Page 165

Boogeyman Subhash K Jha

Movie Boogeyman Director Stephen Kay Cast Barry Watson, Tory Mussett, Emily Deschanel

By Subhash K Jha

Rating: * “Is it over?” the quaking starlet asks the hero with pursed lips and narrowed eyes. “Yes,” he whispers. “He’ll never come back.” Don’t be too sure of that. If Boogeyman wins the terror-striven audience’s approval we can have a whole series—Boogeyman Returns, Back To Boogeyman, etc etc. After watching young Barry Watson quiver and shiver in a daze through 80 minutes of ‘preying’ time, one wondered if the sinister spectre that seems to bother our horrified hero is actually a metaphor for all the terrible things that we imagine our movies are capable of doing to our patience. The scares are so scarce that after a while, nobody cares. The characters don’t invite sympathy…only a sense of tormented resignation as you wait for the screenwriter to unravel the karmic crisis in the spooked-out hero’s life. The acting is neither good nor bad, just indifferent. No one looks particularly petrified by the proceedings. Incredibly, it all begins with a bedtime story. Dad loves telling it. Until one day he gets sucked into the closet…to never come out of it. Tim spends the beginnings of his adulthood trying to forget the boogeyman. But will the scriptwriter let him? Not on your life. Inventing one chilling episode after another to create a sense of frenzied foreboding Boogeyman is a casualty of insubstantial terror. Though the atmospheric aggravation is arresting the characters are largely hazy and hiccupy. Watson’s performance is more elementary than elemental. The two ladies in his love life are like pieces of confetti floating in the air after a rowdy halloween party. The one interlude that gets your gut comes mid-way when Tim drives into a motel with girlfriend No.1 Jessica but finds himself back in his familial mansion where the dreaded boogeyman awaits with sheathed claws. Jessica’s murder in the bath tub makes the murder-in-the-shower in Hitchcock’s Psycho look like a piece of cake. More blood doesn’t add flesh to the terror tale. There are some gentle moments between Tim and a little girl who seems to know the secret of the boogeyman better than Tim …or the scriptwriter. She, poor thing, doesn’t really get a chance to have her say. Wispy and half-warmed the birdbath-terror of Boogeyman is maddeningly open-ended. And open-mouthed. You hardly get a chance to get into Tim’s traumatized world before you are pulled out and told to go home.