(Spoilers.) The introduction of HD
can only be seen as an event to rue. Since the advent of the HD DVD, one no
longer knows for sure whether a film just looks like a TV movie because it was truly
filmed on video or whether it was bestowed its cheap, flat and overly sharp TV
look despite its original film stock. Book
of Blood, in any event, has too much nipple and blood (not to mention
discretely side-shot penis) and non-US accents to truly look like a Big Three*
movie, but for all its neo-noir cinematography and inconsistently timed dollops
of stale chills and effective grue and gratuitous nudity, this slow-moving and
relatively uninvolving horror movie often feels like a Halloween night TV
flick.
For the most part Book of Blood is a haunted house movie,
though a lot of extraneous stuff happens elsewhere. And as a haunted house
flick, at times it brings to mind earlier such films like The Haunting (1963 / trailer)
or The Changeling (1980 / trailer)
or The Others (2001 / trailer),
while never coming anywhere close to being half as involving or chilling or
surprising as any of them. (It does, however, have an early scene in which a
girl gets her face ripped off — fun stuff like that ain't found in any of the
older films just listed.)
Book of the Dead opens with Sophie Ward's somber recital of the
"fact" that drives the movie: "The dead have highways, running
through the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed
souls. They can be heard in the broken places of our world, through cracks made
out of cruelty, violence, and depravity. They have sign posts, these highways,
and crossroads and intersections. And it is at these intersections where the
dead mingle, and sometimes spill over into our world."
Yep: when you die, you go to the
great highway in the sky where you walk round forever yearning to talk about
yourself with the living world. And if you're lucky, you stumble upon a place
like the house in the movie, a place that is an inter-realm intersection, where
if you're even luckier you can tell your story by cutting it into the skin of
some uninteresting milquetoast like Simon (Jonas Armstrong) before you continue
on down the highway. Of course, one wonders why such intersections are even
needed, when elsewhere in the movie ghosts of the dead show up and do things
far from the house, like playing ring around the rosy on a lawn or drowning a
hired killer in an isolated cabin.
Though the supernatural
crossroads of a house is the core setting of the movie, the Book of Blood opens elsewhere, in a
diner where a hooded Simon is having a cup of java under the watchful eye of
Wyburd (Clive Russell of Outpost: Black
Sun [2012 / trailer]).
Simon ends up strapped to a table in an isolated cabin — so guess what Wyburd
is — the setting whence the movie moves into the dreaded flashback mode, one
that even involves flashbacks within flashbacks.
* Both
being way better movies than this one here — which says a lot about the quality
of this one.
As for top plot point that needs
synopsis clarification: that Simon stops aging after he becomes a "book of
the dead" is so ineffectually communicated in the movie that the viewer
seriously scratches their head at Mary's sudden head of white hair — especially
since her face is still so wrinkle-free and young. (Please: tell us the brand
of skin moisturizer she uses — we'll take a crate.)
Found nowhere, neither in the
movie nor in a synopsis, is why, if the dead can write all over the walls of
the haunted bedroom, they even need or want to carve their stories into Simon's
skin. Give 'em a ton of pencils and their stories could be told more quickly
and effectively and fully on the walls of the room than epigrammatic and one-by-one
on Simon's body. In turn, considering how boring most people's lives are while alive,
it is hard to believe that the tales the dead tell are so intriguing as to make
Mary rich after she starts writing them down — but then, much of Book of Blood is hard to believe.
Speaking of what women crave, can
someone clarify the what and the why of whatever cravings Mary had that she
would go through the unconvincing evolution from serious scholar to
disappointed lover to cold and heartless scrivener of the dead?
We'll totally skip talking about
— no we won't — the whole bit about how quickly Simon gets into Mary's pants by
first standing naked in front of her and, later, telling her that he
masturbates when he can't sleep and then pulling her hand down between his
legs… OK, admittedly: the latter scene turns out to be a dream sequence, but
into her pants he does eventually get because, basically, as so many porno
movies realistically reveal and any man who isn't an incel already knows, all a man really needs to do to get a woman to
spread her legs for him is to show her his cock. Fact: sooner or later, guys,
if she sees it she'll crave it. (See: Lasse Braun's serious 1986 study of the
phenomena, The Flasher, featuring
Harry Reems
and Billy Dee.)
Even this movie is scarier
than Book of Blood —
trailer to Monster House
(2006):
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