John's Horror Banana-nanza Episode Sixty-Seven : The Boogeyman

There are spoilers in here, but really, there's just not that much to spoil. If you really are set on watching "The Boogeyman" in suspense, then, stop reading.

So, what could I classify this movie as? Well, it's a mashup movie. A mashup of Amityville Horror (using a house that looks identical), Halloween (a child POV stabbing scene) and the Waltons. The story is, as kids, Lacy and Jake had a mom that was less than nurturing. Her boyfriend is trying to have sex with her and the kids are looking in through the window, appearantly locked out. So they get punished. Makes sense. The boyfriend wears a stocking on his head, and then is stabbed by Jake, a-la Michael Myers.

Fast forward to, uhm, the future. Jake is now a mute, who collects knives and has a pet tarantula. I'd definetly want a mute guy who killed as a child to collect knives. Probably great for therapy.

Speaking of therapy, John Carradine shows up to half-act his way through another paycheck, as Lacy's psychiatrist. She has flashbacks of the murder and starts acting like a demon, to which Carradine responds, "Ok. You can wake up now." Unfazed. What a badass.

So at this point I was wondering, how did this become a Video Nasty? I've learned my lesson from listening to Lampyman101's Youtube reviews of the Video Nasties that most of the time, the DPP had no clue what they were doing when prosecuting movies. And for a little while, this seemed like the case. Then, all at once, chaos and mayhem.

Lacy's husband takes her to the house the murder took place in, which is inhabited by an apple munching girl and her siblings, one of which being an obnoxious little brat who you prey, sickeningly, will somehow get killed. Lacy sees the mirror and starts having flashbacks, so she smashes it with a chair, and her husband inexplicably puts the pieces in a bag to put back together at home and hang on the wall like some sort of prize.

This appearantly unleashes the demon inside the mirror, who promptly rips the shirt off of one girl and forces her to stab herself, then slams the window on the neck of the obnoxious kid (mini-cheer!), then smacks the remaining girl in the head with the bathroom mirror. So we go from no violence to boobs and violence run amuck! Huh.

So what we have is a killer mirror movie, a mirror which has a heartbeat similar to the demos of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." It tries to kill Jake using a pitchfork but fails miserablely. Lacy's husband puts the mirror together but a piece gets stuck on his son's shoe, just as he and Lacy head to the lake to fish.

So now what we have is a killer mirror shard movie. And some random disposable teens, one of which is wearing a "Triumph" tee shirt. Yeah 80's! He's unfortunately killed by a flying knife, which his girlfriend then french kisses. It has to be seen to be believed.

So Lacy comes home and is almost raped by the demon mirror, as her kid wonders towards the oversized well the family keeps in the back yard. To recover, she locks herself in a dark lit room. Seems logical to me. At this point, out of nowhere, John Carradine's character reappears, basically to say, "This script is rediculous! I refuse to believe anything that's going on in it!"

So a priest shows up, just as Lacy's family is being killed by pitchforks and garden hoses. The mirror gets a piece of itself lodged in Lacy's eye, and makes her talk like a demon. She hits the priest in the back, causing massive head bleeding (?), but eventually, the mirror is ripped off the wall and thrown into the well where it explodes.

Oh yeah. And Jake, predictably, says a few words and is no longer mute. Wait...didn't he kill someone? What happened with that? Uhm...

So this movie is a trainwreck. I can only recommend it to "Nasty" fans or fans of weird, bizzare 80's horror.

But the sequel...oh my.

Believe it or not, this movie made the Video Nasties list too.

Well, that might be because the actual version is violent and disgusting. Or in the case of the version I have, the "Director's Cut", it's the same as the first movie. And if the first movie was on there once, it has to be on there again, right? Consistancy.

So I have no clue what this movie is supposed to be about. We have a character who's name I don't remember or care to remember, having flashbacks of the first movie, and explaining them to her doctor, Doctor Love. I'm not making that up.

Basically, if you watched the first movie, and had some easily frightened woman commenting on exactly what she was watching and how scared it made her, you'd have the Director's Cut. There are random cuts to black and white scenes, dialogue scenes and characters that go nowhere, and an almost love scene with the girl and the doctor's assistant on the beach. I can't even explain it.

In the real version, there's a famous toothbrush death scene, so patheticly executed it's hilarious. That's not in this version. In this version, we see a woman killed by a radio in a bathtub. Twice. Same woman. Same bathtub. Same radio. So while most of the movie is a clipshow of the first, the rest is a clipshow of itself.

I was so disappointed while watching this movie. I actually wanted to revisit the first one, and I didn't even like it. My 25 cents could have been spent on a pack of gum, and instead I wasted it on this. Ugh.