Boogeyman

June 16, 2005

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 86 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Boogeyman is Hollywood’s latest PG-13 horror movie. As fans of the buckets of blood and bouncing teen tah tahs from the 80’s, we really groan everytime we see another horror movie come out with only a PG-13 rating. A good horror flick should be campy, full of nudity and grotesque killings. Or it should really work you over psychologically. Most of today’s horror films do neither.

Unfortunately, Boogeyman is very typical of contemporary offerings and doesn’t bring anything special to the table. There’s no campy humor, no nudity and the action is almost completely bloodless. There’s no psychology, and the film relies on startle techniques to try to make the audience jump instead of actually scaring them. Everything about it is totally predictable and watered down to get that PG-13 rating and extract a few bucks from the teenagers.

The storyline is a bit of a cookie cutter mix that borrows heavily from Darkness Falls with just a dash of Poltergeist thrown in. The “Boogeyman” snatchs a kid’s father right in front of him when he’s 8 years old. We fastforward and pick up with the kid as a grown up. Psychologists have told him he just imagined it all as a child’s way of dealing with a parent who left. But he makes sure he lives in a loft with no closets and takes all of the doors off of all of the cabinets just in case.

We are giving this film 3 stars despite our rants. It would be unfair to hold contemporary movies up to the standards of a different era. As such, Boogeyman is what it is. And by today’s standards in horror movies, it’s about average. The gaggle of young girls sitting 3 rows behind us who came to a scary movie so they cold squeal seemed to really enjoy it. As guys, we think it’ll make a good DVD to watch in a dark room with a female who you want to cling to you all night.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 3 Stars, Barry Watson, DVD, Emily Deschanel, Horror, Lucy Lawless, PG-13, Robyn Malcolm, Skye McCole Bartusiak