Thanks for the memories!

One of my all time favorites.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend - who wore her stockings on his face - make out. Their mother was so upset, she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn't work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that's only the first few minutes of this one! Now we're in the present and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the director of the film Ulli Lommel and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna's real-life brother)on a farm. Willy's never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn't talk and often steals knives.Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that she has face her fears and go back to her childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes crazy and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitate pitchforks, rip off Lacey's shirt and impale young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You've taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying too, right?This being 1980, Jake decides to bring a priest in to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror's control over her.That's when the best solution comes up - let's just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son happily exiting a graveyard. Oh no - a piece of the mirror is on her son's shoe!I was wondering where so many of the plot points of this movie would go and they're often lost as if this were a foreign film. But it isn't! So I did a little digging into the director, Ulli Lommel.Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder's surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director's films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who became involved in his films Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.Seriously - a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cut her own throat with scissors, a child get his neck broken and a priest get his face melted? The acting is horrible - but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people's eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

John Carradine was in some of the greatest films ever made as a supporting player. But that sonorous speaking voice was forever in demand for various horror flicks and he willingly obliged. Just as soon as my paycheck clears I'll speak anything you want.In The Boogey Man however Carradine's penchant for scenery chewing when he knew he was in crap was not even utilized in The Boogey Man. Instead he plays a psychiatrist listening to the tales of horror from a woman who has unleashed the spirit of The Boogey Man who when he was flesh and blood was murdered when he was doing the deed with her mother.This one is not even for John Carradine fans who like to hear his voice. He's dull and the rest of the cast emote on the level of a grade school play.

I remember viewing this movie many years ago, and to be honest I just didn't get it, after seeing the previously banned sticker on the front of the video, well I just wanted to see it at the time and then forgot about it after a while. But recently I decided to give this movie another chance to see if my taste has changed through the years, seen as though I have matured as I got older and watched this movie again with an open mind.The start of this movie is very interesting and the further storyline does take an interesting turn, but it does lag in some places as it takes way too long setting up the haunted mirror story line off the ground and dwells too much on the past and once the supernatural element kicks in, it does start to deliver (well on some parts). The good points though are the death scenes and set pieces are very effective, but sometimes clumsy and dated by today's standards. But to be honest the bad points do way out the good points in this movie, as it does try to go way over the top and perhaps becomes a little bit too ambitious, okay the idea is interesting like with the vengeful spirits but then it seems the director doesn't know what to do from there on, like bringing in a priest doing a exorcism in the third act of this movie, which to be honest I just felt like switching off and apart from a very few decent performances, this movie is mainly hampered by bad acting and the obviously really low budget that shows through with some poorly shot scenes and lack of humour instead opting for pure exportation. But the performances do save this movie, Nicholas Love gives a pretty good unhinged performance as Willy, despite lack of dialogue he still makes it work, something not many actors could do. Ron James gives an adequate performance and Suzanna Love brings depth to her role and plays it convincingly without going over the top.All in all "The Boogeyman" is not a terrible movie, it's certainly ambitious given the subject matter, but it doesn't quite shine, but it does have some decent qualities but not enough to earn a status as one of the slasher gems that came out during this era.

I was way too young to see this movie back when it was out in the theaters. And horror movies gave me the creeps then. But when I saw this movie for the first time, I enjoyed it very well. The only drawback I had with this movie is, it was too short. Enough of that, let's get to the details about it. The mother send boyfriend were making out, the siblings were caught watching, the brother gets tied up by the boyfriend. He was later killed. And his spirit was in the mirror! How crazy is that. The mother used one of her stockings to conceal his face. When time passed, the sister is married with a son, while the brother doesn't speak. The horror is relived when the sister has nightmares. The come to to the house where the mirror is located. It gets smashed, and the terror insures on other people. The young boy who played jokes gets his neck broken by the window pane, and the girl before him, is impaled by the scissors. The other girl was able to find that broken piece of mirror and put in the sink, and that mirror just erupted in flames. Then the outing was a nightmare when the son unwittingly steps on the mirror and sent the unseen specter on a killing spree. Impacting the couple in the Mustang was gruesome. And I liked the part when the Boogeyman attacks the mother. It easily really a scary moment when that piece of mirror attached itself to the woman's right eye That mirror had to be destroyed, everyone was right, and the husband had to learn the hard way. This movie was great, despite being shorter than usual. So what? I enjoyed it. 3 out of 5 stars