Just plain ridiculous film that opens with a three-year old girl and her slightly older brother being asked to stay outside while mom and boyfriend have some fun. Children spy on lovers and then boyfriend ties boy up. Sister gets huge knife to untie him and brother does the next most natural thing...he stabs the lover repeatedly whilst in bed with his mother. Guess what happens next? Yep, the movie goes forward 20 years. Haven't we seen something like this before? Yep, John Carpenter did it in Halloween and a parade of cheap imitators followed. No different here. But what is different is that this film is at least unique in what it asks its viewers to believe. We just don't have some psychopathic killer from the past...in this film, the young girl is grown up with a child living with husband, some of his family, and the brother who is now mute due to his terrible past. She begins to have recurring nightmares when a letter is received by her mother asking to visit. We never see the mother in the film. The heroine goes with husband to the old house. She sees the man her brother killed in a mirror, smashes the mirror, and releases him to the world as some bloody, crazed, asthmatic killer. When you see a sliver of the mirror, he is there. When you see a shiny bit of mirror focused in your direction, you cannot escape him. He, now after just being a guy killed in an exposition piece, is "the Boogeyman." Why? Anyway, this is where the film really gets bad, and though I could rant for hours about what's wrong, I will confess that this film had me in stitches for some of its bloody awful scenes. The first time we see a sliver we hear this loud heart beating and very heavy breathing. Director Ulli Lommel doesn't want any chance that we might not know that sliver means this invisible predator is about. A girl sticks scissors in her throat and a young boy, not knowing his sister is dead, puts his head in window and yells "watch out for the Boogeyman" and then the asthmatic sound track comes on and the window shuts down hard on the kid's neck. It was such a poor, ludicrous scene that I just broke out laughing. Other scenes were just as humorous. The fishing scene has a sliver somehow miraculously jammed on the kid's boot, and while he is fishing it goes all over the place(the reflection that is)including an abandoned house and a car a goodly distance from the house in a wooded lot. What was the kid doing on the dock...Riverdance? The ending scenes are equally bad, and this film, for me, just had no credibility. It has an interesting premise, a deadly mirror, but there are obvious cheap elements stolen from Halloween, Amityville Horror(there is a priest in this too), and other like films. Suzanna Love "stars" as Lacey the young girl. She is the director's wife. Horror veteran John Carradine plays a brief role as a psychiatrist and gives one of his more restrained performances.
Review of The Boogey Man
