisted on being so dim and muddled. I know, I know, this is a haunted house flick—it's supposed to be dark—but whereas other films of this ilk go for an atmospheric blend of shadow and light, Book of Blood coagulates into an icky grayish-black goop. The image is frequently, unnecessarily bleak, with black levels that crush fine detail while also never achieving truly inky depths. The grey palette is similarly drab, and what bursts of color we do get look pulled back and desaturated. Skin tones are pallid in the dark, but whenever flesh is put under any sort of lighting, it takes on an overly yellowish cast. Shot on digital video, the film gets a 1080p/VC-1 encode that readily displays some of the faults the medium can have when not used correctly. Contrast is weak, and while you'll notice some digital noise, it does appear that a certain amount of noise reduction has been applied to some scenes. In daylight—or what passes for daylight in the gloomy version of Edinburgh presented in the film—the image is fairly crisp, with lots of detail apparent in facial textures and foreground objects. All that detail is washed away in the dark, however, and only comes back whenever a character has a light beamed in his/her face. There are a few impressively sharp scenes, but they're unfortunately in the minority.
Book of Blood is inscribed with an adequate DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, but the knuckle-dragging sound design shows little imagination. Here's what you can expect. With a dearth of actual frights, the film leans on the audio crutch employed most often by underwhelming horror flicks—the jump scare. Whenever we're supposed to feel tension, the LFE channel rumbles to life and the big moment is punctuated by a screeching musical jolt or a ridiculously loud bang. It may scare my cat—who had been napping cozily at my feet before one particularly piercing stab made her flee in terror—but it has little effect on jaded horror buffs. Likewise, the surround channels try to go all spooky on us, with jittering ghost voices, flitting dragonflies, and slamming doors, but the effects are less than subtle and most of the cross-speaker movements have a stocky, clumsy feel. Ambient sounds like pounding rain and rushing wind are a little better, and the breadth of the film's dynamic range is acceptable, but I was rarely—if ever—impressed by the audio experience.
Book of Blood: Behind the Scenes (SD, 19:00)
Clive Barker, paragon of the profane, intros this feature by giving his wicked seal of approval to
the film and his own work, calling it "an epic vision of life after death." Sure thing,
buddy. And this movie review has been a monumental achievement in the history of film
criticism.
Anyway, this is an average behind-the-scenes documentary—with small chunks of time
devoted to casting, location, special effects, and CGI. It's hardly exhaustive, but with a film like
this,
would you want it to be?
Once again, disservice is done to another work by Clive Barker—that emperor of eerie, potentate of perversion, and dictator of the damned. (I'm running out of "ruler" words.) But maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't in the adaptations, but in Barker's works themselves. That, however, is an argument for a different forum. Unless you're a Clive Barker completist, I wouldn't bother checking out Book of Blood. There are far more thrilling horror tomes available in the Blu-ray library.
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