| Rating: | ★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Horror |
You thought it was a just a story... but it's real.
And, it's crap.
Of course, they won't tell you this.
One problem many screenwriters seem to have with horror movies is that they don't understand that logical consistency is good.
So, for their benefit, and yours, let me explain a phenomenon called "voluntary suspension of disbelief." When you go to a movie, you are making a contract with the director and screenwriter. You agree to ignore the fact that the story is on a screen, and whatever the basic premise of it is, however unbelievable. THEY agree to make the rest of what follows from that premise as believable within its context as possible, so that you can watch the movie without yelling "Bullshit!" at the screen.
The problems arise when they fail to do so. Examples follow:
* Horse-drawn carriages exploding on overturning in Van Helsing.
* Jason Bourne getting amnesia from being shot in the BACK in The Bourne Identity. Note that this wasn't the book author's fault; in the book, Bourne was shot in the head.
* The discovery of "unobtanium" enabling the trip to The Core.
* The fact that the bashed-in cab with a shattered windshield is only stopped by police ONCE during Collateral.
In Boogeyman, this phenomenon abounds. To put this in perspective, Darkness Falls, with its murdering Tooth Fairy, (!?!) was more consistent with its premise.
The Boogeyman appears in Tim's bedroom and drags his father into the closet, where he disappears. Tim is raised on an endless diet of people telling him that what he saw was his mind's way of compensating for the trauma of his father's "leaving them," but Tim keeps the faith, and in his 20's, returns to his hometown to try to find out the truth. What he finds is that for years, some being has been disappearing children. At one point, Tim finds a backpack full of "missing persons" posters, detailing a reign of terror longer than his own life.
Ok, I was able to suspend disbelief to that point, but then the filmmakers failed me. Catastrophically. Although the monster has been around for years, has "stolen" maybe a hundred people, and is supposedly invincible, (according to the ghost of one of his victims, no less,) Tim is somehow "the only one who can defeat him."
Why? No clue what makes Tim special. He's an adult, who the Boogeyman didn't get as a kid, but then Booger takes several adults over the course of the movie, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. There's no actual hint in the movie as to why Tim is the Chosen One.
How? By "confronting" him, of course. It's a Hollywood movie, so of course Tim wins, and the Boogeyman just vanishes, never to return.
HUH!?!
If there was ever a movie that screamed for a They-style ending where the good guys lose, it was Boogeyman. Instead, the filmmakers bankrupted their premise, totally sold out a sequel-worthy villain, and turned what had until then been a reasonably creepy movie into a huge pile of shit. Terrible. How a newspaper can review this as "the scariest movie ever" I have no idea; maybe they just don't get out much. This was not only not scary, it was complete trash. If you want to watch a vastly superior version of the same movie, watch They or Darkness, either of which is far scarier and more believable than this garbage.
