director
Stephen T. Kay
screenwriters
Eric Kripke
Juliet Snowden
Stiles White
story by
Eric Kripke
producers
Daniel Carrillo
Hans Jürgen Pohland
Sam Raimi
Rob Tapert
cinematographer
Bobby Bukowski
music
Joseph LoDuca
editor
John Axelrad
cast
Barry Watson (Tim Jensen)
Emily Deschanel (Kate)
Skye McCole Bartusiak (Franny)
Lucy Lawless (Mary Jensen)
Tory Mussett (Jessica)
Robyn Malcolm (Katie)
Charles Mesure (Mr. Jensen)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 86m
u.s.
release: 2/4/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
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Ever gone to one of those "haunted
houses" where you end up wandering through pitch-black hallways
while things jump out at you loudly? That describes too many
horror movies these days, and it especially sums up Boogeyman,
a film I wouldn't recommend to anyone with a heart condition
-- not because it's so terrifying, but because the damn thing
is like having someone scream "Boo!" in your ear every
five minutes. The cumulative effect is less scary than irritating.
Epileptics might want to steer clear of Boogeyman,
too, as its shocks depend a lot on rapid-fire subliminal flashes
of supposedly horrific images. Everyone else merely risks slow
death by boredom.
Fifteen years ago, a little
boy cowers in his bed from some unseen thing in his closet.
His dad reassures him that there's nothing there, but apparently
the Unseen Thing hasn't gotten the memo, because it makes short
work of poor Dad. Cut to the present day: the little boy has
grown up to be Tim (Barry Watson, of Sorority Boys and
TV's 7th Heaven), who works at a city magazine when he
isn't leaving all the lights on in his apartment and casting
a wary eye at every closet he sees. Tim has king-size issues
-- he still visits the juvie psych ward that treated him as a
kid -- and the official story is that his dad just took off and
that Tim processed the abandonment by concocting a Boogeyman
that took Dad. Of course, if that were the case, we wouldn't
have a horror movie.
We barely have one anyway.
The idea of the Boogeyman has powered many a nightmare; Stephen
King's early short story of the same name is a nasty little item
that reads like a dry run for Pet Sematary (it also inspired
a poorly-made low-budget short film), and there was an amusing,
if baffling, 1980 thriller called The Boogeyman, about
a haunted mirror. John Carpenter also gave his famous killer
Michael Myers the nickname in the original Halloween
("It was the boogeyman," said Jamie Lee Curtis;
"As a matter of fact," agreed Donald Pleasance, "it
was"). So I was up for a decent horror flick tackling this
childhood terror. What I got instead was a thinly plotted clothesline
of shock effects and a monster, when we finally see it, that
looks like a lame ripoff of the three ghastly, silent killers
in the superior Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush."
Watson, who should probably
stick to TV and drag, makes an annoyingly wimpy hero, and an
asexual one, too, though Tim has a hot girlfriend (Tory Mussett)
and another childhood friend (Emily Deschanel) who has a major
crush on him. More bewildering still, Tim apparently came from
the loins of Lucy Lawless, who has a pointless cameo here in
a flashback as Tim's mom. Lawless hasn't been doing much since
Xena ended except tiny roles in films produced by her
husband Rob Tapert and his partner Sam Raimi, who founded the
company Ghost House to put out medium-budget PG-13 spook shows
(their first was last fall's The Grudge).
It's nice that Raimi, who made his name as the hyperactive director
of the Evil Dead films, wants to keep his hand in horror,
but it would be nicer if these movies amounted to anything but
making a quick buck.
I'm sick of the supernatural,
too. Ghosts have become the new slashers -- overworked monsters
in an exhausted genre. The Sixth
Sense started it, and the Ring
remake kicked it into overdrive. For a while, it was refreshing
to see old-school horror that didn't rely on dumb teenagers being
isolated and butchered, but now we have dumb teenagers (or dumb
adults) being isolated and...startled a lot. It will continue,
I fear, until another horror movie comes out of nowhere and makes
$200 million, and then everyone will rip that off for
five years. Anyone want to predict the next trend? I'm sort of
hoping for a giant-monster comeback, and maybe Peter Jackson's
upcoming King Kong will
do it. While we wait, though, tepid seat-jumpers like Boogeyman
exist to kill part of a Saturday night.
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