Gory greetings horroryearbook alumni! Welcome to another exciting edition of IT CAME FROM THE MAILBOX, a column where your old pal Brain Hammer reviews whatever random crap the good folks at horroryearbook decide to throw my way.

LIVE ANIMALS is the heartwarming tale of a beefy bearded maniac who pays his even beefier bearded henchman to kidnap five young adults and hold them captive in stalls inside a large isolated barn. The prisoners are treated like animals, tortured until their spirits are completely broken, and then sold into slavery to the highest bidder. When one captive asks where his girlfriend has been taken the bastard in charge coldly informs him she has been sold into prostitution and that the best he could hope for is that she winds up in a high end European brothel that will give her a bed and a room.

We spend time with the recent batch of human cattle, and then experience the horror of watching them sedated, captured, and then forced to live in filthy pens. The fresh female meat is routinely taken home to be pounded tender before being sold. The male captives quickly learn to keep or their mouths shut or have their tongues removed without anesthesia. As if this all isn’t brutal enough, there’s an incredibly annoying haggard bitch in a cell that never stops taunting the other captives and drives them crazy with her endless singing. One by one, the spirits of the captives are broken until a chance to escape finally presents itself. The innocent victims then turn into savage animals and the hunters become the hunted.

LIVE ANIMALS is the latest in a long string of recent horror films that deal with the themes of abduction, torture, and white slavery. The dvd cover even has a blurb that says “fans of Saw and Hostel will cheer,” so there should be no mistaking this for some pg-13 family friendly fare. This is clearly being marketed as a hardcore horror film, but gore junkies will be disappointed because there’s only a handful of scenes that are bloody and nothing is particularly over the top in the splatter department. There’s a tongue ripping set piece, and they cut away instead of showing the goods. It’s amazing how these modern “splatterfests” still pale in comparison to Blood Feast!

Despite the fact I thought this was a bit restrained in the gore department, it was still an uncomfortable watch and the many scenes of men and women in horse stalls were genuinely unsettling. The acting was decent for a straight to video flick about sex slaves and the production values were impressive. The film looks like it had a decent budget, which I am guessing it did not. Director Jeremy Benson shows some skills as a director. The biggest problem with this movie is the fact that it felt very familiar. Bloodsucking Freaks immediately comes to mind, as does the more recent Stockholm Syndrome. Putting <>b>Hostel and Saw on the cover also draws comparisons to those films as well. At this point you would have to be something REALLY special to stand out and be memorable, and sadly LIVE ANIMALS just doesn’t have that sort of quality. I thought it was a passable effort, but nothing I would want to watch again.

LIVE ANIMALS is available on dvd from Echo Bridge Entertainment. The bonus features include behind the scenes featurettes and deleted scenes. Not Brain Hammer approved, but perhaps worth a look for the hardcore torture junkies.

Clive Barker’s BOOK OF BLOOD is the story of a paranormal researcher named Mary Florescu who crosses paths with a college student named Simon McNeal who appears to be channeling messages from the dead. Mary has a theory that there are strange highways that lead the souls of the dead to their afterlife, and that there are also crossroads with our world. A supposedly haunted house should be the perfect location for one of these crossroads, but Mary & Simon quickly discover that the dead want to be left alone. Simon becomes a conduit for damned souls on their way to Hell and the souls carve their stories onto his body, turning him into a living book of blood.

John Harrison is the writer and director responsible for bringing Clive Barker’s BOOK OF BLOOD to life. The movie is a faithful recreation of two of Barker’s short stories: Book Of Blood & On Jerusalem Street. Reading the stories beforehand is not necessary for enjoying the film, but it will help build a sense of familiarity that might help ease the fact that the film moves at a snail’s pace. The stories are short enough to keep the reader riveted, the film manages to take a unique and morbid premise and stretch it into the point of tedium. In the short stories, Barker immediately throws the reader into the fiery climax of the paranormal investigation. In the movie, Harrison spends more time with the characters, and they are not particularly interesting.

As expected with a film with the name Clive Barker attached to it, there are some great gory scenes of spectral rape, face ripping and skin carving, but here they are spread out to the point of being ineffective. The “old dark house” set up has bone done countless times before, and no amount of noisy jump scares can wake up the now comatose viewer. By the time the climax finally arrives it plays out like a lame laser-Floyd show. “Stunning” and “Astonishing” are the words the press materials use to describe this finale, but “Cheap” and “Silly” were there words that kept flashing through my mind.

I thought this one had a few moments here and there, but overall it was boring and not something I would recommend to anyone other than the most rabid Clive Barker pinheads. BOOK OF BLOOD is now available on dvd from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Bonus features include the trailer and a behind the scenes feature.

KEEP THE BLOOD FLOWING!!!