The Boogey Man
The Boogey Man
R | 07 November 1980 (USA)
The Boogey Man Trailers

A young girl witnesses the brutal murder of her stepfather at the hands of her brother, by mirror reflection. Years later, when the mirror is accidentally shattered, a dark and vengeful curse is unleashed on the family, and anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with its shards falls victim to heinous murder.

Reviews
Cleveronix A different way of telling a story
PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.
Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Sam Panico When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend - who wore her stockings on his face - make out. Their mother was so upset, she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn't work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that's only the first few minutes of this one! Now we're in the present and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the director of the film Ulli Lommel and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna's real-life brother)on a farm. Willy's never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn't talk and often steals knives.Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that she has face her fears and go back to her childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes crazy and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitate pitchforks, rip off Lacey's shirt and impale young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You've taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying too, right?This being 1980, Jake decides to bring a priest in to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror's control over her.That's when the best solution comes up - let's just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son happily exiting a graveyard. Oh no - a piece of the mirror is on her son's shoe!I was wondering where so many of the plot points of this movie would go and they're often lost as if this were a foreign film. But it isn't! So I did a little digging into the director, Ulli Lommel.Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder's surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director's films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who became involved in his films Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.Seriously - a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cut her own throat with scissors, a child get his neck broken and a priest get his face melted? The acting is horrible - but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people's eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.
InjunNose "The Boogey Man" won't change your life, but if you've got eighty minutes to fill on a lazy summer evening, you could do a lot worse. The story revolves around pretty, charismatic Suzanna Love and her brother, who suddenly find themselves tormented by memories of a traumatic past. When they were children, the brother killed their mother's abusive lover...who comes back to haunt the siblings in just about the oddest conceivable manner. Derivative in spots, with a few subpar performances, but Love ably carries this relentlessly eerie film; horror icon John Carradine has a cameo as a psychiatrist who tries to convince our heroine that there is a rational explanation for the increasingly strange events in her life. Not the stuff of classics, but pretty good of its type.
Rainey Dawn Sadly I do recall seeing this film in the 1980s after *trying* to re-watch recently. I forgot all about see this film back then, now I recall it. The only reason I *tried* watching it was for John Carradine - I like him. The film is terrible, stupid but Carradine is good as always.Nothing to see here but some cheap, cheesy murders - if you like that sort of thing thing this film might be up your alley! I'm not into that so this film did nothing for me.Why give this film 2 stars? Number one reason: John Carradine, number two reason it held my interest a little bit in the beginning but after the first half hour I really lost all interest - it started out fine and kept going down hill from there. The idea behind the film could be fine but needed some major work on the script to make this mess work well.2/10
ModKuraika Dismal tone, terrible effects (for that time), cheesy acting. One of the worst films I have ever witnessed and never wish to view again. Seems like the film was made on a pocket change budget, I will give the director credit for trying, but this is a gigantic failure of epic proportions. Not scary, nor intimidating, nor intriguing, nor artistic in any sense of the terms. I urge everyone to steer clear away from this garbage. I wanted to stop the film as soon as I saw the stabbing (which looked like he was stabbing a pillow) scene but my tenacity to always watch from start to finish overcame me. I regret doing so.The movie depicts a little girl cutting her brother free from his binds after their mother's lover tied him up. The boy then murders the man in front of a mirror, and the mirror is haunted by the man he killed. Loving this so far, eh? Over time a shard of the mirror causes weird phenomenon among those it is closest around, ending with their impossible and cheesy demises. In the end, they run it under a faucet after a priest has blessed it, turning it into holy water, and apparently ridding the curse from the shard or some other such nonsense.But wait... Earlier in the film, a boy had stepped on an alternative piece of the mirror and it got stuck on his shoe, and at the end of the film, it lets up. As they walk away into the bleak conclusion, the other piece unconvincingly glows red. Dun dun dun, I guess.This movie is terrible, I hated everything about it, the premise, the acting, the effects, the ending, everything. It saves itself from a 1/10 only because... while it is dreadful, it is original.