The Boogeyman (1980)

As young children, Lacey and Willie were not exactly on the road to solid mental health. One evening as they are caught peering in at they’re drunken mommy seducing her creepy ass boyfriend (complete with wife beater and panty hose on his head!), young Lacey is sent to bed while Willie is tied to his and beaten by said creepy boyfriend, under mommy’s approving eye of course. Cutting her brother free with a big butcher knife that very same night, Lacey watches via a mirrors reflection as her older brother repeatedly stabs and murders his tormentor. Years later the very same mirror that witnessed the said events is broken, unleashing the vengeful spirit of the murdered boyfriend. Lacey and Willie, now in their twenties and seemingly normal (except that Willie doesn’t talk thanks to the events of “that night”) are living on their aunt and uncles farm where they receive word from their sick (sicko) mother who wishes to see them before she dies. Mommies letter starts triggering all sorts of bad memories for the two and wouldn’t you know it, a certain creepy boyfriend spook also arrives to spread the love. Of course no one, including Lacey’s husband, wants to believe Lacey’s tales of vengeful ghosts as every one from the family priest to shrink John Carradine (!) are called in to help. Various murders abound as we witness director Ulli Lommel try to combine a pastiche from both the slasher and possession genres with, well, some decidedly mixed results.

To start with the good, there is a very surreal and somewhat arty vibe to the entire proceedings. Lommel uses various color schemes ala Argento to great effect, all accompanied by a nice and eerie synthesizer score. The film’s trippy vibe is probably what prevented me from turning it off halfway through, as I’m a sucker for pure ambiance. This puppy looks and smells good, but when you take a bite out of it…

The film as a whole suffers from bad acting, bad effects, bad editing, and well, lots of bad. Ideas and characters are introduced and then never mentioned again as Lommel can’t decide whether he wants to rip off either “Halloween” or “The Exorcist”. The murderous ghost stalks his victims with the typical “heavy breathing” POV shots, and just why in the hell does the character of Lacey speak in the killers voice while under hypnosis? Because Linda Blair did while possessed by a Mr. Pazuzu some year’s prior silly. Some of the murder sequences are just plain laughable, Zombo almost pissed himself when that window closed on that annoying little brother type…hilarious shit to be had there. And say, doesn’t that farmhouse look like a certain haunted house on Long Island? Still, all complaints aside there was enough of my beloved ambiance to keep me watching till the end, utter stupidity be damned. It’s for this reason alone that the film has achieved a decent cult following over the years, as while there were certainly tons of movies from this time that were both bad visually and in content, this one at least had the looks going for it. Worth a look if you’re into Argento or Bava for that visual flare, but those looking for something with a little more content and intelligence need look elsewhere.