The 41st film on the video nasty list feels like an amalgamation of Halloween, The Amityville Horror and The Exorcist. It's not a patch on any of them but it does have a scene where someone is brutally murdered by a kiss. That has got to count for something. Right? RIGHT???
Kids with weapons. Always a BBFC bugbear. Sadomasochistic sex? Another BBFC hot button issue. The Boogeyman begins with a child discovering his mother and her fella indulging in a spot of slap and tickle so he buries a knife in the fella's back. From the off The Boogeyman was going to be in trouble. Sex and violence combined and a child with a blade in the mix too? Yeesh. The murder kicks the story into gear. A murder in front of a mirror that the dead man's tormented soul gets trapped in. How? Who knows? Who cares? The murder has affected the boy and he grows up to be a troubled man living and working on his sister's farm. A letter from their dying mother dredges up old memories and a trip back to the murder house unleashes long withheld emotion and destruction that sees the mirror smashed to smithereens. Now there's an evil presence on the loose and revenge is it's only mission. It's definition of revenge is elastic though so basically everyone in the film is in trouble. Especially the random groups of teenagers knocking around because early 80's horror films loved to slice and dice them.
It sounds poxy but the presence of a real director does this one a lot of favours. Ulli Lommel started directing in the New German Cinema movement of the early 70's alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder before moving to New York late in the decade where he collaborated with no other than Andy Warhol. The Boogeyman was his third American film and while the majority of the film is really no different to the ten a penny slashers that riddled the early 80's there's an ability to create tension and scares in daytime settings that other film makers nearly always fail to do or just flat out avoid. There's a Freudian undertone in the opening scenes that gives it a rare intelligence and there's a couple of nice visual flourishes here too, usually when someone is about to violently bite the dust and the spirit makes its presence known through twinkling lights in the distance or a reflection dancing on a wall between a victim. It's subtle and better than a crappy ghostly effect.
It's the only subtle thing here though. Every other horror trope is trotted out. Dopes heading off into the unknown by themselves, oversexed teens finding remote locations to canoodle and then die. The house our leads live in SCREAMS haunted house. People with special needs are the source of special powers. If someone good looking dies it's usually in the nude. You know all the usual cliches that slasher films deal in. Adding a splash of the supernatural into the mix keeps the death scenes interesting though. The knives and machetes you'd expect are kept to a minimum and instead we get scissors and pitchforks. Haha! Yes it's stabbing implements as always but this time it's not a madman welding them and when things are ghostly all logic flies out the window.
A supernatural being forces a nude woman to stab herself in the throat with a scissors. She dies in the bathtub with her boobs bloodied and on display. Yet another BBFC nono. That and the opening scenes were definitely going to ring bells in the BBFC's Soho Square offices. Similar scenes have been cut from the films of Brian De Palma in the past among others. The video version of this that was released in 1981 has this scene and others shortened and the distributors, the infamous VIPCO who also released Driller Killer and Zombie Flesh Eaters, thought all was well until the film was targeted in the video nasty scare of 1983. Unlike those this one wasn't successfully prosecuted for obscenity and was removed from the video nasty list in 1985. It's place on the director of public prosecutions list made it instantly collectible for horror fans and it was sought after for years until VIPCO re-released it in 1992. The cuts stayed in place until 2000 though when fans could legally see Ulli Lommel's preferred version.
Did it deserve a place on the list? Through modern eyes no but certain aspects of it were always going to be trouble.
Is it worth a watch? Yup. It's not bad at all.
Previous Nasties
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