Boogeyman (2005)

Director: Stephen T. Kay

Starring: Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel

Run Time: 89 mins

Certificate: 15

 

Plot Outline: A young man, traumatised by events that happened to him as a child, returns to his parents house after his mother dies. There he must confront and overcome his fear of the Boogeyman, who is still lurking in the closet after all of these years.

The Review: Simply dire. There's hardly another way I can start off a review for one of the worst mainstream horror flicks I've ever seen. From the production house of Sam Raimi, you'd have thought that something in the horror genre would have his stamp and seal of approval. Wrong. The film amounts to little more than a guy walking around his old house for about 70 minutes, opening doors and treading on creaky floorboards. That's pretty much the story in one. It looks and acts like Darkness Falls and They, two similar horror films featuring unpleasant monsters who lurk in the dark. In fact you'd be hard pressed to really draw any differences between any of them. Boogeyman features a very unconvincing CGI monster who appears briefly, mainly towards the end. Who is he? What is his purpose? Who cares? Certainly not the scriptwriters. The rest of the film involves doors being opened, cupboards being checked and noises being slammed into the speakers. The problem is that so much time is spent looking around the house and expecting to find the Boogeyman, it actually anti-climaxes too many times so when we do eventually find him lurking, there's absolutely nothing scary about him. Not to mention the fact that spending ages looking around an empty house is indescribably boring. There's also an obligatory creepy kid who is here to explain all to our main lead (which leads to a not-so-shocking Sixth Sense style twist). But when it all boils down to the end, nothing has changed with the film. The story is pretty much at the same point as it was when we started. There's no developing or clarifying what has happened. It's like 89 minutes of storytelling without actually telling a story.

Final Verdict: Boogeyman is the single worst American horror to be cinematically released within the last 10 years. It's abominable.