A child, Willy, kills his mother’s abusive boyfriend as his sister, Lacey, watches in a mirror. Years later, Lacey (Suzanna Love), suffering psychological damage from the event, breaks a mirror that releases the spirit of the boyfriend, and the killings begin.
Here, in one film, is everything that went wrong with horror in the ’80s. It’s poorly shot, edited, acted, and written. And, it isn’t frightening. Not even slightly disconcerting.
It steals its beginning from Halloween, but John Carpenter knew how to frame a shot. This looks like it was filmed with the old family 8mm in the neighbor’s spare bedroom. The stabbing might have been funny if played for laughs as it looks so fake. Like most of the killings in the film, extreme close-ups are used so that there doesn’t have to be a person in the shot. Just a knife shoved into some cloth.
For the next hour, the bland people just walk about, doing some farming. It looks like the director went off for lunch and left the cameras rolling. That director is Ulli Lommel, who obviously took this project to prove that Europeans can not only be as incompetent as Americans in making horror films, but can exceed them. There’s no cliché he is unwilling to drag out, no unbelievable effect he won’t haphazardly shoot, to demonstrate his ineptitude.
Knowing that most people will get bored and leave for significant portions, Lommel repeats flashbacks over and over. Hey, you might have been gone the first five or six times. Now that’s being helpful.
Watching, I have to wonder if they had a script, or if they were writing it as they went along. The Adult Willy is a good, but mute man, who strangles a woman for no reason. It doesn’t tie into the story in any way and is thereafter ignored. Lacey’s husband yells at her when he actually thinks she isn’t doing things on purpose, but is insane. Perhaps Lommel changed the husband’s point of view mid-day, after shooting the yelling scene. Four campers pop up by a lake and two are killed. There’s no reason for them being in the film or dying (the ghost is after his killers—I think, it’s never explained). The remaining campers drive off and aren’t seen again. But then there’s a lot of threads that go nowhere. Early on, Willy and Lacey get a note from their mother who wants to see them. They don’t see her, and she’s never mentioned again. Did the actress who was supposed to play the mother fail to show up?
John Carradine appears briefly as a psychiatrist, but has no connection to the story. It looks like they had him for one afternoon, shot a few bits on the same set, and then spliced pieces throughout the film.
It all climaxes in a silly supernatural fight scenes, with plenty of point-of-view shots because showing the entire scene would be too expensive. One of the more pathetic segments has a priest impaled by a drawer full of knives, except we don’t see that. We see close-ups of his face (which changes very little for a man getting stuck in the back). Then afterward, the camera pulls back to show the blades sticking into an obvious board under his vestments.
But this is a Slasher film and things like a nonsensical story, amateurish lighting, and non-existent color correction aren’t important. So, how does it stand up in what does count for a Slasher? It’s very, very slow, with over thirty-five minutes between killings. There is little blood and the closest you get to skin is a girl in her underwear cutting her hair.
The Boogeyman has nothing to offer anyone. No matter what your tastes, there’s something for you to hate. And there’s no boogyman to give the title meaning.