The Boogey Man

Here’s a movie that can’t decide what it wants to rip off.

It opens like a sleazy Halloween knockoff: Willy and Lacey, grade-school-aged siblings, witness their mom’s boyfriend getting kinky. Willy gets tied to a bed. Lacey hands Willy a knife. Willy stabs the boyfriend to death while Lacey watches in a mirror. Twenty years later, you’re thinking: okay, Willy’s the Boogey Man now, right?

Wrong.

The film abandons that thread and lurches into Amityville Horror territory. Willy, who’s been mute since the murder, just sort of stands around.

Nothing much happens for forty minutes. Lacey has nightmares. A psychiatrist—John Carradine cashing a paycheck—suggests confronting her fears. She visits her childhood home and smashes the mirror in a panic. Big mistake. Breaking the mirror releases the dead boyfriend’s spirit, who becomes an invisible force that starts killing people.

Then, finally, comes the film’s one brilliant moment. A teenage girl alone in the bathroom. First the mirror makes her slice open her shirt. Then her throat. Her pervy little brother climbs up outside and peers through the window, shouting “Boogey Man!” just as she dies. The invisible force slams the window down on his neck. It’s ridiculous. It’s glorious. It’s the best part of the movie.

The rest is a slog. The performances are community theater stiff. Only Carradine, in scenes filmed separately in Los Angeles, has any charisma. Everyone else is interchangeable.

The plot makes zero sense. Why does Lacey’s husband take the broken mirror home to glue it back together? How does the mirror work exactly? Aren’t there hundreds of glass shards scattered everywhere?

The gonzo finale goes full Exorcist. Green lighting. Levitation effects. A mirror shard covers Lacey’s eye and she gets possessed. Too little, too late.

A shame as director Ulli Lommel shows an eye for creative kills. One involving a piercing and a car door stands out. He should have stuck with his Halloween ripoff. He nailed that opening. Instead, he grafted on Amityville Horror and The Exorcist, each requiring their own expository setups, until the whole thing collapsed under its own derivative weight.

Here’s a lesson for low-budget filmmakers: pick one movie to rip off, not three.

Note: I watched this primarily because it was shot in southern Maryland, near my hometown. The locations feel familiar even if I couldn’t pinpoint most of them. Though I have to wonder about that Cowboys jersey.