I've only read the first half of one of Clive Barker's books, The Great and Secret Show, but that, along with several movie adaptations of his work, has given me a pretty firm handle on what gets the guy's juices flowing: death, sex, pain, blood, naked men, hell, perversion, good and evil, ghosts, damnation, demons, and eternal suffering... you know, all that malarkey.
This film is no different. Based on the opening story to his 'Books of Blood', it covers a lot of those themes, delivering supernatural occurrences aplenty, loads of atmosphere, ghost rape, flaying, a brief glimpse of Jonas Armstrong's tallywhacker, a fit bird in hot-pants having her face ripped off, and lots of general strangeness in an old house that turns out to be an intersection on a spectral highway, where the dead spill over into the world of the living.
Movies based on Barker's work range from the pretty awful (The Plague, Rawhead Rex) to the bloody awesome (Hellraiser, Candyman); Book of Blood sits comfortably somewhere in the middle. The direction from John Harrison is competent enough, the acting is fine, and the effects are surprisingly good for such a comparatively low-budget film, but being adapted from what is essentially the introduction to a collection of short stories, plus elements taken from one of those stories, it lacks some of the depth and complexity to be found in his best cinematic offerings.
This film is no different. Based on the opening story to his 'Books of Blood', it covers a lot of those themes, delivering supernatural occurrences aplenty, loads of atmosphere, ghost rape, flaying, a brief glimpse of Jonas Armstrong's tallywhacker, a fit bird in hot-pants having her face ripped off, and lots of general strangeness in an old house that turns out to be an intersection on a spectral highway, where the dead spill over into the world of the living.
Movies based on Barker's work range from the pretty awful (The Plague, Rawhead Rex) to the bloody awesome (Hellraiser, Candyman); Book of Blood sits comfortably somewhere in the middle. The direction from John Harrison is competent enough, the acting is fine, and the effects are surprisingly good for such a comparatively low-budget film, but being adapted from what is essentially the introduction to a collection of short stories, plus elements taken from one of those stories, it lacks some of the depth and complexity to be found in his best cinematic offerings.