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Flight Centre Specials
Bad to the bone
Nils van der Linden
Posted Thu, 12 May 2005
Remember the boogeyman? The monster who would come to get you once your eyes were closed, who hid under your bed or in the dark corners of your closet?
If only he'd stayed there.
But no, the man's been given his own movie that's sure to torment everyone who braves the cinema. While those who still believe in him will be genuinely frightened, anyone over eight will, more likely, be grimacing for all the wrong reasons.
Granted, there are a few cheap scares (of the cat-suddenly-jumping-out or the-loud-bang-after-prolonged-silence variety) that, against your better judgment, will have you jolting in your chair, but on the whole 'Boogeyman' is as bad as it sounds.
When little Timmy was eight his daddy was violently sucked into the closet by the very character that inhabited his bedtime stories. Now, a decade and a bit later, Tim's your pretty average guy with a decent job at a magazine and a pretty blonde girlfriend. Except that he still hasn’t really come to terms with that fateful night many years ago, even though nobody really ever believed his version of events. Would you?
So there are no doors in his apartment (apart from the front one, of course) and when sleep does come it's filled with some nightmares involving the Boogeyman, of course, and a rather disturbing one involving his mommy.
When she dies, he returns to his home town for the funeral and, encouraged by his childhood shrink to "face his fears", spends the night in the now deserted House Where It All Happened.
The scene is now set for a series of clichéd shots of doors slowly opening; close-ups of terrified faces, creaking staircases and turning doorknobs; and curtains fluttering in the breeze while an orchestra saws it way through something resembling the 'Psycho' soundtrack.
But the derivative approach doesn’t end there and, having ransacked classic horror approaches, the film begins tackling more modern clichés. As Tim's girlfriend bizarrely disappears and a mysterious little girl shows up to help him, out comes 'The Sixth Sense' and a time/place teleportation sequence courtesy of 'Donnie Darko' or 'Lost Highway'.
But unlike those movies, there's not even an attempt to explain what's happening. Maybe the filmmakers are trying to create a sense of mystery, but the result is pure frustration. As is the climax.
Having been wise enough to keep the villain obscured for most of the movie — we're more scared of what we can't see, after all — they haul out all the special effects their meagre budget could muster and whip up a computer-generated storm that recalls 'The Ring 2' and outtakes from 'Scary Movie'.
It's a laughable, overblown conclusion to a film that's already lacking in originality, credibility and intentional horror.
As that old chestnut goes: "You have been warned."
