Boogeyman English Movie
"Is it over?" the quaking starlet asks the hero with pursed lips and narrowed eyes. "Yes," he whispers. "He'll never come back."
Don't be too sure of that. If "Boogeyman" wins the terror-striven audience's approval we can have a whole series - "Boogeyman Returns" and "Back To Boogeyman".
After watching young Barry Watson quiver and shiver in a daze, one wonders if the sinister spectre that seems to bother our horrified hero is actually a metaphor for all the terrible things that we imagine our movies are capable of doing to our patience.
The scares are so scarce that after a while nobody cares. The characters don't invite sympathy... only a sense of tormented resignation as you wait for the screenwriter to unravel the karmic crisis in the spooked-out hero's life.
The acting is neither good nor bad, just indifferent. No one looks particularly petrified by the proceedings.
Incredibly, it all begins with a bedtime story. Dad loves telling it like it is, until one day he gets sucked into the closet... to never come out.
Tim spends the beginnings of his adulthood trying to forget the Boogeyman. But will the scriptwriter let him? Not in your life.
Inventing one chilling episode after another to create a sense of frenzied foreboding, "Boogeyman" is a casualty of insubstantial terror. Though the atmospheric aggravation is arresting, the characters are largely hazy.
Watson's performance is more elementary than elemental. The two women in his love life are like pieces of confetti floating in the air after a rowdy Halloween party. The one interlude that gets your gut comes mid-way when Tim drives into a motel with girlfriend number one Jessica but finds himself back in his familial mansion where the dreaded Boogeyman awaits with sheathed claws.
Jessica's murder in the bathtub makes the murder-in-the-shower in Hitchcock's "Psycho" looks like a piece of cake. But more blood doesn't add flesh to the terror tale.
There are some gentle moments between Tim and a little girl who seems to know the secret of the Boogeyman better than Tim... or the scriptwriter. She, poor thing, doesn't really get a chance to have her say.
Wispy and half-warmed, the terror of Boogeyman is maddeningly open-ended. You hardly get a chance to get into Tim's traumatised world before you are pulled out and told to go home.
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