The Boogey Man (1980) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by kat🕷 ★★★ 1

  Instead of lucky shards, you’re getting a killer with a stocking over his head. Or is that the epitome of happiness? 🤔

• Review by The Horror of Marna Larsen ★★★★★ 3

  So, okay. You ready for this? Pieces of a broken mirror that this woman's ex-mother's ex-lover's murdered ghost murdered by her mute brother for tying him up for watching them do it, fall out of the mirror or gets on a toddler's shoe or flies at someone's face and it kills people...directly with powers that cause their heads to melt -

  Wait. You are already confusing this movie with the last one where pew pew rays shoot out of someone's eyes and someone's head melts.

  Oh yeah. You are right. In this one, it does that a few times but mostly, it just tinkerbells onto people's faces from a distance (love that song) before driving sharp implements into jugulars and…

• Review by Blake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★½

  "The Boogey Man" is a 1980 horror film directed by Ulli Lommel. The film borderlines on a slasher film, especially from the start of the film's narrative, but then as it progresses forward it formulates into a bit of a supernatural or possession build. Honestly, a humorous way to put it is that if we turned this film into a simple sentence, "Halloween" (1978) would be the noun and "The Amityville Horror" (1979) would be the verb for all intents and purposes when describing this thing. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, maybe to an unimpressed grouping of audiences at the time who gave it lukewarm reviews at the time, but as things grow within the camp of…

• Review by ELECTRICWIZARDx ★★★

  This film was sh*t, but also it was amazing.

  A possessed mirror that bore witness to a child committed murder comes back to haunt the family of the murdered and anyone that associates with them. The murderer a mute, the mirror haunting the victims via shards. Red and green lights. Priests. Shard-eyed final posession. Glass soled shoe. Pulsating score.

  I'm not sure why this film was made. I'm not sure why 88 included it in their slasher collection. I'm not sure why it was included on the video nasties list (though I'm not sure why any film is included on the video nasties list, and perhaps I'm desensitised enough that dead children in films make me feel nothing), I'm not…

• Review by Slig001 ★★★½

  A real surreal slasher flick from director Ulli Lommel that takes the broken mirror superstition and creates a whole narrative out of it. The film begins with a man being murdered by a young boy; the crime glimpsed in the mirror by his sister. Years later the sister, still haunted by the memory, returns to her family home, breaks the mirror and unleashes the evil. The Bogeyman is a film that makes no sense and yet somehow works on it's own terms. Ulli Lommel directs with a real sense of seriousness. This broken mirror really weighs heavy on lead actress Suzanna Love, as we spend the first half of the movie exploring her trauma and grief. The second half is…

• Review by Bleeding Skull 2

  If you love to see haunted mirrors eviscerate priests, this is your movie. A collaboration between director Lommel and writer-star Suzanna Love, THE BOOGEY MAN is a classic haunted house story coated in the awkward pizzazz of a low-budget slasher. With telekinetic gore-slayings and surprisingly perverted twists, the movie plays out like AMITYVILLE HORROR meets HALLOWEEN as directed by Lucio Fulci’s third cousin who never graduated high school. Add the finest bedroom synthesizer soundtrack of all time and you’re guaranteed 80 minutes of gentle slasher angst. (Joseph A. Ziemba)

• Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  A horror pastiche, taking everything they could from popular horror films from the previous decade to create a solid and surreal slasher. The soundtrack immediately tells you in the opening that this film is going to be a rip-off, but then it surprises you by ripping off multiple films in order to get to its bizarre climax. If it were made 40 years later, it would be hailed for its classic horror references; being made a year after at least one of the films it's taking from, it's clearly an attempted cash-in. That said, I enjoyed it in part because its storytelling was decent for a lower budget horror flick and in part because of that sense of trend-exploitation. Thank you for being shameless, filmmakers.

• Review by Michael501 📺 ★½

  1980 In Review - November

  A young woman is haunted by a piece of broken mirror possessed by the spirit of her mother's lover.

  An interesting take on the slasher genre that overall doesn’t quite work. Having your characters possessed by a shard of broken glass ultimately comes off looking very silly. Also it does seem like the writer director took elements from some other horror films. Nearly everything here is borrowed from other more superior films. The arbitrary title seems like an attempt to cash in on the success of Halloween (even more so when you see a child holding a butcher knife at the beginning). The incredibly pointless inclusion of the priest who comes to investigate the strange happenings is an obvious nod to The Exorcist. Even the house itself looked from the outside like the Amityville house.
  Apart from a couple of bizarre yet amusing deaths this is pretty much unwatchable.

• Review by 🎃 Kyle 🎃 Johnson 🎃 ★★★

  Son, you got a panty on your head.

  Do love a syrupy slow slasher that lets the lighting and music do so much of the work, that gets loose and goofy with the supernatural elements, that drifts between shlocky and spooky and silly without breaking stride. And it’s just hard not toappreciate dressing up one of the main characters in some fly overalls for the bulk of the movie. Denim drip immaculate.

• Review by belial_carboni ★★★½ 4

  Ulli Lommel's supernatural shlockfest is an appetizing 80s horror delight. Feeling akin to Superstition it strikes a great balance of B movie madness, euro-horror and cozy paranormal prestige. And much like Superstition it has an underlying 80s slasher narrative running through it's cheesy veins. Top it off with a sprinkle of dream logic and you've got a tasty nonsensical video nasty!

  The mirror is back for revenge!! After witnessing a child committed murder a mirror becomes possessed and begins tormenting anyone associated with said murder. I think? A doozy of a plot that perfectly fits within this unhinged spectacle of cinema. I'm a sucker for these ambitious and convoluted 80s horror plots and this one is all over the place!…

• Review by SpOoky Lukey Video 👻📼🎃 ★★★★ 7

  A mish-mash-meltdown of Halloween clone, European art house and haunted mirror shenanigans. Rural American locales meet hyper-stylized kill sequences and twinkling, neon-drenched visual effects. It feels like the kind of film that would be lost to the sands of time if it hadn’t gained notoriety by landing itself on the video nasties list. It’s certainly not the greatest video nasty, but if sparkly, supernatural slashers are your thing (like me), it may be your jam.

• Review by Mondo Cinema ★★★ 3

  letterboxd.com/mondocinema/list/a-stab-in-the-dark-mondo-cinemas-slasher/

  A Review of The Boogeyman
  OR
  An Amityville Exorcism on Halloween

  "The most terrifying nightmare of childhood is about to return!"

  The Boogeyman is a flick from the early days of the slasher film boom created in the wake of the runaway success of Halloween
  While being a well-shot film with some great SFX work, The Boogeyman suffers from trying to be a copycat version of too many movies, so much so that the plot is almost incoherent.
  The film starts with a prologue, two kids Lacey and Willy, who are subjected to physical and mental abuse from their alcoholic mother and her sleazy boyfriend, (This dude is f*cking creepy!) after being tied up and beaten one too many…