The Boogey Man (1980) Revisited – Horror Movie Review (2024)

Folks, I just got done digging through the dustiest, crustiest, mustiest box of 80s schlock that I could get my hands on and… Well, I found something I needed to share with you guys. Now, the art of making an original horror film with unique ideas, clever storytelling, and engaging characters to bounce off a scary antagonist can be damning if not extremely difficult. And this movie is proof that sometimes it can be TOO difficult because it has none of those things. 1980’s The Boogey Man (watch it HERE) is the story of a pair of siblings as they battle with the trauma of their childhood and the return of an evil entity that once possessed them in a blood-soaked trance. The movie was written, directed, and produced by German actor Ulli Lommel and starred his then wife (Suzanna Love) and her brother Nick Love as the film’s main protagonists. It focuses on themes of childhood trauma, suppressed rage, and the power of faith- while somehow managing to say almost nothing about any of those topics. Truly, it’s kind of remarkable how much isn’t resolved by the end of this movie. Stay tuned.

Okay, so if you haven’t heard of this movie- don’t worry- it’s not an original version of the also forgettable 2005 film or the much more memorable 2023 film. This movie is just a one hour and twenty-minute standalone science-fiction slasher which did spawn a couple of sequels that even less people have heard of. Honestly, I can’t really speak to the quality of these movies as I have not seen them. But either way, today we’re going to revisit this movie and see for ourselves whether the past can truly never die.

The Boogey Man opens with what will immediately become an increasingly ridiculous attempt to recreate John Carpenter’s iconic opening sequence from Halloween. We get a long, eerie tracking shot that follows from the exterior of the house into the living room. We see an attractive woman on the couch entertaining a drunk man while her two-young children (Lacy and Willy) watch from the front porch while they’re locked outside in cold. Pretty f*cked up. Although, I must say that I quite liked the very late 70s style for the opening score. It’s kind of going hard. The children’s mother is clearly more interested in her guest than the kids, and the movie gives us the harshest possible example of that by showing the mother let her boyfriend tie up and gag her 7-year-old son to stop him from interrupting their private time. Now, mind you this is just the first 10 minutes of the movie, so I was sitting there watching it like “oh, sh*t! This movie might be kind of intense.” but then by minute 11 I’m back to laughing at the clear attempts to rip off Halloween.

So, here’s the deal. Lacy sees that Willy had been tied up, so she goes to the kitchen and grabs a giant ass knife. She uses the knife to cut Willy out of the ropes but that’s when Willy decides to take that thing into his mom’s room and stab her boyfriend to death while his mother watches in horror from the reflection of a mirror. That mirror comes back into play eventually.

Automatically we’re brought into the present day where Lacy and Willy are in their 20s and Lacy is married with a family of her own. Willy is living with Lacy and the family and working on their farm, but we learn that he hasn’t been able to talk since the murder all those years ago. With the past seemingly behind them, the siblings receive a letter from their mother- who they also haven’t seen in many years. Mom claims that the doctor says she doesn’t have a lot of time left and that’s when Lacy and Willy’s trauma kicks up to haunt them again. What makes it funny though is that in order to show us the trauma of the one night- they just keep flashing back to the same footage we saw literally 10 minutes earlier. They just splice in clips from the previous scene. It’s truly funny.

Now is probably a good time to mention that the dialogue in this movie, and the writing in general is hilarious. It sounds like it was written with the least amount of detail possible on purpose and there are a lot of examples of this. The mom wrote these kids a letter and she basically says she’s dying soon and she wants to see her kids one last time- and Lacy’s husband thinks it might actually be a good idea because it may help Lacy overcome her past and put it behind her. To which lacy agrees- but then… they never do it. Like they START to do it- Lacy’s husband (whose name is Jake by the way) suggests that they drive back to their hometown and visit their mom as well as visit the house they used to live in- which is now owned by new residents. They do go visit the house, but they never make it to the mom. And they never mention… why? Like, what happened? We never hear another line about the mom again in the whole movie. It is supposed to be the source of their trauma and the movie sets it up to be such, but then they all just forgot about it. Well, I didn’t forget, Ulli. Where is this woman?

While visiting the childhood home, Lacy begins having one of her trauma attacks when she sees the mirror that reflected Willy killing the man. She shatters the mirror out of ear which alarms the family living in the house. Lacy and Jake take off and for some reason Jake decides that he needs to bring the shattered mirror and all of the pieces with him. All but one.

Now, in classic slasher fashion- you got to have one or two scenes where random nothing characters that aren’t connected to the main cast in a big way get picked off. This is meant to entertain us and tide us over on the guts while the main conflict is building up. In this movie… They actually do some pretty interesting things with that tradition. Again, this movie is NOT original. It’s basically Halloween meets The Exorcist with less imagination and significantly less talent behind the scenes. HOWEVER, one piece of the mirror ends up being left at the house which is where we learn (say it with me folks) the mirror is evil. It’s unclear what the entity is as we never see it but it breathes and definitely glows orange. The scene where the entity kills the kids that live in the house is pretty good slasher stuff though. There’s a scene where he makes one girl cut her own throat with scissors, one kid gets this hilariously cartoonified death in the window-

And the other one like… gets slapped by a different mirror. Okay I lied; this isn’t interesting at all. But how about the other random kill scene here the mirror gets stuck to Lacy’s son’s shoe and the reflection causes these random beachgoers to die horrible deaths? Talk about a KISS-KABOB.

I’d like to just see a movie of mysterious final destination style deaths but instead this is just a brief break from the bore-fest we’re meant to be invested in. The problem is that these disposable characters that die to fill runtime are MUCH more interesting than the main characters. They all lack basic motivations and unique attributes which make everyone so 2D that it’s distracting. Also, I don’t know why but the number of times we cut to Jake cutting the same exact piece of chicken is so funny to me that for a second, I almost enjoyed it. They spend most of the movie’s runtime on this chicken getting carved I swear to God. The chicken gets more screentime than the Boogey Man. That is not a joke. Also, I don’t know what the hell is supposed to be going on with Willy in like 90% of this movie. His character has the most hilarious reaction shots to supposed awful things happening just offscreen. This shot is so good.

It all culminates in Jake putting the mirror back together piece by piece (because that’s how it works) and hanging it over their dinner table for some reason? The mirror then reignites the evil and begins picking off the main crew one by one.

Listen, at this point we’re at the end of the movie. Like, there is less than 10 minutes left and we’ve got almost no information as to what the hell thing even is. At first, we think that maybe Willy is just a creepy little freak. He kills his mom’s boyfriend (even though we don’t blame home) but then he like doesn’t talk and he almost kills this neighbor girl for some reason, but then we think it’s the mirror possessing people, but then the mirror has like a mind and being of its own so basically nobody knows what the f*ck is going on here and we’ve only got a few minutes to explain this sh*t.

And wouldn’t ya know it- we get no information. The mirror’s underwhelming killing spree takes out two completely meaningless characters off screen for Jake to find the bodies after the fact. But the crime scene does look awesome. And that’s kind of a perfect example of every aspect of this movie- good ideas, interesting themes, and some inspired visuals that really help it out- but ultimately just adds up to nothing. Lacy and Willy don’t die and neither does Jake, but in the last 3 minutes of the movie- Lacy get’s possessed by a piece of the mirror and as quick as you can scream it’s pretty much over when Lacy pulls the glass off of her and seemingly defeats the evil? It all happens so fast, you guys.

What we’ve got here is a swing-and-a-miss attempt to capitalize on the unprecedented success of John Carpenter’s Halloween but with a crew that didn’t have the experience, the talent, or the money to pull it off. There are some moments that I can have some fun with particularly if I’m leaning into the “So bad it’s good” perspective- But overall, this movie is just Halloween and The Exorcist‘s less interesting and kind of smelly lovechild. 3/10 I would not waste your time.

Two previous episodes ofRevisitedcan be seen below. To see more of our shows, head over to theJoBlo Horror Originals channel– and subscribe while you’re at it!