Smash the Mirror

Film: The Boogey Man
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Ask someone who the worst film director is of all time, and you’re going to get some pretty standard answers in a lot of cases. Names like Michael Bay, Uwe Boll, Ed Wood, and Tommy Wiseau are going to be high on the list. You have to actually know something to come up with the name Ulli Lommel. A trip through Lommel’s filmography is going to show you a collection of films with titles intended to shock and to capitalize on the worst of human experience. Lommel’s films include things like Black Dahlia, Zodiac Killer, BTK Killer, Green River Killer and plenty more of that same ilk. Lommel’s best-known film is 1980’s The Boogey Man, which doesn’t have a lot of new ideas but does have at least a few interesting shots.

We start in the past, with young Willy and Lacey (Jay Wright and Natasha Schiano) witness their mother (Gillian Gordon) engaging in some kinky pre-sex play with her boyfriend (Howard Grant). When she spots them, she gets angry, and the boyfriend sends Lacey to her room, but ties Willy to his bed. Lacey lets her brother out and Willy grabs a knife and kills the boyfriend, something Lacey witnesses reflected in the mirror in her mother’s bedroom.

We doodley-doodley-doop to the film’s present. Willy (Nicholas Love) is now a farmhand and doesn’t speak. Lacey (Suzanna Love, Nicholas’s sister and Ulli Lommel’s wife at the time) is married to Jake (Ron James), and they have a child named Kevin (Raymond Boyden). They also live on the farm with Willy, although Jake works outside the farm, which is run by Lacey’s and Willy’s aunt and uncle (Felicite Morgan and Bill Rayburn).

But, we’re going to need a boogey man, right? Lacey starts having nightmares about being tied up and attacked by an intruder, so Jake takes her to a psychiatrist (John Carradine). He recommends going back to the house where everything happened to demonstrate to her that there is nothing to fear. Unfortunately, the mirror that she witnessed the murder in is still there, and she sees her mother’s dead lover in the reflection. As a reaction, Lacey smashes the mirror, which essentially releases the angry spirit of the murdered man, who will now manifest himself in shards of the broken mirror.

What happens from this point forward is pretty much what you’re going to expect. Shards of the broken mirror are going to flash red (or green at one point) and the evil spirit is going to start attacking anyone and anything in the area, often by possessing people and forcing them to kill themselves. And there’s not going to be a lot of discretion taken here—our angry spirit is going to kill children as well as adults.

Because we need to get our boogey man into the home of our main characters, for some reason or another, Jake gathers up all of the pieces of the broken mirror that he can (he does this before the current residents of the house are bumped off) and rebuilds it in the farmhouse. This is allegedly supposed to help Lacey deal with the fact that the mirror is broken, but in reality is just an excuse for there to be a bunch of mirror shards in the house, which puts everyone there in danger.

The Boogey Man is not a great film, and it might not even be a good film. There are a few interesting shots, but the film is tragically wooden in terms of acting and clearly pointed in a very specific direction. Every beat of this story is predictable, even if one or two of the deaths are not. There’s a particularly interesting pair of deaths in a scene at a lake where a pair of young people are essentially killed in a sort of permanent kiss. It’s at least inventive, and one of the more fun moments in the film.

The sad reality of The Boogey Man, though, is that this is not a movie that breaks a lot of new ground. Even in 1980, a lot of the established tropes of the slasher genre, either standard “guy goes on a rampage” or “supernatural force attacks the living” were already in place, and The Boogey Man doesn’t really explore them at all or do anything with them that wasn’t already expected at the time. And today, the tropes are right in your face the whole time.

There are a lot of interesting things that can be done with mirrors in a horror movie. Oculus is a great example of this. The Boogey Man is not.

Why to watch The Boogey Man: It’s short and pretty painless.
Why not to watch: There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen.