I consider myself a lapsed Barker fan, and I completely missed this one until now - that might be because it's a "Hulu original", a service that doesn't exist here in the UK. It has the distinction of being the last Touchstone Television production made before that producer was swallowed whole by Disney.
Yes, it's a TV movie, but I guess these days that means that it was made for streaming, so there's no shortage of gore or swears. The budget is pretty limited, though. It clearly had aspirations to become a pilot for a series or the first of several anthology films, a la V/H/S, but that never happened.
After a short prologue where a bookseller tries (unsuccessfully) to not be murdered by some thugs by giving them the location of a book that's purportedly worth millions, we launch the first story: Jenna.
Jenna (Britt Robertson) is a troubled young woman recovering from some unspecified trauma with her family. Whatever happened, it left her hyper-sensitive to sound, forcing her to wear noise-cancelling headphones.
Jenna runs away and hops on a bus to San Francisco, but she keeps seeing someone following her. Trying to escape her pursuer, she ends up in a bed and breakfast run by a friendly older couple. Her paranoia ends up being justified when she makes a series of horrifying discoveries, and the reveal of the horror elements of the story is a fun one... but by the time they arrive it's too little, too late. The story is poorly constructed, and meanders back and forth along its forty-minute runtime providing plenty of red herrings and unnecessary detail but no clear reason to care about anything that's happening.
Jenna runs away and hops on a bus to San Francisco, but she keeps seeing someone following her. Trying to escape her pursuer, she ends up in a bed and breakfast run by a friendly older couple. Her paranoia ends up being justified when she makes a series of horrifying discoveries, and the reveal of the horror elements of the story is a fun one... but by the time they arrive it's too little, too late. The story is poorly constructed, and meanders back and forth along its forty-minute runtime providing plenty of red herrings and unnecessary detail but no clear reason to care about anything that's happening.
The second story, Miles, is a loose but fairly faithful adaptation of the original The Book of Blood tale. In it a scientist (Anna Friel) who's recently lost a seven-year old to Leukemia, is confronted by a medium (Rafi Gavron) who says he can help her get in touch with her son.
The seance goes well, and the scientist and the medium end up in bed, and also later launching a foundation to promote investigation into paranormal phenomena. The medium is a fake, though, and ghosts are not known to be very forgiving.
This one is actually pretty good, despite some ropey CGI and a cheesy spooky kid. It plays around with chronology a little in ways that are fun and help the story flow a little better, the characters are good.
This one is actually pretty good, despite some ropey CGI and a cheesy spooky kid. It plays around with chronology a little in ways that are fun and help the story flow a little better, the characters are good.
The last story - Bennett - follows the gangsters from the introduction as they search for the Book of Blood, which takes them to the same house the second story took place in; in a fun twist, the ghosts taking their revenge on the medium also turned the whole neighbourhood into a sort of post-apocalyptic haunted wasteland. Things do not go well for either thug. This one's an extremely loose adaptation of the short story On Jerusalem Street from the source material, but aside from a couple of neat scenes and checking back in with characters from the other stories, it's a non-starter.
Finally, there's a sort of epilogue that explains what was up with Jenna from the first story, and her ultimate fate. It's a remarkably fucked-up finale that does a lot to redeem how boring the first segment was.
Director Brannon Braga and Cinematographer Michael Dellatorre don't manage to inject a lot of personality into the film, but it's not a bad-looking either and there's some great aerial footage. Their big score is a cliffside building with giant windows that allows us to see two groups of characters going about their life separately, like two vignettes in a comic book; The movie doesn't find a way to use it in any meaningful way, but it still makes for a couple of great shots.
The effects are too CGI-dependent for their own good, and at this level of budget that can get to be a pretty big liability. The gore, despite being graphic, is pretty tame compared to what you'd expect from a Barker adaptation; It also carries none of his trademark horniness, with the film's sole sex scene fading tastefully to black - this is especially egregious after a pretty sensual, non-conventional bit of foreplay as the scientist rubs down the medium looking for hidden devices. Meanwhile, the script (by Braga and Adam Simon) fails to capture Barker's energy, choosing to deliver home-brewed lifeless dialog despite being given a few opportunities to quote the original author verbatim.
The effects are too CGI-dependent for their own good, and at this level of budget that can get to be a pretty big liability. The gore, despite being graphic, is pretty tame compared to what you'd expect from a Barker adaptation; It also carries none of his trademark horniness, with the film's sole sex scene fading tastefully to black - this is especially egregious after a pretty sensual, non-conventional bit of foreplay as the scientist rubs down the medium looking for hidden devices. Meanwhile, the script (by Braga and Adam Simon) fails to capture Barker's energy, choosing to deliver home-brewed lifeless dialog despite being given a few opportunities to quote the original author verbatim.
The acting, however, is pretty good, with both Robertson and the ever-dependable Friel turning in good performances.
So... yeah, I don't know. This is definitely a mixed bag. It ended up winning me over, but it's still pretty damn slight; For anyone interested in this story I'd recommend the 2009 edition. Or better yet, the original books, which also include the
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