Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Book of Blood Blu-ray Movie Review

I wonder, wonder who, who-oo-ooh, who wrote the Book of Blood?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater September 26, 2009

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.

Pieced together from the two short stories that bookend the Books of Blood, the film has a kind of circular narrative, starting at the end but, you know, not the very end. We open with a leprous-looking Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong, of the BBC’s Robin Hood), slopping his way through breakfast at a rural diner, watching drops of blood fall off his face and into his egg yolks, but not giving a damn and eating them anyway. A shady, pony-tailed tough guy accosts Simon, chains him up in a cabin, and proceeds to tell him that he’s about to be flayed, because a “collector” wants Simon’s skin. But for why, you ask? Let’s go to the beginning, shall we? Lecturer, writer and professional ghosthunter Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward) and her tech-head Reg (Paul Blair) set up shop in a house with a noted haunted history, most recently a demonic attack that left a teen girl dead, her panties half-removed and her face ripped off. Sheesh, those demons, huh? Mary recruits her student—the erstwhile medium Simon—to assist with the investigation, but the situation quickly goes to hell in the proverbial hand-basket, as an unseen force repeatedly assails Simon, leaving ragged gashes in his skin and charcoal notes all over the walls. (Note: this does not keep Mary and Simon from making teacher/pupil sexy time.) Tensions in the house come to a head, secrets come out, and angry ghosts end up scrawling their stories all over Simon’s body, turning him into a literal book of blood.

Clive Barker’s gothic yarns have always skirted the borders between sex, death, horror, and erotica, and director John Harrison tries doggedly here to make sensual and scary shake hands, even though the two are kissing cousins already. The thing is, there’s too little sex for those looking to be, um, scared stiff, and the meager platter of blood and guts won’t come close to satiating the gorehound crowd. It’s neither spooky enough to work as an all-out haunted house flick, nor smart enough to take itself as seriously as it does. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the film is just plain mediocre. The dialogue is over-obvious, there’s nothing in the way of subtext or nuance, and Harrison doesn’t seem to understand that ghost films require atmosphere and creaking tension—not just a rhythm of syncopated jump scares. While the film shows some decent practical effects work—Simon’s carved up skin is effectively nauseating—the ghosts that converge at the “crossroads…where the dead mingle and spill over into our world” are as laughable and clichéd as they come, shot in double exposure and sporting costumes that wouldn’t look out of place at your local Salvation Army thrift store. I’ve seen scarier ghouls at “haunted” corn mazes…for kids…during the day.

There are one hundred and one reasons why the film doesn’t work. I didn’t really have a problem with Jonas Armstrong’s performance—he was just a bit dull—but Sophie Ward poses and postures through the weirdest line readings. She almost seems like a caricature of herself—most of the time she reminded me of what Amy Poehler would sound like if, at gunpoint, she were told to act dreadfully serious. Ward is British, and I don’t understand why they made her stumble through a stagy, put-on American accent. Pacing is also a major issue. The film starts with the shock of a genuinely intriguing premise, and ends with a satisfyingly gruesome comeuppance, but everything in between is a slog through woefully underdeveloped relationships, tepid dialogue, and the tired tropes of the haunted house sub-genre. Stretching two short stories into a feature- length movie was an unwise move here, and though it would’ve been a different beast altogether, I venture the film would’ve worked better if the director had cherry picked a few of Barker’s tales and filmed them as separate vignettes. Hell, bring in an extra director or two and make an anthology of it. As it stands, Book of Blood is one of the more middling Clive Barker adaptations.

Book of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

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?

Book of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.