Clive Barker's Book of Blood

Book of Blood (2009)
Dir. by John Harrison
Written by John Harrison, Darin Silverman
Starring Jonas Armstrong, Sophie Ward, tiny, tiny cameo by Doug Bradley

Hey, speaking of framing stories (like we were in V/H/S VIRAL, try and keep up here guys) here’s a good idea: what if you were to take an anthology --you know, those handy full-length vehicles comprised of short stories or segments bookended by a framing sketch-- and, get this, removed the stories, and just left the framing narrative? It’s crazy, right? But maybe just crazy enough to work. If they pull this off, it’ll change everything.

Oh wait, no, it’s just a terrible idea. What these morons here do is take ONLY the brief framing prologue from Clive Barker’s excellent horror anthology Book of Blood (the seventh story from that anthology to be adapted, after RAWHEAD REX, MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, CANDYMAN, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, QUICKSILVER HIGHWAY and DREAD), adapt the whole thing (adding a little fat), add an additional framing story to this framing story, and then realize they’ve only filled 10 minutes of screentime. What accounts for the intervening 86 minutes might generously be described as a plot in the most technical sense, but it’s so direly without any reason for existence that it almost crosses over the line from painfully dull to genuinely horrifying based solely on the fact that it clearly exists in defiance of the will of any kind and loving god.

Read between the lines.

I mean, director John Harrison actually has some experience with anthology horror films, having directed the workaday but acceptable TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE. Surely for at least a moment before he began developing this grinding nothing of a movie, he must have briefly paused to imagine what that one would have been like if instead of dropping in other stories, he had just tried to fatten out the 10 minutes of Debbie Harry as a witch into a full 100 minute feature. Or if THE ILLUSTRATED MAN was just about a guy getting tattooed, and never specifically referenced what any of the tattoos actually were. Plus, he actually wrote the score for DAY OF THE DEAD and CREEPSHOW. Come on John, you know better. We raised you better than that.

It’s not utterly without merit, I suppose. The roughly ten minutes that actually come from the Barker story are pretty decent. You got this gruesomely scarred young man (Jonas Armstrong), grabbed off the street by a jaded bounty hunter (in a better age, he would have been played by David Warner, here we have a serviceable Clive Russell) who says that someone is paying him to skin the kid and keep the whole thing in one piece. Pretty fuckin mysterious, right? Unfortunately for the subsequent 80 minutes, we don’t really deal with this mystery but instead get involved in the lame flashback ghosthunting shenanigans of these two worthless morons (Sophie Ward and Paul Blair), who eventually get involved with the young man (as yet unscarred). He claims that he’s a psychic and can help them make contact with the spirits of the haunted house they’re staying in (one apparently being Doug Bradley, who makes an approximately 8 second wordless cameo and also appears on a painting you can see in the background in a couple shots, for whatever reason). The ghost hunters decide to make him the focus of their investigation because they are so stunningly inept that they seem to have no other plan whatsoever except to sit in the house with a camera and hope a ghost turns up. But SPOILER, he turns out to be a phony, and somehow for no reason at all faked the whole thing, so that was pointless. He does have a weird, incredibly inappropriate sex scene with Ward, though, so you got that to look forward to. Otherwise, literally nothing of note happens in the entire middle section.

Not the most relaxing message environment.

The two bookends of the movie are fine enough, and the whole thing is perfectly competent. I mean, it looks decent, the performances are generally acceptable, it’s got an OK score. There’s one cool scene early on where a chick gets her face ripped off, that’s always nice. But that long middle stretch, jesus. I’ve seen a lot of dull, uneventful horror cheapies, but at least they have the good sense to be incompetent enough that you can laugh at them. This one simply offers nothing of value whatsoever. It barely even exists. It seems to drag on and on, maintaining the same low level of competence but without ever finding a single incident of interest. It’s just lame, derivative filler while the movie patiently waits til it gets to the end so it can go back to the Barker source material.

The only memorable thing here, period, is a long spoken passage which I assume comes from Barker’s original book. Here it is in full:

“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.“

That’s a perfectly good bit of horror writing, just the kind of overwrought prose that you want from a guy of Barker’s dark imagination. But unfortunately, the reason it’s memorable is not that it’s so great in itself, but that it is repeated an unforgivable four or fives times*, in full, by various characters and a narrator throughout the course of this turkey. Now that you’ve read it, you’ve saved yourself another 10 minutes of screentime. Of course, hearing it that many times eventually causes it to lose all meaning and simply begs you to start picking it apart. The dead have highways? Why would they need those? Are these, like, interstate highways, or is it more like a route 66 scenic route? And where are the dead going? Are there rest stops on the highway of the dead? I mean, they have crossroads and intersections, so presumably there are roundabouts and yield signs and traffic cones and stuff. If they have highways, they’ve got to have maintenance crews fixing them up from time to time. Does that mean that the dead have congestion issues? And they have places to mingle, not really too common on the highway but maybe they mean truck stops and shit, where methed-out trucker ghosts can stop for a quicky with a toothless, dead-eyed ghost hooker (not that this would be too different from the living version)? Or is that cynical of me, do they actually mean quaint roadside diners with elaborate tourist trap fiberglass dinosaur statues and stuff to draw the dead off at their exit? Or maybe the dead are more sophisticated than that, maybe they have hip coffee shops and art installations where the dead can mingle as they move along the highways at their own pace. Speaking of mingling, do they have Christianmingle, or does being dead kinda sort that out? These are all questions worth exploring. What the movie proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the one question not worth exploring was, “what do you suppose happened to those characters in the framing story that the original author didn’t feel was worth including?”

*I realize that’s a little vague, but there’s no way I’m watching through again to nail that number down. Once was already too many.

OK I admit this is cool, but it's literally 5 seconds of the movie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Adapted from the framing narrative to Clive Barker's Book of Blood.
• SEQUEL: None.
• REMAKE: No.
• FOREIGNER: Nope.
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Doug Bradley, for, generously, 10 seconds.
• BOOBIES: Yeah, couple extended sex scenes.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Demonic/Ghost rape combined with skin- stealing, although by the end it seems to have been completely forgotten about and it's never exactly addressed what the deal was with that.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: (Spoiler) Skin removed.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Yes, the house is haunted, it's at that stupid crossroads thing.
• MONSTER: None.
• THE UNDEAD: Many ghosts
• POSSESSION: No, not really. Seems to flirt with the idea for a bit but never commits.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): The bounty hunter guy is a killer, I guess.
• EVIL CULT: Doug Bradley seemed to have something occult happening, but its never elaborated on.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Guy becomes book of blood, does that count?
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. Rightfully ignored.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Fucking adapt the actual stories of an anthology, not just the cover.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Well, they call the dude a book of blood, that seems kinda a loose interpretation of both book and blood, but I guess you could claim the title is just poetic or in reference to what the characters say.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Hellraiser VIII: Hellworld

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Hellraiser VII: Deader

Hellraiser VII: Deader (2005)
Dir. Rick Bota
Written by Neal Marshall Stevens, Tim Day
Starring Kari Wuher, Paul Rhys, Doug Bradley

    Following the massive, collective shrug that was HELLRAISER VI: HELLSEEKER, Rick Bota again returned to the franchise, surely with the intent of making a memorable, horrifying entry into the series which would restore it’s legacy and make Pinhead fans happy. Or possibly to crank out another generic cash grab with the minimum possible amount of effort, how should I know. The end result does seem to support the second possibility more than the first: again, we’ve got a generic horror script loosely adapted as a HELLRAISER film at the last minute; again, we’ve got a dismal surreal DTV feel where reality is constantly shifting, again Pinhead only appears for like five minutes at the very end. Honestly most of it is virtually indistinguishable from the last two entries, except --if anything-- it seems cheaper, more convoluted, and less ambitious. It does star a lady who has the same last name as the bartender from the Mos Eisley Cantina, though, so that’s a plus.

    Although it’s convoluted and uninvolving, this one does have a slightly more interesting premise than the last two. Kari Wuher plays plucky reporter Amy Klein, a reporter so plucky that we first meet her shooting smack in a grimy junkie’s den, just to get a story. That’s commitment to the profession, and I believe it qualifies as some grade A pluck, at least from a technical standpoint. Pluck, she has, but luck, not so much. So when her boss (Simon Kunz, the guy who gives Ourumov and Xenia Onatopp the Goldeneye in GOLDENEYE, here under the mistaken impression that he’s a scenery-chewing DeNiro-esque character actor) shows her a video which appears to show a weird cult murdering and then reviving one of their own, you can bet she’s on the case. Conveniently, the cult is located in Romania, which means that unlike most of these DTV films that shoot cheap in Romania, this one is actually set there and doesn’t have to half-heartedly try to impersonate New York City. 

Enjoy the familiar face, you won't be seeing much of it.

    The leader of the cult is Paul Rhys, honestly a classier actor than you would think they could get at this point, having worked with Robert Altman (portraying Theo, Vincent Van Gogh’s brother in VINCENT AND THEO) and Richard Attenborough (playing Syndey Chaplin in CHAPLIN. What is it with the guy and playing brothers of great artists?) Judging from his performance here, though, he’s probably aware that a DTV HELLRAISER sequel is a significant step down even from being 10th-billed in FROM HELL (that’s four lower than Jason Flemyng, who plays “coachman”). He looks like he’s devoting 30% of his energy to the scene and 70% to imagining how he’s going to fire his agent. Plus he looks sort of like Ted Raimi, so it’s a little hard to take seriously the idea that a bunch of suspiciously-attractive women and men think this guy’s the shit, even if he does bring people back from the dead*. All this has something to do with the puzzlebox, and Pinhead seems royally cheesed off by the whole thing, although it’s never exactly clear what the deal is or why Pinhead cares if some jerk in Romania is continuing the work of the late Dr. Herbert West. First he’s teaching people lessons about morality, now he’s playing grim reaper, what the fuck, is he the only denizen of Hell who does any work around this joint? I hope this guy’s got a nice Christmas bonus this year.

Anyway, getting to the Paul Rhys cult involves some mystery-solving, which is the most interesting thing here because the mystery is so convoluted and nonsensical that they have some fun coming up with random steps in the process of getting to the cult. The best, and by far the most memorable part of the whole movie, involves Amy pluckily climbing aboard some sort of metaphysical hedonism train to talk to this guy Joey who seems like kind of a big deal, I dunno. It looks like they spent most of their budget on this crazy ass hedonism train, which is just packed with naked chicks, needle drugs, vague graffiti, strobe lights, and sadomasochistic hijinks. In fact, there are more titties in this one scene than in the entire series up to this point, and given that this is a feature to both of Rick Bota’s entries into the series so far I’m going to have to assume it’s a major aspect of his auteurial vision. Anyway, the scene is over-the-top enough to at least seem perverse, which is closer to an actual feeling than anything else this series has evoked for some time now. Later she comes back and everyone on the train has been slaughtered and there are just a bunch of limbless torsos hanging in sex harnesses and so on, it’s pretty rad. I guess they died doing what they loved, though, so don’t feel too bad.

I can't see any harm in opening this ornate evil cube I pulled out of the hands of a corpse.

I should also say something nice about Kari Wuher, the actress who plays our plucky heroine. She’s not exactly the world’s best actress, but she commits to the part pretty respectably. When she screams “NOOOOOO!!!!!” you can see her suck in her breath and really belt it out, heroically overdoing it in a series which has been marked by listless, mopey nonperformances for the last couple installments. She’s also ballsy enough to do a pretty crazy scene where she wakes up topless and in her panties to discover there’s a huge kitchen knife sticking out of her back. It’s one of those what-the-fuck scenes like when Virginia Madsen wakes up covered in blood in CANDYMAN where it seems like it has to be a dream and then it just keeps going. You gotta give the gal credit for doing a scene where she’s basically nude but instead of looking sexy she’s screaming and whimpering and covered in blood on the bathroom floor, helplessly trying to pull out a foot-long kitchen knife jammed into her spine (when she can’t get it out, she wraps duct  tape around it and puts on a coat to conceal the fact that she’s gonna be spending her day with a knife handle sticking out of her clothes. That may actually go a little beyond simple pluck.)

    So, Wuher is clearly hustling, but in general the movie is not. For evidence, look no further than the tag-line on the cover of the box, which attempts to pique the interest of the casual viewer with perhaps the tamest come-on ever, “the latest, most terrifying evil.” Seems kind of unfair to call Pinhead evil after all the good work he’s been doing lately to teach people to be nicer, although he’s admittedly kind of villainous here. But “The latest”? Why not just say, “It’s a new one, what the fuck, you’ve got nothing better to do.” I guess since they got shy about putting numbers on these after part 5, they want to make sure people know that yes, this is the new one. It probably also doesn’t help that the covers of HELLRAISER I, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 are all essentially identical, so it doesn't hurt to have a little reminder that even though this looks exactly the same** it’s actually “the latest” one. I can only assume the marketing guys thought the series would end here, because, of course, the existence of part 8 definitively establishes that part 7 is no longer the latest (and a long way from the most terrifying, but that’s a little harder to prove in court) but now it’s doomed to claim it’s the most current forever, just like poor FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL* NIGHTMARE (*The use of the word “final” does not actually denote that this is the final one).  

It's pretty bright on this debauchery train, so the sunglasses make sense.

    What does this mean for our beloved series? Well, it simply means the series is still treading water, pulling the exact same bullshit that shamed them and sullied Pinhead’s good name for the last three movies. In fact, HELLRAISER V-VII are so similar you could almost look at them as a kind of trilogy -- they’re all about driven, amoral loners who are forced to face the truth about themselves through a hallucinogenic journey brought on by Pinhead and vaguely related to opening the puzzlebox. They’re all developed from other scripts, they’re mostly about muddled, unimaginative surrealism rather than the grotesque mythology originally developed by Clive Barker for the original (and to a lesser extent parts II-IV), and none of them have much Pinhead or seem to make sense with his character even when he does show up. The difference in number VII is that now this shit has been going on long enough that we can’t really pretend it’s a fluke anymore; this is the new definition of the series. And to celebrate the new, lowered standards hardcore fans now held for the franchise, Rick Bota decided that after part VII came out he’d call up Lance Henriksen, stop trying, and really just run the whole thing into the ground once and for all. Prepare yourself, dear reader, for HELLRAISER VIII: HELLWORLD.  

THE WHOLE SORRY HELLRAISER SAGA:

1: HELLRAISER (1987)

2: HELLRAISER 2: HELLBOUND (1988)

3: HELLRAISER 3: HELL ON EARTH (1992)

4: HELLRAISER 4: BLOODLINES (1996)

5: HELLRAISER 5: INFERNO (2000)

6: HELLRAISER 6: HELLSEEKER (2002)

7: HELLRAISER 7: DEADER (2005)

8: HELLRAISER 8: HELLWORLD (2005)

9: HELLRAISER 9: REVELATIONS (2011)

10: HELLRAISER X: JUDGEMENT (2018)  

Who wants a hug?

   

*They say this douchebag is the descendant of the original L’Merchant, but that seems questionable because he’s not played by Bruce Ramsay and as we know from HELLRAISER IV: BLOODLINES all descendents of L’Merchant looked exactly like him for at least 300 years. Why couldn’t they just have gotten him back? It would have been nice for the continuity, and Rhys could have gone back to playing the brother of famous artists way sooner.

**Part 8 looks a little different because Pinhead’s face is made of a collage of MATRIX-y 1’s and 0’s to artistically communicate the fact that it’s about video games.

Yep, there's a few solid back-and-forths between our protagonist and some female cultys.