Three Films Make A Post: A severed hand beckons from an open grave!

Books of Blood (2020): Why anyone would go to the effort of licensing Clive Barker’s seminal series of short story collections to then go on and excise everything about the stories that actually feels like Clive Barker is anyone’s guess. Perhaps director Brannon Braga knows? Anyway, if you ever wanted to watch Clive Barker adapted as blandly, passionlessly and plain boringly as possible, this made-for-Hulu anthology movie is for you. Braga’s direction is competent but completely lacking in style, the script turns everything that’s specific and personal about Barker’s work generic, adding some tedious pacing all of its own and calls it a day, and the actors act like actors act in bad made for TV movies. In the days of ambitious TV and streaming horror, this sort of non-effort is just baffling to me.

Unheimliche Geschichten (1932): Why, I’d honestly call this old German connected anthology movie very loosely based on stories by Poe and Stevenson as directed by Richard Oswald more exciting. At least, Oswald did use the some of the visual themes and methods of German expressionist horror here where today’s Braga effort doesn’t seem to have put a iota of thought into visual presentation as an important way to create mood in horror. And while Oswald certainly stumbles in adapting the psychological tension of the stories he’s using here, he does at least clearly identify their main set pieces and proceeds accordingly.

Of course, while that’s better as Braga-style Barker, it’s still wasting all the complexities of the fiction it adapts without finding much to replace it; but then 1932 was really the tail end of the cinema of the fantastic in Germany, before the Nazis put their boots to it, too, Oswald, being Jewish, soon emigrating to places where he wasn’t going to be murdered.

Vampires vs. The Bronx (2020): But let’s end this on a positive note, with this nice modern variation on Fright Night directed for Netflix by Osmany Rodriguez. It’s a film about Puerto-Rican American kids on bikes versus vampires and gentrification, told with palpable love for the Bronx neighbourhood it takes place in, and while it’s neither deep not terribly stylish (though not ugly to look at either), it’s a fun and likeable movie that manages to integrate actual social concerns and light horror well enough to entertain well, also. The climax could have been a bit more dramatic, mind you, but this one’s really aiming for charm and a sense of community more than that sort of excitement.