The Boogey Man (1980)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

hyped garbage

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend - who wore her stockings on his face - make out. Their mother was so upset, she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn't work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that's only the first few minutes of this one! Now we're in the present and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the director of the film Ulli Lommel and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna's real-life brother)on a farm. Willy's never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn't talk and often steals knives.Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that she has face her fears and go back to her childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes crazy and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitate pitchforks, rip off Lacey's shirt and impale young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You've taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying too, right?This being 1980, Jake decides to bring a priest in to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror's control over her.That's when the best solution comes up - let's just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son happily exiting a graveyard. Oh no - a piece of the mirror is on her son's shoe!I was wondering where so many of the plot points of this movie would go and they're often lost as if this were a foreign film. But it isn't! So I did a little digging into the director, Ulli Lommel.Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder's surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director's films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who became involved in his films Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.Seriously - a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cut her own throat with scissors, a child get his neck broken and a priest get his face melted? The acting is horrible - but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people's eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

This another one of those movies that make me feel sad as it could have been so much better had the writer, director and producer, Ulli Lommel, spent a little more time on it. I can say this in fairness as the story is pretty sound and there are some good original bits in the movie. Though what you get is a lacklustre movie which steals shots and feeling from other movies to ignite the viewers fear. The opening panning shot to the front of the house is very reminiscent of John Carpenter and Halloween, even the soundtrack is very similar to Carpenter's style, as well as the Phantasm movies. The two protagonists of the film move in with their aunt and uncle on their farm... the farmhouse looks to have had the same architect as the Amityville house and in the end sequence all the windows glow red.These rip-offs scream of laziness. However, I liked the idea of a killer trapped in a mirror until the mirror is smashed and his soul is released to kill again. I think Lommel missed a major scene here. Instead of starting the film with the mother and her lover getting frisky as the kids spied on them. He should have started with the lover killing somebody on the way to his rendezvous with the mother. This would have added a depth to the "killer" character. As it is he's just a man wearing a stocking over his head... not really boogey man material... would he really go on a killing spree? This actually weakens the story as it's hard to believe.As for the special FX, these are hit and miss and I think the budget was spent on the more gruesome FX, though on the whole, they're more than passable. I particularly like the bathroom death sequence, especially the death by scissors, and the teenagers "kiss of death" in the mustang.The direction, for the most part, is okay. Lommel does create tension at times, there could have been more of it though. Some are obvious so it doesn't really work, like when Will is in the barn as a pitchfork gets ready to impale him. The pitchfork raises and hangs in the air for an eternity before his sister Lacey arrives to save him. If this had been trimmed down it would have worked much better, it's just too long.As for the acting... well, the best actors are the three kids who are in the original house where the murder took place. They actually do a good portrayal of brother and sisters. Their interaction is spot-on, each has their own life but still interact with each other. They're in the movie for only a few minutes, though this section is the best in the whole film.Lacey is portrayed by Suzanna Love (who also part scripted the screenplay), who takes woodenness to a new level - Suzanna Love Oak. The only person worse than her is the guy playing her brother, Will, Nicholas Love. For most of the movie he's mute, a psychological reaction to the murder, so you would think he would act using his body and facial expressions... Don't be silly. At times it looks like he's taken root. His stand-in could have been a store mannequin.The other actors are average and really try to do their best with speeches, which at times, are awkward and unconvincing. Even John Carradine cannot add any credence to this film.This is a movie for die hard horror fans. I watch films like this to find the hidden treasure in a quagmire of rubbish. It could be a good actor, an outstanding scene, or an effect that is well thought out and executed. Sometimes there's no treasure... but most of the time, like this film, there a couple of things.

I remember viewing this movie many years ago, and to be honest I just didn't get it, after seeing the previously banned sticker on the front of the video, well I just wanted to see it at the time and then forgot about it after a while. But recently I decided to give this movie another chance to see if my taste has changed through the years, seen as though I have matured as I got older and watched this movie again with an open mind.The start of this movie is very interesting and the further storyline does take an interesting turn, but it does lag in some places as it takes way too long setting up the haunted mirror story line off the ground and dwells too much on the past and once the supernatural element kicks in, it does start to deliver (well on some parts). The good points though are the death scenes and set pieces are very effective, but sometimes clumsy and dated by today's standards. But to be honest the bad points do way out the good points in this movie, as it does try to go way over the top and perhaps becomes a little bit too ambitious, okay the idea is interesting like with the vengeful spirits but then it seems the director doesn't know what to do from there on, like bringing in a priest doing a exorcism in the third act of this movie, which to be honest I just felt like switching off and apart from a very few decent performances, this movie is mainly hampered by bad acting and the obviously really low budget that shows through with some poorly shot scenes and lack of humour instead opting for pure exportation. But the performances do save this movie, Nicholas Love gives a pretty good unhinged performance as Willy, despite lack of dialogue he still makes it work, something not many actors could do. Ron James gives an adequate performance and Suzanna Love brings depth to her role and plays it convincingly without going over the top.All in all "The Boogeyman" is not a terrible movie, it's certainly ambitious given the subject matter, but it doesn't quite shine, but it does have some decent qualities but not enough to earn a status as one of the slasher gems that came out during this era.

I saw this one when I was young and it had some elements in it that were effective. Overall, though I would have to say it is a wasted effort. Basically, it is a horror movie like most...one of those that had something going for it and it just lacks something or has something that turns what could have been a good horror into just another in a very long line of bad horror movies. The story has some weird sex pervert killed in front of a mirror or something. I think some time passes and the girl who had severe issues with him sees his image in the mirror, she freaks out which is understandable and smashes said mirror into many many pieces. This is where the terror begins as now where there is a shard of this mirror the dude scene in the mirror can now reach out from beyond the grave and kill people and seeing as how this movie is four years older one can not say they copied this from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" though that is easily the superior film. This film has some good kills and such, but it plays out very slowly and the whole thing with the guy being a sex pervert is just unnecessary and adds nothing to this film but unneeded sexual abuse kind of stuff. Had they made it where the guy was maybe just an abuser or something and focused on the kills it would probably had been a better movie. Still, this one apparently did well enough to spawn a sequel.