Bookmonkey vs The Hoard: Post Six - Book of Blood

Following my viewing of The Midnight Meat Train, I was looking forward to the other longest-held item in my "to be viewed" collection, the 2009 film Book of Blood, based, strangely enough on the framing narrative of Clive Barker's Books of Blood collection of short stories, "The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street (a postscript)". As these two stories offer an excellent way to view enter and exit the entire collection, they seemed a strange duo to turn into a film, but, as a long-time fan of Clive Barker's work, it certainly got me interested.

The film follows a young man named Simon McNeal (played by Jonas Armstrong) as a young medium hired by a paranormal researcher to investigate a haunted house. Unlike the original work, which, like The Midnight Meat Train,is quite short, the film expands the original story to include background on the researcher, Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward), and her own relationship with the events in a haunted house.

Overall the film does a good job with scares and like The Midnight Meat Train, is pretty gruesome, but it falls to the same problem as the previous adaptation, in that I feel it would have done better as a short film. This isn't to say every short story must be made into a short film, as stories from the same collection were made into the films Candyman and Lord of Illusions, both great films on their own, and adaptations which brought more to the original story. I just felt that these two stories in particular, would have been served better in a shorter (perhaps televised) format.

Not sure how I feel about the new "Book of Blood" Movie

I just saw the trailer for the new film Book of Blood, based of the short story by Clive Barker and I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it.

First off - I love Clive Barkers books, I own all of them and I even bought the six-part short story that came with all the nasty looking toys from MacFarlane Toys (story was worth it (totally keeping that) - but the toys are in a box in my basement somewhere - any offers?)

Although some of his movies are hit and miss - Loved Nightbreed (probably because it takes place in my home province of Alberta, Canada), Liked The Lord of Illusions, and was steadily disappointed by the Hellraiser series. I have heard great things about The Midnight Meat Train, and have it on my Ziplist.

Anyway, I found the trailer for this upcomming movie and here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros

- Starring Jonas Armstrong (Pictured right) - loved him in the BBC Series Robin Hood

- Directed by John Harrison - who worked on the Dune Mini-series for the SciFi Channel and directed one of my favourite episodes of Kindred: the Embraced.

Con - actually only the one

-The story the film is based on is a framing story for the six-book series The Books of Blood; basically it shows us where all these great stories come from, and gives the collection of short stories a starting and ending point. Even if you take the final story in the series and add them together, you get a page count of 15 pages!

So there you have it - I like the director's work, the lead actor's work, and the story the film is based on, but how do you make even a 90 minute film based on 15 pages of prose?

Check out the trailer at Spike.com

and let me know what you think.