The Boogeyman
Director: Ulli Lommel
Writers: David Herschel, Ulli Lommel, and Suzanna Love
Starring: Suzanna Love and Ron James
Body Count: 9
Review: I had read nothing but bad reviews for The Boogeyman, so when I sat down to watch it, I didn't have exactly high expectations. In fact, I really didn't expect it to even qualify as a slasher movie (and, by some standards, I suppose it doesn't).
In a lot of cases, when I have low expectations, I end up pleasantly surprised. In the best cases, I end up really liking a movie.
The Boogeyman was not one of these cases, but that's not to say that it's as bad as everyone makes it out to me. The film begins with a prelude (accompanied by some creepy piano music--sounding familiar?). Two young kids watch their parents fooling around on the couch (okay, this is sounding really familiar now), and when they get caught spying, the father takes out a rather strict excercise in discipline on the little boy. His sister helps him out, and the kid proceeds to slice up his pop.
Flash-forward a few years later, the kids are grown up, but still having a hard time dealing with the events of "that night." The girl is married, and the guy lives with them and hasn't spoken a word in years (okay, that's enough--Carpenter should sue). As usual in this situation, strange things start to happen and people start to die.
Okay, here's where the movie stops resembling Halloween and starts to go off on its own weird tangent. It seems that the "boogeyman" of the title is really a spirit of some type that inhabits mirrors, or mirrored surfaces, or knives, or something like that. Anyway, these accursed mirrored surfaces start glowing red and people in their presence die. Some are killed by unseen foreces, some are mystically forced to kill themselves. The film racks up a sizeable body count in this pattern, and the deaths are rather ridiculously contrived. They're pretty funny (the kid in the window is a true gem!), and there's a decent amount of blood for this period of the slasher timeline, which makes up for the complete utter lack of logic present in the movie.
The Boogeyman plays like a combination of Halloween, The Amittyville Horror, and Final Destination, and while it's not as good as any of those films, it's entertaining in its own weird way. You can't go into it expecting much, but if you keep you hopes low, you just might have a good time.
