The Movie:

Clive Barker's novels may be hit or miss but his short stories, particularly those published in the 1980s in The Books Of Blood, have always been consistently good. His knack for incredibly imaginative and macabre set pieces, however, doesn't always translate so well to the big screen - the recent debacle that was The Midnight Meat Train is a perfect example. The short story was great. It was tense, imaginative, exciting and something different. And so were the bookending parts of The Books Of Blood, now a feature length movie from director John Harrison.

When the film begins, a burly Scottish mercenary type abducts a grubby looking guy from a pub. It turns out his skin has writing all over it and there's a collector type paying him good money to retrieve it. Before he skins the poor guy, however, he asks him to tell him how he got this way. In exchange for a quick death, the man agrees.

Cut to a university where a foxy professor named Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward) is teaching her class on the paranormal only to be interrupted by her newest student, hunky young Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong). One thing leads to another and the pair soon find they have a bit in common in that they're both firm believers in the spirit world. Mary, desperate to prove this to improve her book sales, hears tell of a house with a past wherein spirits will manifest and so she takes her newest favorite student as well as a tech guy named Reg (Paul Blair) into said house with all manner of recording gear to prove that spirits can and do communicate with the living.

Things start off a bit slow but before you know it strange and cryptic writing is appearing burned into the walls of the room where Simon is staying. He appears to be the conduit for the spirits Mary is so keen on getting to know. Having a newfound respect for Simon, she starts to lust after him and despite Reg's misgivings, the feeling is mutual. As Simon and Mary begin a bizarre sexual relationship, Reg starts to suspect that Simon might be a fake. Mary's not so sure, however, especially when the writing that was appearing on the walls starts to appear etched into Simon's own flesh...

Book Of Blood has a really solid premise at its core but the first hour or so plays out like a mediocre episode of Ghost Hunters. Harrison tries to build atmosphere by showing us some spooky manifestations of spirits in various forms and styles and it works to an extent but there really isn't all that much tension here. Mary, while well played by the milf-tastic Sophie Ward, isn't give much of a background for us to take interest in her outside of her attractive appearance while Simon is on similar ground. Had the characters been given more of a motive and less of a superficial existence than maybe Harrison's efforts wouldn't have been so vein but sadly that doesn't happen and what we're left with is a solid hour of predictable haunted house style high jinks. The last half hour of the film does go a certain way towards redeeming things as we're treated to some interesting 'Barker-esque' imagery and ideas and as such the picture is worth a look, but even then it never quite manages to fire on all cylinders.

Had the pacing been improved or the running time cut down we could have had a contender here, but instead we're left with a movie that should have been much better than it turned out to be. Book Of Blood isn't a complete disaster and Barker's fan base will find some value here but probably not as much as they'd have hoped for. The film feels padded, overlong, and while it'll entertain you enough that you can look past it's many and obvious shortcomings, once it's over, you'll probably forget it.

Video:

Book Of Blood arrives on Blu-ray in a 1080p VC-1 encoded 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that isn't really all that impressive. There are shots that definitely remind you that you're watching an HD transfer but for the most part this doesn't look much different than a nice standard definition effort. Detail isn't all that hot and the film's grim color scheme makes it hard for anything to really pop here the way that you might want it to. Skin tones look fine and black levels are alright but shadow detail isn't all that impressive and much of the film looks soft. Much of the problem stems from the fact that this is just a really dark, grey looking film, there isn't much more to it than that, but this does come at the cost of fine detail. There aren't any compression artifacts to complain about though some jittering and line shimmering pops up here and there. The overall effect is that the picture is certainly watchable, and not even close to terrible, but neither is it all that impressive. Like the movie itself, it's just rather unmemorable.