After the snore-fest that was
Boogeyman, my hopes were not high. Add in the fact that his is a Direct-to-DVD sequel made two years later and I'm really pessimistic. Plus, what exactly are you going to follow-up on from the first film? The guy confronts his fears, sends the creature away and moves on with his life. Did I miss something? As it turns out, I didn't, but we'll get into that later. Like the last film, this one is the brainchild of Ghost House, a company that has not met a Japanese horror film that it was afraid to remake. On the possible up-side, this movie is not made for theaters, so it could distract me with some gore. Will it continue the trend of sucking or will it punch me in the sack with its quality? Find out in my bloody review of...
The film begins at a kid's birthday party. All is going well, the birthday girl is happy and nothing could go wrong with the world. All of a sudden, the dad goes to fix a light and a masked man stabs him to death. Um, The Boogeyman uses a knife now? What the hell is that shit?!? Anyhow, the mother is also killed, but both brother and sister survive. We do a time-jump and we learn that the girl is still having some nightmares related to the event. Did you guys just add a sibling and think you could make the same movie again? Thankfully not, but it feels like that for a while. The girl ends up in an asylum where she will be treated for her fear of The Boogeyman. Dude, that wrestler is freaky- I don't blame you, honey! The rest of her group is made up of people with different disorders and phobias. One girl (played by
Arrested Development's 'Egg) is a cutter, while another one is anorexic. Rounding out the group is a few other crazy people, but none of them are quite as annoying as the ones from Ginger Snaps 2. In addition, their counselor is Rene O'Connor aka Gabrielle. Considering the last movie of yours I reviewed, the odds are not in your movie's favor, honey. Oh yeah, the psychiatrist is Tobin Bell. Given that this movie is only three years old, this just comes off as sad.
After establishing it's plot, the movie doesn't take quite so long to get to the interesting stuff. The facility goes into lock-down one night, but that doesn't stop our heroes from wandering around. The anorexic girl decides to stare at herself in the mirror, which naturally requires her to be topless. Now that our prerequisite nudity quota has been filled, let's get to some killing. One of the guys is attacked by a masked man and has cleaning fluid poured down his throat. This is supposed to be ironic, since he was a junkie who would put anything in his body. If you want subtlety, this is not your movie. The anorexic girl meets up with one of the other guys and has pointless sex with him. This is overlaid with a scene involving 'Egg' being tied to a bed and having bugs crawl in her skin. She is given a scalpel, which she uses to start cutting up her wrists and let the bugs out. Don't bend your wrists a little further and cut your way out or anything, idiot! After all of that, we get the 'people wandering around and discovering the bodies' scene. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention O'Connor's character getting zapped with a live wire while she's standing in a puddle with no shoes on. The fact that she approached a fuse box in that way is pretty much tempting fate.
The movie doesn't stop with the bullshit, so why should I? Another one of the patients is kidnapped, strapped to a gurney and has a bunch of tubes put in her. As it turns out, this is the anorexic girl and the tubes go to a liposuction machine...which they have here, for some reason. The Boogeyman turns it on and the device works in reverse, filling her with fat and making her stomach explode...off-camera. With only a few people left, our heroine goes to warn the guy we last saw having sex and subsequently-rejecting the anorexic girl. Unfortunately, he's stabbed off-camera in a scene deemed to boring, I guess. By the way, his fear was one of commitment- no, really. The mysterious killer finally confronts our heroine in a hallway that has flickering lights- thank you, cliches! Her confrontation is put-off by the sudden appearance of Tobin Bell's character, who tells her that The Boogeyman is not real. Yeah, he gets stabbed to death and has syringes put in his eyes. It does the 'I'm chasing you while walking' thing until she finds O'Connor's character...alive and with her brain fried. She was afraid of going insane- ha ha. Finally, she manages to find out who the killer is. It's....her brother. Yeah, the guy they barely-mentioned at all is the villain. He apparently snapped after Bell locked him in a closet to make him confront his own fears of The Boogeyman. They have a little scuffle and chase again, but our heroine eventually gets cornered in his lair and kills the man. When the police arrive, we see O'Connor under the mask, which means that the brother escaped and puts all of this on her. The End.
This movie sucked, but for all the reasons that it shouldn't have. The movie ignored the silly 'killer Boogeyman' idea from the first one entirely. Unfortunately, their only substitute was a
Saw knock-off...in a film featuring freaking Jigsaw! There are a lot of better ways to do a story like this, which is the worst part of all. The premise could work, provided you spend the time to set-up things right and don't just cheat. Hell, they could have done what both my brother and I 'saw coming': Bell is the killer, but gets offed by the real Boogeyman. That was too clever for them, so they just put in this stupid ending. Speaking of which, see how much of this continuity is maintained in
Boogeyman 3, coming next Saturday. The acting is alright, but the muted atmosphere of the film- not to mention that bullshit color correction technique- kills most of it. Bell barely tries here and O'Connor only acts when she is supposed to be crazy. Our heroine is nothing special and really does nothing to help the film. The whole 'killing the people with their fears' thing is alright, but the movie does nothing to make it plausible. How does the guy sneak in all of the stuff, let alone procure it or know how to work it? Explain, movie- explain! If you like bad movies like this, you'll have much more fun than with
Boogeyman, although that's not saying much. This shit only gets worse, people!
Next up, I take a look at one of my favorite Italian films. It has dangerous masks, biker gangs and an extremely 'Meta' plot. Stay tuned...
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