Horror fans there are so few new horror films that in order to get my new horror film fix I have to watch films that I normally wouldn't watch. The film that i'm reviewing today is one of those since while I do like anthology films there not really something that I look forward to watching however since there are barely any new films let alone horror films coming out I have to watch one and so here is my review of the 2020 film version of "Books Of Blood" enjoy.
Since this is an anthology film there is no one story hell there's not even much of a framing story there's just three random stories all of which aren't connected by any theme. Which is perhaps it's biggest issue since there's nothing connecting these stories and so all three fee disconnected from each other which is a shame because there are some truly good stories in this film with the first story which I believe is called "Miles" being such a good story that it could very easily make a really good and a really creepy feature film.
Starring in the film is Britt Robertson as Jenna , Freda Foh Shen as Ellie , Nicholas Campbell as Sam and Anna Friel as Mary . Also starring in the film is Rafi Gavron as Simon , Yul Vazquez as Bennett , Andy McQueen as Steve , Kenji Fitzgerald as Gavin , Paige Turco as Nicole , Saad Siddiqui as Dan , Glenn Lefchak as Balsam , Brett Rickaby as The Bookman , Matt Bois as Peter , Etienne Kellici as Miles , Cory Lee as Chelsea , Greg Fong as Kun and Sean Skerry as Lasky.
I will fully admit I had slightly high expectations when it came to the acting in this film just because i'm a fan of some of these actors and actresses and I know that they can be really great when they want to be. However this really isn't a good example of how good these actors and actresses can be since none of the scipts for any of the stories give these actors anything to work with and so they can only do so much which in this case results in performances that are at best ok and nothing more.
For some reason they chose to use CGI in the first story and yeah it really does standout by a huge mile because it's so obvious and it just looks fake as hell. I'm not kidding when I say that when I saw the CGI in that first story instead of being scared I laughed because it was that bad it was honestly laughable FuseFX who did the CGI fir the first story and i'm guessing the rest of the film didn't do that good of a job at all in my opinion and whoever gave the ok to these effects needs to be let go because there not good or even passable XGI there just bad flat out bad.
The original idea for this adaptation of the Clive Barker book of the same name was to make it an anthology series. Which given how disconnected these stories are making turning it into an anthology TV series would have worked alot better in my opinion since then you don't have to connect the stories together by anything be it theme or characters you can just jump right into the story but by making it as an anthology film you now do have to find ways to connect all of the stories which as i've said before is something that this film doesn't do at all.
Now I did my research and this is actually the second time that one of these stories has been adapted since the story featuring the Simon and Mary characters was adapted into the 2009 film called Book Of Blood. As far as I can tell this version and the 2009 film version share not alot in common with each other but I cannot say if that's true f9or the book version of the story and any of the two adaptations of the story tho.
As i'm sure alot of you know this is based on the Clive Barker book of the same name and even tho i've not seen any of the films based on his works or read any of his works even I can tell that there's something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it but there's clearly something missing in the writing since Clive Barker is known for creating these truly scary stories and while I will get into the scares soon enough to me this feels like the team behind the film, who i'm sure had great intentions didn't truly understand what Barker was going for when he wrote any of these stories or at least that's my opinion anyways.
What for me is a really bad thing is the fact that the film is nearly two hours long with a running time of an hour and forty seven minuets. This to me makes the film feel very boring since some of the stories aren't that entertaining and by some I mean the second story where there's just nothing that much happening as such if they had to make this as a feature film then it shouldn't have been no longer then an hour and fifteen minuets in my opinion.
Now then boys and girls since this is a horror film that does mean that we have to talk about the scares that are in the film itself. Which depending on the story are either one of the best things about the story or one of the worst things since the scares in the first story work really well where as the scares in the second and third / last story don't work as well which isn't a good thing since you come to a horror film to get scared even more so when your watching a horror anthology and when two of the three stories don't scare you then there's something clearly wrong with those stories and how there being presented in this film.
Overall while this film is indeed pretty creepy in it's first story where it starts to fall apart for me is in the second and third / last story. I've listed reasons as to why this is the case for me in this review but it's a pretty big issue for an anthology film since each story needs to be strong and hold up on it's own and when that's not the case for the majority of the film's stories then you clearly have an issue that needs solving in my opinion as for the overall film it gets a score of a 5.5 out of 10 from me.
All of the images that I used in this review were gathered from either Wikipedia or the god of all images (that's a joke by the way) Google Images. Since the overall majority of the images that I used in this review came from Google Images I have no choice but to recommend that you use Google Images if you want images from this film simply because while the images there aren't always high quality / high definition there's a more of a verity of them but that being said the poser which I got from Wikipedia was shockingly high quality which was something that I wasn't expecting from Wikipedia if i'm being honest since alot of the posters on there aren't high quality at all. As always boys and girls we end this review as we always do with our true goddess Elvira wishing us all some very unpleasant dreams.
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