Macabre…ish Horror Review: Boogeyman

 

Boogeyman, 2005/ 1 hr 29 min

 

As a little kid, Tim (Aaron James Murphy), witnesses the boogeyman take his father (Tom Mesure), snatching him into the closet and slamming him around until he was bloody and disappearing into the closet. From then on the story was his dad abandoned he and his mother (Lucy Lawless) and she never recovered.

 

Ever since then he has taken steps to protect himself from the monster by sleeping on a mattress on the floor, having glass doors or no doors including on his cabinets and he has no closets, he keeps his clothes in a dresser.

 

While spending Thanksgiving with his girl friend’s family, Tim (Barry Watson) has a premonition about going back to the family home. Her home is huge and filled with places for the boogeyman to hide. So he does his checks but get’s no rest, he sees his mother and immediately knows something’s wrong.

 

He decides he needs to return to the old house. But until then, he’s hallucinating a lot. And on the drive there, Tim almost hits a truck and a bird hits his windshield.

 

He enters the old Victorian and though it’s under construction, all the memories are still there. And so is the boogeyman.

 

Later, Tim finds a little girl, Franny (Skye McCole Bartusiak), in the shed. She wants to know if it’s true that the boogeyman took his dad. He gives her advice to count to 5 when she’s afraid, sometimes it works for him.

 

Also inside the woodshed is Franny’s backpack full of old posters of missing children. Tim immediately starts hallucinating them and they all are supposed victims of the boogeyman. He’s so freaked out, he leaves and runs into his girlfriend, Jessica (Tory Musset), on the porch and they go to a motel.

 

But later, Kate (Emily Deschanel), Tim’s childhood friend and neighbor comes by the house with food, not knowing he’s gone, she enter’s the house. And back at the motel, Jessica vanishes from the bath and Tim runs around looking for her. And then he opens the motel closet door and steps in. Then he steps out of the closet into his old house, running right into Kate. Who is now alarmed.

 

Both Tim and Kate drive off looking for Jessica, he has no idea what is going on. He remembers going into a room with Jessica but he has no idea what happened after that. He pulls out the key to Room 3 and he and Kate go in. It looks bad. She’s not there but her blood and clothes are.

 

Kate thinks Tim did something to Jessica but he’s convinced it was the boogey man. When Kate is dropped off at home, Tim sees the boogeyman and tries to warn her but she’s afraid of him and tells him he needs help.

 

So Tim goes to the park and sits on the swing with Franny. He talks to her telling her the boogeyman is just gonna keep taking people and they go to an abandoned house full of graffiti, he tells her about the man who used to live there. The man once tried to lure the boogeyman out. A wall is covered in missing children’s posters and Franny is among them. Tim says he wants to help her but she says he can’t. He can only help himself. She says she needs to go home, back to where it started and then she disappears.

 

Meanwhile, Kate calls Tim’s uncle, Mike (Phillip Gordon), she’s concerned about Tim’s mental health. Then she hears noise in her house that is not her dad.

 

And Tim’s uncle, Mike, turns up at the house looking for him but Tim is convinced he’s been taken and so he nails all the doors shut in the house but one. The last one, he enters and screws a chair to the floor. Behind him all of the doors blow open.

 

Franny materializes by Tim’s side before he enters a closet and comes out from under the bed in the motel, room 3. He sees Jessica  drowning in muddy water in the tub and the boogey man has her and vanishes. Then he exits the closet into the Victorian again and Uncle Mike walks in and starts shooting something behind him with his nail gun. The Boogeyman leaps and wraps Uncle Mike in a roll of plastic and as Tim desperately tries to cut him out before he suffocates, the monster drags Mike across the floor, into the closet, still wrapped in plastic.

 

Tim is seeing exactly what happened to everyone but he’s powerless to help anyone but Kate. He enters her house and the boogeyman grabs her and tries to drag her under the bed but Tim holds on to her. With the help of memories from his childhood, he does defeat the boogeyman and it is a very good ending.

 

This movie was directed by Stephen Kay and it was great! The camera work made all the difference. Plus the effects, this movie was a pleasure to watch. There are plenty of jump scares in this one, this is not a blood and guts movie. And the cast is just right.