This week…
BOOGEYMAN (2005)
Barry Watson, Emily Deschanel, Lucy Lawless

Please bear with me while I tell you how I ended up watching Boogeyman.

It was all my daughter’s idea. Every time we go to the video store, she walks right past the kid’s films and bears down on the horror flicks. Curiously, she does the same thing at the record store – she is always able to see past the flowery packaging of the pop princess releases, and head to the dusty denizens of the old school Heavy Metal aisle, the land of Iron Maiden*, Black Sabbath, and any other band that features skulls, ghouls, and serpents prominently on their album covers.

She especially like skulls with snakes slithering out of the eyes. If she starts liking the music, we may have a problem.

Anyway, Boogeyman was a bit of a compromise. She really wanted House Of Wax, which carries an R rating, while Boogeyman’s rating is merely PG-13. And as much as I want to see Paris Hilton get hacked to bits by a crazed lunatic, I'm not going to let Sydney see an R-rated horror film until she's at least six.

I'm not one of those trying-too-hard-to-be-hip parents who ends up causing psychological harm to my child. My finely honed instincts say it will be another year before she's ready to see The Skank get shanked. Like good scotch, it’s best appreciated when you’re mature enough to handle it.

My wife is pretty much against our daughter viewing any horror films. Last spring we watched The Grudge, over her objections. For a few weeks afterward, Sydney had some nightmares and woke up crying in the middle of the night. Were these bad dreams related to The Grudge? Maybe, but they could have been caused by viewing The Big Comfy Couch too. I'm trying to create an aura of plausible deniability. It's not easy.

“I’m getting up every night to comfort her because of the movie you made her see,” said my wife.

“Really, we can’t discuss this rationally until you’ve had a full night’s sleep,” I said. “Get back to me when both of you are sleeping through the night.”

The doghouse has satellite TV and a bar fridge, in case you were wondering.

We cued up Boogeyman, and my wife, resigned to more sleepless nights the way Tibetans are resigned to more brutal oppression from the Chinese, left us to our fright fest.

There was no need to be concerned this time. In a nutshell, Boogeyman is the lamest horror film I’ve ever seen.

Our hero Tim (Barry Watson) has been plagued by a shadowy figure who has been living in his closet for the last fifteen years, ever since he was eight. It causes a few awkward moments, especially when someone asks him to grab their coat from the… (cue eerie music) closet. Tim stands there, trembling, with brutal flashbacks in his mind of the night the boogeyman took his dad. Then the person gets tired of waiting and says “Well I guess I’ll just get it myself.”

I suspect Tim smells vaguely of stale urine, most of the time.

Tim’s mother (the unusually unsultry, woefully miscast Lucy Lawless) dies, and the orphaned Tim must come to terms with her death. On the advice of his psychiatrist, he returns to his childhood home to face his demons, as it were.

Question: have we arrived at the fiftieth anniversary of Psychiatrists Giving Horrendously Bad Advice In Horror Films? Are we there yet? Just wondering…

Tim’s return to the house is a Very Bad Idea, telegraphed by all kinds of clunky foreshadowing, including the raven that flies into the windshield of his car. Good grief, why don’t you just have a plane sky-write YOU ARE DOOMED in 100-foot-high letters and be done with it?

His visit engenders countless tired and clichéd red herrings for the audience.

Ooh, what’s behind that door?
Well, nothing.

Eee, what’s under that bed?
Slowly now…oh, hey, nothing.

And so on.

A breath of fresh air arrives in the form of Tim’s childhood friend Kate (the beguiling Emily Deschanel, sister of the enticing Zooey, who you may have seen in Elf. Damn those Deschanel sisters are the spicy meatballs, hey? I wish I hadn’t sworn to cut down on my hack tendencies, because would I love to tell hack joke #1109 right now. It’s so filthy.

It becomes apparent that Kate has a wee crush on Tim. Tim’s either gay or a bit of a blockhead, so he fails to notice her come-ons, and sends Kate on her way. Stupid, stupid Tim! Hey, why don’t you go off to Brokeback Mountain and see if Heath Ledger can quit you, you Deschanel-spurning freak! You suck!

Call me a romantic, but I really wanted Tim and Kate to get all hot and bothered and then have a (filthy hack joke #235). Oh well.

From there, Boogeyman just plods along, like a doomed prisoner going to the gallows. Tim runs around in a frenzy, some people he knows get killed, some people he knows survive, and in the end he gets rid of the boogeyman by…striking him repeatedly with a baseball bat.

Yes, that’s the best example of the creative bankruptcy that plagued this film. Yikes, who greenlighted this thing? I need to thank them.

The kid enjoyed it though. She said it was way scarier than The Grudge. But she’s only four, what does she know?

*I’ve never heard an Iron Maiden song from start to finish. But once, circa 1983, I heard a snippet of an Iron Maiden song, and it has never left my head, since for me, it sums up the whole heavy metal genre better than anything else:

Run to the hills!
Run for your liiife!

Run to the hills!
Run for your liiiife!

Run to the hills!
Run for your liiiife!

Run to the hills!
Run…. for… your…liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife!
(Close with massive, screaming guitars and crashing drums)

I think it might be called Run To The Hills. I'll check.