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Little Timmy's father gets sucked into a closet door before we head on over to "Fifteen Years Later" territory. Timmy is now a photogenic young man...one who's deathly afraid of closets. Important to the plot in no discernable way is Timmy's snooty blonde girlfriend and the night they spend at her snooty family's mansion.

Timmy gets a phone call from Uncle Mike. Uh oh! Mama back home! She's sick!

Next thing we see is Mama being buried. Timmy decides that the only way to exorcise his mopiness is to (all together now) spend a night in his family's spooky old house....boogeymen (or lack thereof) be damned!

Look, I could sit here all night and rattle off a list of what doesn't work in this movie. But that's like shooting fish in a barrel. Suffice to say that Boogeyman is one of the most narratively stunted, annoyingly overdirected and shapelessly inert horror movies I've ever been subjected to. The paper-thin story is as boring as it is meandering, the thing moves at a snail's pace (and that's me being kind), and there's not a single worthwhile acting performance that helps to elevate the tedium.

I sit here, perhaps 75 minutes removed from the film itself, and I can actually feel Boogeyman as it evaporates from my frontal lobes. The only thing that stands out is Stephen Kay's horrendous little directorial flourishes. When Mr. Kay isn't zoooooooming his camera down a dark hallway or soaaaaaaring it through the foliage, he's treating his audience to those moronic shriek scares that are the touchstone of any well-crafted thriller. Every twelfth minute of Boogeyman comes packed some SHOCKING noise. It could be a cat or a faucet or just some little cheat of a musical note. Basically, it's the single oldest trick in the lame-o horror book: when you have no REAL scares for your patrons, it's best to just throw a bunch of loud noises and flashing lights onto the screen. It's an effective way to trick an audience into being "scared." Feh.

If the first 2/3rds of Boogeyman are huge gaping maws of boredom (and trust me, they are), then the third act is where everyone involved just threw up their hands and said "screw it." If you can actually follow what happens in the final 25 minutes of this movie (indeed, if you even care to) then you've seen waaaaaay too many episodes of Scooby-Doo.

If this movie has a "plot," then Hallmark Cards deserve to be called Hallmark Novels. I'm drop-dead stunned to learn that it took three (3!) entire screenwriters to come up with the cardboard artifice of this thing. Perhaps it was a contest of "let's see who can come up with the most boring and obvious cliches."

And for the love of all things not nausea-inducing: someone please buy Stevie a goddam tripod for his next movie. Not every sequence has to have a waaaandering creeeeping approach. Better yet, Steve, just quit directing altogether. Between Boogeyman and your wholly disagreeable Get Carter remake, I'm not fully convinced that you deserve to be a filmmaker. Plus you're obviously just interested in the camera tricks, so why not focus on the cinematography angle?

Boogeyman exists for one reason and one reason only: when a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls get together for a slumber party, they want to rent something "scary" (but not really). And sitting right there, in all its neutered, toothless and PG-13 glory, is Boogeyman. So if you're a smart-thinking parent looking for a horror movie "for kids," you're an easy mark for this piece of junk. Do me, you, and all those thirteen-year-olds a favor: leave this one sitting on the shelf, caked with all the dust it so richly deserves

One of this year's absolutely WORST horror movies...and we're talking about a year that's already given us "White Noise," "Alone in the Dark," and "Hide and Seek." Think about that before you head out to the multiplex. Please.

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link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11580&reviewer=128
originally posted: 02/04/05 16:53:46
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