I read Clive Barker's 'Books of Blood' years ago and instantly fell in love with them; they had a wonderful combination of horror and fantasy, fear and humor. I've been pinning for them to be filmed for years and I finally got my wish to marginally mixed results.
A parapsychology professor and her assistant have been trying to prove their theories about the afterlife and beyond when an opportunity presents itself in the form of a house with a long paranormal history and a university student who seems to be a psychic. They decide to use his abilities to try to tap into the house's energies, but things are not as they seem and the experiment goes in ways no one could have guessed.
First things first, I had a few issues with the film. First was the bookend story segments that surrounds the plot; the movie essentially spoils the best part of the story from the very first seen. The second (and bigger) problem the movie has is the running time; at 100 minutes the movie is too damn long. This is based on a short story (two actually) and there is just not enough driving plot to justify the length. A good 20 minutes needed to be trimmed off, as is the movie is gets pretty slow at parts. The last real problem I had was that the stories this is based on weren't the best stories from the books, they were just the first stories in them; the reason for this seems to be that a series of films based on the books is in the works and they wanted to start from the beginning, 'Pig Blood Blues' (great story) is apparently up next.
Having said all that I still enjoyed the film more than I was frustrated by it. Even though this wasn't the best story from the novels it is still an engaging tale of the macabre and features some occasional excellent horror imagery. The principal actors in the limited cast are all suited nicely to their respective rolls and the character dialogue has a pleasantly moody cadence to it.
The visual and gore effects are (relative to the genre) fairly limited, but what is on display packs quite a visceral punch. One particularly memorable moment involves a poor girl getting her face peeled like an orange. That being said, this is not a gore film, despite what the DVD box would have you believe.
The setting and location of the film (Scotland) fit the story well and provide a Gothic backdrop for the action. The house were most of the film takes place is a appropriately grim without feeling like a clique spook house.
Despite the some slow sections in the middle and the unfortunate story reveal early on, it manages to be a creepy tale about death and beyond.
7/10
