Boogeyman (2005)

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An odd thing happened to me as I watched the film "Boogeyman". From the opening few minutes, which scared me like no other film had in recent memory, to the ridiculously laughable finale, I could keep track of my feelings for this film regress from love, to like, to numbness, to loathing, and finally to desperate hatred.

Tim (Barry Watson- who tries, and yes, I am the only person on the planet who liked "Sorority Boys") is a quivering emotional wreck. When Tim was a child, he watched his father get brutally attacked, taken by an unseen force, and disappear into a bedroom closet, never to be seen again. Tim is now trying to live a normal life working at a magazine, and dating rich girl Jessica (Tory Mussett). Tim also has a fear of closets, standing before them in a trance whenever he sees one; not sure if school lockers or storage units set him off, the three screenwriters responsible for this don't let on. Tim's mother (Lucy Lawless, in an obviously slashed role not even deserving of the word "cameo") dies and Tim decides to take ONE night to go through her things at the same house where his father vanished from. The house still has lots o' closets, and while Tim does reconnect with childhood friend Kate (Emily Deschanel, who's been better), he must battle the titular monster with the help of a new character, a little girl named Frannie (Skye McCole Bartusiak) who you know is not what she seems from her very first appearance onscreen.

The first sequence in the film, where a young Tim (Aaron Murphy) imagines innocent items in his room coming alive, until finally something does attack his father, plays on everyone's fear of their own space when they were younger (monsters under the bed and in the closet), and this sequence genuinely frightened me. I wondered what my fellow critics were talking about when they trashed this film, this was some scary stuff- until I kept watching the film. Every scene. EVERY scene has a scare in it. When Tim goes back to his childhood psychiatric hospital to visit his doctor, we get no exposition or plot development, just another scene of a scared child that, while creepy, has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Every time Tim approaches a freaking closet, director Kay kicks the visuals into overdrive, as the camera swoops and darts and your mind begins to wonder: what exactly is the Boogeyman? What happens to the people the Boogeyman takes? Where does Tim's sudden ability to bend time and space come from? Are the Boogeyman's victims just waiting in another closet somewhere, watching the clock tick as Tim walks from one closet to another, looking for them? Is that really Sam Raimi listed as a producer in the opening credits?

Yes, the script is a mess. Someone took out all of the scenes that didn't have a sense of dread, and tried to cobble together a scary film from what was left. You never care about Tim or any of the other characters. Aside from the film's beginning, there are many unsettling scenes (Frannie's house), but they are quickly forgotten as the film makers pile on jump scares to keep the viewer watching until the lame finale. I watched this on DVD, and was so miffed with the film when it was over, I didn't care about deleted scenes or alternate endings, I just wanted it out of my player and on the bottom of the big stack of discs I needed to donate.

"Boogeyman" was successful enough to generate a couple of straight-to-video sequels. When Kate asks "Is it over?" toward the end of the film, I answered out loud "I hope so."

Stats:
(2005) 89 min. (*) out of five stars
-Directed by Stephen Kay
-Screenplay by Eric Kripke and Juliet Snowdon & Stiles White, Story by Eric Kripke
-Cast: Barry Watson, Tory Mussett, Emily Deschanel, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Aaron Murphy, Andrew Glover, Lucy Lawless, Charles Mesure, Philip Gordon, Jennifer Rucker, Scott Wills, Michael Saccente, Louise Wallace
(PG13)