The Boogeyman (1980)
Directed by Ulli Lommel
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you killed your mother’s abusive boyfriend in front of a mirror, then twenty years later broke that mirror, reassembled it, bled on it, and hung it up in your kitchen? If so, then “The Boogeyman” has the answer for you!
In this, “The original 1980 version,” as the DVD cover proudly exclaims, young Lacey and Willy are forced to play outside by their drunken slut of a mother while she fucks some random drunk on the couch. Those rascally kids get up to no good and start watching through the overly large, curtain-less window which is conveniently located directly in front of said couch. When mom sees this, she is none too pleased, and she and her lover, who is at this point wearing one of her stockings over his head, tie young Willy up and beat him. Afterwards, mom and the boyfriend retire to the appropriate place to have casual sex when you have children, a.k.a. the master bedroom, while Lacey runs downstairs and finds a kitchen knife with which to free her older brother. Willy proceeds to borrow a sequence from the original “Halloween,” and makes his way down the hallway using first person point of view while holding the knife directly in front of the camera. (Side note: young Willy magically becomes about six feet tall during this sequence.) Needless to say, Willy stabs the boyfriend while Lacey watches THROUGH THE MIRROR. Foreshadowing! Also, the boyfriend officially dies the moment a glob of blood bubbles up through his back with a hilarious “blub” sound. Kind of like that sound effect they use in “Ghostbusters” with the ectoplasm.
So twenty years later, Willy, who is now a retarded mute and apparently served no time in juvie, and Lacey, who is now married and saddled with a kid at the ripe old age of 23, live on their Aunt and Uncle’s farm where everyone eats in a kitchen full of unvarnished cabinets. Lacey, who clearly never learned to let the past stay in the past, becomes hypnotized by the sight of her husband Jake carving a roasted chicken with a large butcher knife. Is this the first time in twenty years she’s seen a knife? Doesn’t she live on a farm? Anyway, also during this dinner, for no reason whatsoever, Lacey receives a letter from her mother with whom she has not had contact since the infamous night of murder. Her mother begs to see her and Willy before she dies, but unfortunately for her, this subplot will eventually go nowhere. What all this does, however, is trigger Lacey to have a nightmare which prompts her husband to enact a plan to rid her of this traumatic event once and for all. Jake’s plan involves (1) revisiting the scene of the crime, (2) Lacey confronting her mother, and (3) Lacey seeking psychological treatment. For all the hoopla, he only manages two out of the three, and considering the importance placed on the mother early on in the movie you would think they might’ve cut the psychologist storyline from the film, but no.
So cut to a psychologist who treats his patients while sitting IN FRONT OF A MIRROR. Are you detecting the theme yet? Considering she’s gone to all this trouble to see the shrink (which believe me most likely involved days of wrangling with her insurance provider over co-pays) she is awfully vague when discussing the defining event of her life. To get over her reticence, the doctor places her under hypnosis where she talks in a goofy voice which is most likely supposed to be the voice of the title character.
As though her schizoid breakdown in the therapist’s office wasn’t enough, Jake drags her to the house where the murder was committed. You can tell Lacey is falling apart emotionally at this point by the way in which she smokes her cigarettes. Conveniently, the family currently living there is putting the house on the market, so Lacey and Jake take advantage of this opportunity to poke around the house.
MEANWHILE, back at the farm, Willy, who clearly has not been trained as a retarded mute, is feeding the animals in the barn when a local slutty friend of Lacey’s stops by for some eggs. Despite the loud warnings of the animals, who are going ape shit the moment she walks in, Lacey’s friend proceeds to come on to the grown man with obvious emotional issues. How does Willy respond to her advances you ask? By strangling her of course! That is until he LOOKS IN A MIRROR. Jesus. This whole sequence was very “Of Mice and Men.” I was waiting for him to kill her then ask “why lady stop talking?” Anyway, the mirror stops him (or maybe tried to make him, who knows) from killing the girl, who runs from the barn and I guess never tells anyone what happened because we never hear from her again. Maybe she was embarrassed about getting rejected by a mute.
Over at the house of childhood murder, Lacey stumbles onto the mirror that witnessed the crime and begins to see the deceased drunken lover rising from the bed and walking towards her. Like any normal person, Lacey begins smashing the mirror with a chair, which amazingly enough, doesn’t really upset the current owners of the house. She doesn’t even offer to replace it or reimburse them for it. She and her husband instead take it and all its pieces back to the farm so Jake can teach her a lesson. He is tired of all this traumatic flashback bullshit and doesn’t believe that she saw a murderous ghost in the mirror. Hey Jake, cut the girl some slack. She witnessed a murder at the age of three! Oh, and by the way, it was revealed that the mirror came with the house and the owners never once took it down or moved it from the spot where it was placed TWENTY YEARS AGO. The crux of Jake’s plan to rehabilitate his increasingly high strung wife is to glue all the pieces back together and stick the mirror on the kitchen wall. But wait! One shard is unaccounted for, and after all this set-up, the action finally gets into motion.
What proceeds is a number of scenes in which various shards of the mirror receive extreme close-ups, followed by a ghost with respiratory problems either killing people, or forcing people to kill themselves.
I won’t give everything away, but there are a couple of fun, and satisfying, death sequences. The thing that makes this movie worth watching is when Lacey finally gets possessed by the Boogeyman and goes all kinds of Linda Blair crazy on her husband, a priest, and Willy. Also, note how the director flat out steals the image of the Amityville house, windows for eyes and all, when the shit hits the fan. In fact, this movie owes a lot to “Amityville” and “The Exorcist.” My major complaint with the film is the title, because it is really misleading. It should’ve been called “Ghost Mirror,” or something along those lines.
“The Boogeyman” is best viewed in the company of others who will most likely laugh at the same scenes you will. There’s something amusingly charming about a movie that tries to scare you by flashing to pieces of a broken mirror and punctuating it with a few keys of early ‘80’s synthesizer music. I will leave you with this gem of an exchange from the final act of the movie, which occurs right before Jake discovers his wife has been possessed by a 3×3 inch square of shattered mirror:
(Oh, one last thing, Lacey is standing at the stove with her back to Jake, cooking dinner while people are dying around her.)
Jake: “Lacey, what are you doing?”
Lacey: “I’m fixing supper dear.”
Jake: “Lacey, Uncle Ernest and Aunt Helen are dead!”
Lacey: “Oh, that makes dinner for four then. Father Reilly, you’re staying aren’t you? Would you be a doll and fix me a drink?”
(For the record, she never gets that drink.)
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