The Good

An interesting horror movie that does it's best to be better than it is.

The Bad

Too many music video, post production FX hurt what could have been a much stronger film.

Boogeyman is one of those movies that starts off with a jolt and then continues to jolt the audience for the rest of the movie until things get resolved. Tim (Barry Watson) comes home to deal with his past and forced to confront the thing that terrifies him the most, the Boogeyman. This is essentially the beginning and end of this story. This movie is filled with false starts, red herrings and every other thing that would normally really hurt a horror movie for me. However, the end of the movie, well I should say the last 25 minutes are where things get interesting. It seems like the screenwriters were really doing their best to try something new, but sadly this movie is a case of having too much too late.

If you like horror movies, especially the newer horror movies that almost seem to rely on quick cutting and the like, then I would certainly recommend seeing this film. If you are more of a purist and you like your scares not so set up, than I would say view Boogeyman with the fast forward button pressed, and stop when the main character gets to the hotel at the end.

Features

No extras came with this UMD.

Video

Widescreen. This movie takes up the entire screen on the PSP player. I was really surprised at how clear the picture was, mainly because this is one of those dark horror movies. There were times, especially during the wide shots, where the characters would be deep in the foreground and they tended to get fuzzy. Other than these brief forgivable moments, this film did have a freshness to it's look. There were too many music video type features in this movie's presentation, but I honestly saw the film making an effort to try and not be what it ultimately became.

Audio

Stereo. I think the audio on this UMD was better utilized than any of the other audio I have heard in my PSP experience thus far. There wasn't anything that special about it, but for a horror movie you can't go wrong watching it on this player. First of all, the jolts that happen are 100% more jolting because the speakers are embedded in your ears. Even when you close your eyes (which I did) there is no escaping the sounds that you hear. Yes, a lot of this movie is cut like a music video, yet when it wants to, Boogeyman serves up scares like the best of them.

Package

The gray front cover image of the hand coming out of the closet is great. This minimalist approach really sets this movie apart from other present day horror movies that try and utilize imagery that makes no sense. The back continues this overcast look with a description of the film and some technical specs for the PSP player. I was a fan of this movie's artwork when it initially screened in the theater, and I am even more of a fan of it for the UMD packaging.

Final Word

I really think the filmmakers missed the boat here. They had an interesting idea and the lore of the "boogeyman" is something that is ripe to be done well in cinema. I think that director Stephen T. Kay essentially took a very lazy way out. There was an opportunity here to make a genuinely scary film, but the director chose to telegraph all the horror so that it wasn't that scary. Watching a film like this one can tell that so many other factors are at work, it becomes almost impossible not to spend most of the movie bracing yourself to be scared. When you are doing that how scary is the film going to be?

I liked Boogeyman, I thought it was interesting in parts but ultimately it gets consumed by it's shortcomings.

Boogeyman was released February 4, 2005.