Boogeyman film review

certificate_15

BOOGEYMAN

Boogeyman is your standard, by the numbers, scare-em up thriller which wouldn't know an original idea if it leapt out from a cupboard and screamed "boo!". From the haunted house straight out of Psycho, to the location/time traveling portal from Nightmare On Elm Street, Boogeyman wheels out all the stock shock clichés. Its wafer thin plot is punctuated with loud crashes, shadowy lighting, eerie music and a fixation with door handles. Imagination is far more effective than anything a computer can create and certainly the age-old myth of the boogeyman lurking in the dark is far more frightening than anything conjured up here.

Early on the film's central character Tim (Barry Watson) declares, "This is going to get ugly." Even by this premature stage there's enough evidence to prove him right. It begins with the whole, dark and stormy night opening. Then there's the setting: an isolated country home closely modeled on Hitchcock's famous house in Psycho. After which we meet the then eight-year-old Tim, who is lying in bed, paralyzed by fear as the wind and his imagination convince him his room houses an intruder. His dad (Charles Mesure) tries to console him, telling him the tale of a boogeyman hiding in his room was "just a story. He's not real." If so, then who is it that emerges from the closet and suddenly snatches dad?

The story jumps forward fifteen years and we meet the grown up Tim. He is still haunted by the events surrounding his father's disappearance, Even after time spent in a children's psychiatric hospital, he can't so much as look at a cupboard without having a flashback. One of Boogeyman's failings is that it offers Watson very little to do other than fix a permanent look of worry to his face. There are few moments of respite for Tim, who spends almost the entire film eyeing up shut doors, then plucking up the courage to open them. Watson offers an extensive repertoire of furrowed brows and anxious looks, but beyond a point even he runs out.