Urgh. That's the best way to start this review. Director Rob Savage made such a great impression on horror fans when he released Host, arguably the best use of Zoom ever, with the exception of that one short clip of the man who accidentally made himself look like a cat (check it out if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's hilarious). Unfortunately, it is starting to look more and more like Host was an exception, with Savage following that up with the horrible Dashcam and now this. The Boogeyman isn't as bad as Dashcam, but it's a surprisingly lazy and inept movie that delivers a polished package of everything that exemplifies the worst of modern mainstream horror.
Springboarding from a short story by Stephen King, and that's more worthy of your time than this is, the very simple plot summary for this is that it looks at a family terrorised by a boogeyman. Still grieving the death of their mother, there's teenager Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) and younger sister, Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). They both live with their father, Will (Chris Messina), a therapist struggling to help his children through this difficult time. Anyway, once the boogeyman enters their home, and once they start figuring out exactly what is going on, people are warned not to spend too much time alone in the dark . . . and they then spend most of the movie wandering about alone in the bloody dark.
I really don’t want to spend too much time discussing this, it annoyed me so much for almost every minute of the runtime (although the opening sequence is impressively dark and disturbing, which makes the sharp slide downhill all the more disappointing). It might be a bit more polished than the 2005 movie that covered some similar ground, but I would struggle to say this is better. It’s so carelessly thrown together, but has a couple of elements in the story that are supposed to give it some weight it never maintains, and I blame Savage and the writers, Scott Beck, Mark Heyman, and Bryan Woods. Having read the original short story, one of the many little gems written by Stephen King, I assumed that everyone involved was drawn to the material because of a twisted ending that could be expanded into a feature full of paranoia and constant unease, but it appears that they just wanted the title so they could then deliver a few jump scares and mediocre scenes we have seen hundreds of times before.
The cast aren’t bad, with Thatcher and Blair capably carrying the whole thing on their young shoulders. Messina is sidelined for a lot of the movie, of course, but does perfectly fine work in his role, and David Dastmalchian is sorely underused in what amounts to little more than a cameo. Having said that, at least he doesn’t suffer the fate of Marin Ireland, stuck playing the standard grizzled survivor who thinks she knows how to finally kill the boogeyman and drags Thatcher’s character into her scheme. LisaGay Hamilton is enjoyable in the role of Dr. Weller, another therapist, but suffers from the fact that her screentime alludes more to the aforementioned short story ending in a way that fails to then deliver any decent pay-off.
I saw a lot of love for this when it was in cinemas, which meant I was keen to see it as soon as it hit home media, but I am glad I didn’t rush along to see this on the big screen. I don’t know what others saw in this, and maybe a fair few people left cinemas disappointed after being hoodwinked into buying a ticket, but there was nothing here that worked for me in terms of the horror content. I might have even preferred a straightforward drama showing the main characters dealing with their grief. Or, and here’s a radical idea, a creepy horror film that actually felt in line with the source material.
3/10
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