Boogeyman 3

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Rating ½


Directed by Gary Jones

Written by Brian Sieve

Starring Erin Cahill (Sarah), Chuck Hittinger (David), Matt Ripley (Kane), Mimi Michaels (Lindsay), Nikki Sanderson (Audrey), W B Alexander (Lukas), Elyes Gabel (Ben), George Maguire (Jeremy), Kate Maberly (Jennifer), Jayne Wisener (Amy), Nikolai Sotirov (Boogeyman) and Vladimir Yossifov (Boogeyman)


Following the death of her father Dr Allen (played by Tobin Bell in the second ‘Boogeyman’ film and whose voice is heard here), Audrey becomes convinced she will be the next victim of the boogeyman. She returns to her dorm at university and tries to convince her friend Sarah, who doesn’t believe her, until she sees Audrey being killed by a supernatural entity. It then becomes a race against time, after Sarah has read Dr Allen’s diary and tries to convince her friends and all the other students in the dorm building that their lives are in danger.

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‘Boogeyman’ was a cheap 2005 horror film from Ghost House Pictures, the company formed by producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi. With a cast that included Emily Deschanel, on her way to the popular Fox Network television series ‘Bones’, and Lucy Lawless (who is married to Tapert), the film had a successful run at the box office. A second film, released direct-to-DVD, followed at the beginning of 2008, this one featuring an appearance by horror stalwart Tobin Bell. A year later comes the third instalment, again released direct to DVD. There is really no need of either sequel, but these are cheaply made films with a built-in audience and no doubt can be guaranteed to make a small profit.

‘Boogeyman 3’ follows a tried and tested formula and vaguely picks up the story from the end of the second film (which had deviated somewhat from the original film), also throwing in a touch of ‘Urban Legend’ for good measure. It is set on a college campus, which means lots of very thin young women in skimpy tops and a variety of boyfriends and male friends whose sole preoccupation seems to be sex and drugs. At the centre of this we have a psychology student who is overcoming the death of her mother and, so it seems, had, a year earlier, suffered some kind of breakdown that caused her to have hallucinations. She now has a college radio show, alongside her psychology professor, in which she imparts advice to other students who call in with their problems. As she comes to believe that the boogeyman is more than just a myth, so her friends start to think she is having another breakdown, but one by one they begin to disappear and as the fear of the boogeyman spreads, so it becomes stronger.

No cliché is left undisturbed and as the body count increases so too do the inevitable buckets of blood that get thrown indiscriminately over the various actors. However, the gore is fairly minimal here. So too is the sex, although I have deducted half-a-star for the pointless and wholly gratuitous scene in which one of the male students climbs through an air conditioning vent and watches female students baring their breasts in the female locker room below. Another half a star is deducted because, having spent most of the running time going nowhere in particular, the film suddenly offered up what might have been, in this setting, a reasonably inventive twist in the story, only to rub it out almost immediately and tack on a rubbish ending, apparently existing only to allow us to view a young actress with large breasts, wearing a skimpy top and panties.

Having said this, the film is clearly targeted at a very specific audience (which I assume to be American teenage boys) and what is served up here is (the lack of gore to one side) probably exactly what that audience wants. In his review for the iFMagazine website, Peter Brown writes, “Boogeyman 3 starts out well enough... hot chick (UK babe Nikki Sanderson) in a bathtub showing off the goods and getting stalked by some creature. Unfortunately... it’s all downhill from there.” I am clearly out-of-sync with my thinking here.

The presence of Nikki Sanderson in those opening scenes did rather throw me for a while. I remember her as the teenager Candice Stowe in the British television soap opera ‘Coronation Street’. Sadly, I thought her performance in ‘Boogeyman 3’ was rotten. Sanderson is one of several British and Irish actors here, alongside Eyles Gabel, Kate Maberley and Jayne Wisener.

I am a sucker for films like this one. ‘Boogeyman 3’ is not very good by any stretch of imagination, but I have no doubt that in time I could probably watch it again.

Review posted 15 July 2009



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Boogeyman 2

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Rating 1½


Directed by Jeff Betancourt

Written by Brian Sieve, based on characters created by Eric Kripke

Starring Danielle Savre, Matthew Cohen, Tobin Bell, Renée O’Connor, Chrissy Griffith, Mae Whitman, Michael Graziadei, Johnny Simmons, David Gallagher, Lesli Margherita and Tom Lenk


When sister and brother, Laura and Henry Porter (Danielle Savre and Matthew Cohen), are children they witness the brutal murders of their parents. Ten years later, Henry undergoes a course of locked-down residential experimental therapy to overcome his fear of the boogeyman, conducted by Dr Jessica Ryan (Renée O’Connor, from ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’) and her senior colleague Dr Mitchell Allen (horror stalwart Tobin Bell).

When Henry leaves the hospital and makes plans to move across country to start a new job, his younger sister’s own fears begin to manifest, and she agrees to enter the programme. The other inmates at the facility are all young people suffering from a variety of phobias and psychiatric disorders. When they begin to be murdered in gruesome fashion, Laura is convinced it is the work of the boogeyman.

‘Boogeyman 2’ is a direct-to-DVD horror film from Ghost House Pictures, the production company set up by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert to make low-budget horror films, starting in 2004 with the box office hit ‘The Grudge’. Jeff Betancourt, the director of ‘Boogeyman 2’, was the film editor on ‘The Grudge’ and its sequel. The first ‘Boogeyman’ film, also a product of Ghost House Pictures, was released into cinemas in 2005. It had a worldwide box office gross a little over $67 million.

The only thing of note the sequel shares with its predecessor is its lead characters’ fear of the boogeyman. There is otherwise no real connection between the two films. ‘Boogeyman 2’ is a composite of clichés from many other horror films and it is probably possible to name any number of films it resembles. Two that immediately came to my mind are ‘Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed’ and ‘Darkness Falls’, although it does not possess the quality of the former or the likeability of the latter.

Cheap, clichéd, direct-to-DVD horror films are hardly a rarity. Clearly there is a big market for them, or at least that is what the constant churning out of such films would indicate. ‘Boogeyman 2’ is well made, but there is nothing remotely original or appealing about it. I found it all unnecessarily and tediously gory, although that might be the one thing its real target audience would have thought made it worth watching. We also get some gratuitous bare breasts for the boys.

I didn’t like it very much. The story was far too predictable, even for a film of this type, and the gore was boring and unpleasant. I would not rush to watch it again.

Is there any point to a film like ‘Boogeyman 2’? There clearly must be an audience for it – and Ghost House has subsequently announced a third film. It provides work for the people involved in making the film, which I think is reason enough for it to exist.



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