Return of the Boogeyman (1994)

RETURN OF THE BOOGEYMAN

WRITER: Screenplay by Jack Smight

DIRECTOR: Deland Nuse

STARRING: Kelly Galindo as Annie

Suzanna Love as Lacey

Richard Quick as Dr. Ricky Love

QUICK CUT: Did you like the first Boogeyman movie? Here, have 40 minutes of it again.

THE MORGUE

Annie - A troubled young woman struggling to cope with disturbing dreams, and just get on with her life.

Dr. Love - The man she goes to for help, who is a pretty bad researcher, but we’ll get to that.

Vincent - A psychology student who shows up on Dr. Love’s doorstep one day to work as an assistant, and falls for Annie.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! This month, I kick off with a return to a franchise and get us out of the 21st century rut we’ve been in, with Return of the Boogieman. Now, if I've got my info right, and there is a chance I don't, this is actually the THIRD Boogeyman movie, because the DVD released awhile back skipped over the second one. I am sure I will repeatedly refer to this one as Boogieman 2, so just bear with me, I KNOW. I don't know if I'll ever go back to do the second one, but for now, we're gonna plow ahead with Return of the Boogieman. Now with 39% recycled footage!

The credits roll over scenes of a woman on a beach, who is eventually grabbed by a man whose face is obscured with a stocking, so at least we're thematically consistent.

She runs off under the docks and escapes, and IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

The plot centers around Annie, who is having these troubling dreams, and the doctor trying to help her get to the bottom of them.

And as he puts her into a hypnotic state, we get extensive scenes from the previous movie. And when I say extensive, I mean they show over five straight minutes from it, showing the entire scenes with how the man got his stockinged mask, and the trauma to the kids, and all that.

This is an ongoing problem with the movie, and I'd need to check my figures, but it is somewhere upwards of 35 minutes from the other movie. It comes dangerously close to half.

We also repeatedly refer to the killer/entity/boogeyman/plot device, as the man with no face.

Over five straight minutes of reused footage, fortunately with narration telling us what we're seeing, so that’s something. Before even a single body has dropped.

After she is brought out of her trance, we get some real movie, and we meet a parapsychology student who helps the doctor, and they try to figure out what to do with Annie. Or they keep saying this, but it’s little more than sitting around, writing in journals, and Annie sleeping, before we get more footage.

But then we get another nightmare, thankfully not a reused one, of another woman, in the present, who is taking a bath. All while an unseen force drops a radio into the tub. Electrocutional!

And I say it's new, but if you told me this was from the second movie? I'd believe you.

This latest iteration of this particular recurring nightmare, she gets the place and time of the death, and so our trio go to warn the residents, see what happens, and if the girl really dies.

So they settle into the house, occupied by a band, but really that's unimportant, and wait and wait and wait, and this movie is not long enough for this much sitting.

And surprise of surprises, nothing happens! Annie was wrong! No, you fools, you awful scientists, you entered yourselves into the experiment, tainting the data set. Once everyone was told what was coming, that alters the outcome.

They head to the beach after their failed experiment, and Annie and Vincent dance among the sands, and he's less research assistant, and comes off more like he signed on to be the love interest

Doctor Love can't stop thinking about the woman in the bathtub though, and we cut to her going to take a bath and actually getting electrocuted, an entire day later.

To be fair, it IS expanded a bit, but let me have my snark. It's essentially the same.

"At least now we have proof you’re not imagining things" Unlesssss someone heard the prediction, and was inspired to take action they wouldn't have. Again, bad researchers.

The doctor takes Annie into the crime scene, so she can try and connect and get more information, and yeah, let's further traumatize her.

So we see the death *again*, or at least flickers of it, and Annie declares it's not the man, it's the mirror, which again, is at least consistent. Are we supposed to assume this mirror is somehow connected? The other one was shattered? Or is it some sort of mirrorverse? Whatever.

For some reason, the band leader is suddenly upset they are in his house and insists they leave. We saw no particular reason for this, but here we are.

And they suddenly have the woman from the first movie speaking through Annie, again for no reason, or very well explained, and then, since there has been far too much new stuff going on, Annie touches a mirror and we get VERY extended look at the first movie, over 10 minutes.

We also get more narration as we rewatch the scene where they visited the old house, first saw the mirror, and the kid dies in the window.

Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the deadest of them all?

I am ridiculously insulted at the overnarration, to the point of "There's a girl eating an apple".

After we exit that chunk of the first movie, we cut back to the present, but don't get comfy! We're only here for a few minutes, before going through another, thankfully smaller, chunk of the first Boogeyman.

The upside is, at least THIS time it is interestingly edited together with I believe new footage of Annie having a nightmare where she's tied up like a person in the footage. If you're gonna do this sort of thing, that's a better way.

But a new day dawns, we get more scenes of Dr. Love writing in his journal and pondering his next step...WHICH IS APPARENTLY MORE REUSED FOOTAGE.

This time out, it's reusing the scenes where Natalie and her kid head to the beach, with a shard of the mirror on his shoe, and some other kids there partying get murdered by the entity.

Also, as an aside, this movie SOLEY focuses on Natalie's character, and never *mentions*, beyond the earliest setup scenes, her brother who was traumatised and silent for most of the first movie.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the flashbacks.

But we finally come out of that footage and OH COME ON!!! We go RIGHT back into it for the first movie's final scene replaying, after only a minute of new footage, solely the doctor looking at a mirror.

It's another ten minutes, with a few moments of newness dribbled in, but just go read my past review.

Finally the first movie concludes, and WHAT WAS EVEN THE POINT of all this???

They say things like, "You need to contact Natalie, warn her" but she never DOES, and even if she DID, it's the past and already happened. This was 70 minutes (And that's being generous) of sitting around, watching another movie, and that is IT. Nothing happens. All of one person dies in the present, to no effect.

Annie is told to interact with the past movie, but she doesn't affect the outcome, it all happens, just as we remember it, and WHY WHY WHY.

Somehow, watching the first movie again frees Annie, and the movie ends...right after Annie sees the Man With Some Face in her rear view mirror. So again, nothing was accomnplished.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: The video quality on this is bizarre. Some of it looks good. Some is downright washed out to be almost monochrome. And then back to normal. Sometimes in the same scene. I don’t know what went wrong here, but it’s bad.

Audio: It’s fine. More stable than the video, at least. There’s some early moments overly quiet, but more or less, it’s okay.

Body Count: A decent body count, but only on an extreme technicality.

1 - Nine minutes and we relive stockingface's death

2 - 14 and a half minutes in and girl in tub gets electrocuted.

3 - Then we see her die AGAIN 10 minutes later

4 - Girl from first movie found dead in the tub again

5 - And the boy dead in the window again.

6 - Boy gets the screwdriver in the back of his head again.

7 - And the girlfriend gets kiss killed again

8 - "Uncle" found pitchforked again

9 - "Aunt" found wrapped in hose, again

10 - Priest is backstabbed AGAIN

Best Corpse: Well gee, not a lot to pick from!!

Blood Type - F-: A complete failing grade. Was there any new blood in this?

Drink Up! Every time Vincent appears

Movie Review: What is there to review? What movie? There’s barely even a story here. Say what you will about Silent Night Deadly Night 2, but there was a story there. This is “girl has a nightmare, now it’s gone” The movie looks bad. The story is disjointed at best. The acting is passable. Grizzly II is a more complete, well put together movie. And that’s saying a lot. One out of five shards of mirror.

Entertainment Value: There’s a lot of “Really? REALLY??” moments here, but that novelty wears thin very quickly. If the reused footage was used less, or not SO much all at once - ten minutes straight, twice!! - it wouldn’t be so bad, but that is a LOT to sit through, and even the best will in the world would become tired of it. It’s just not worth it for so little new content, or not edited together better. For sheer levels of WTFery, it’s barely worth seeing once just to see this is real, and some other entertaining bits, I barely scrape up to a two out of five there’s nothing else iconic enough in ths movie.