bkoganbing John Carradine was in some of the greatest films ever made as a supporting player. But that sonorous speaking voice was forever in demand for various horror flicks and he willingly obliged. Just as soon as my paycheck clears I'll speak anything you want.In The Boogey Man however Carradine's penchant for scenery chewing when he knew he was in crap was not even utilized in The Boogey Man. Instead he plays a psychiatrist listening to the tales of horror from a woman who has unleashed the spirit of The Boogey Man who when he was flesh and blood was murdered when he was doing the deed with her mother.This one is not even for John Carradine fans who like to hear his voice. He's dull and the rest of the cast emote on the level of a grade school play.

Vomitron_G Well, if you're a die-hard horror fan, then watching "The Boogeyman" is worth it. But also, there's some serious stuff wrong with this movie. It seems like Ulli Lommel watched more than one good horror movie before he made this, but he didn't quite know how to make one himself. Here are some random movies that crossed my mind while seeing "The Boogeyman": "Halloween" (1978) (the opening-scene), "The Amityville Horror" (1979) (man, that one house almost looked like a replica), "The Exorcist" (1973) (throw a bit of possession and a priest in the mix) and "Suspiria" (1977) (those colourful lighting techniques towards the end). All good movies, but "The Boogeyman" is such an oddball mixture, that it's even hard to pinpoint where exactly it all went wrong. There's pacing problems, the suspense build-up feels wrong somehow and there are definitely some huge, inexplicable leaps of logic.But the mirror-angle was pretty cool and original. And most killings are a lot of fun! I've never seen a girl first rip her shirt to shreds with a pair of scissors for the sole sake of revealing her breasts, and then plant the scissors in her neck in a quite bloody fashion. And what about that 'longest kiss you've ever seen'... Pretty hilarious! And the ending is a colourful hoot too.Whatever happened to Ulli Lommel? Where did it go wrong? I've seen two movies by him now and at least "The Boogeyman" was entertaining (albeit, very likely not for the reasons Lommel imagined at the time). But one of his recent efforts, "The Tomb" (2007) was one of the worst pieces of crap – pardon my French – I've seen in the last few years. Anyway, to all (younger) horror fans who are ready to go back in time a bit and delve further into obscurity, "The Boogeyman" is one you might want to pick up at a certain point. Although there's much better stuff to be discovered too, of course.

Mr_Ectoplasma "The Boogeyman" is a 1980 horror film that focuses on Lacey and Willy, two siblings who grew up with a careless mother who let her boyfriend abuse them. One evening, after being hog-tied to his bed, Willy breaks free and stabs his mother's boyfriend to death with a kitchen knife, while Lacey watches the murder from the bedroom mirror's reflection. Twenty years later, Lacey lives in a desolate but beautiful farmhouse with her husband and son, and Willy, who has been mute ever since the childhood, whom lives with them and works as a handyman on the property. Both siblings are still haunted by the event, and when Lacey visits her childhood home in order to "face" her fears, she witnesses a horrific apparition in the same bedroom mirror, and shatters it in fear. Her husband takes the broken mirror back with them hoping to further Lacey's recovery, but wherever a piece of the mirror falls, a savage murder seems to occur; could the man's soul be trapped in the shattered glass?Before Ulli Lommel began his hopeless streak of directing cheap, all-around poorly constructed direct-to-video horror flicks in the late 1990s and 2000s (which I may say from experience are very, very horrible films), he scripted and directed this bizarre little feature in 1980. Not to say this film is a masterpiece by any means, but in comparison with Mr. Lommel's more recent work, this is quite a charmer. It heavily borrows elements from other horror successes of the time (the score is eerily similar to Carpenter's "Halloween" as are the point-of-view shots from our invisible villain, and the farmhouse is a dead-ringer for the infamous house in "The Amityville Horror"), but despite that, there are some creative things going on in this.The entire scenario involving the mirror, which is the crux of the plot, is actually really inventive; in other words, I've never seen any idea quite like it, so I appreciate the originality. On the flip side, many of the plot successions are clunky. Transitions are a little too spry and some of the most important events in the film are left completely unexplained - Why in god's name is there a ghost in the mirror? Is it in fact Willy and Lacey's mother's dead boyfriend? Why, at the end of the film, does Lacey become possessed, levitate, and have a piece of glass stuck to her eye, while all others who come in contact with the mirror are simply murdered by an invisible being? Why do they keep the shattered mirror up in their house in the first place? Many of these things are very loosely plotted, unexplained, and require a little interpretation for one's self - you sort of have to accept the faults in their glorious eccentricity.I do applaud some of the death scenes, though, because every good '80s slasher flick requires at least one or two memorable deaths. This one has a few, but most memorable are the scissor self-mutilation and the two teenagers who turn into a shish kabob of affection in their car. It's all rather cheesy, but this is what the vast majority of '80s slasher movies were about. Lommel's direction and camera-work is, well - a little bizarre. Attention to seemingly mundane details is given a lot of screen time, and the editing is odd in the sense that many sequences in the film will cut to another scene rather abruptly for no apparent reason. Then it will cut back just as abruptly. Not that this is entirely unusual for low-budget horror movies, but something about the way it's translated on screen in this film is just... weird. The acting is a mixed bag, but Suzanna Love is the highlight of the film as the leading lady; she plays the character well without overdoing anything. The rest of the cast is pretty typical by '80s horror standards, with a notable John Carradine hamming it up as a kooky psychologist.Overall, "The Boogeyman" is a peculiar little horror movie. There are some original ideas at work here, but it seems like there was a lack of development that left the film feeling clunky and a little bit off kilter. It's not a film that most people of today's generation will find any merit in, but for those who appreciate/enjoy the horror films of the 1980s, then this is an enjoyable watch. It makes for a weird but oddly amusing experience - emphasis on the odd. 6/10.

Aaron1375 I saw this one when I was young and it had some elements in it that were effective. Overall, though I would have to say it is a wasted effort. Basically, it is a horror movie like most...one of those that had something going for it and it just lacks something or has something that turns what could have been a good horror into just another in a very long line of bad horror movies. The story has some weird sex pervert killed in front of a mirror or something. I think some time passes and the girl who had severe issues with him sees his image in the mirror, she freaks out which is understandable and smashes said mirror into many many pieces. This is where the terror begins as now where there is a shard of this mirror the dude scene in the mirror can now reach out from beyond the grave and kill people and seeing as how this movie is four years older one can not say they copied this from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" though that is easily the superior film. This film has some good kills and such, but it plays out very slowly and the whole thing with the guy being a sex pervert is just unnecessary and adds nothing to this film but unneeded sexual abuse kind of stuff. Had they made it where the guy was maybe just an abuser or something and focused on the kills it would probably had been a better movie. Still, this one apparently did well enough to spawn a sequel.