Boogeyman II (1983) — Triskaidekafiles

BOOGEYMAN II

WRITER: Ulli Lommel

DIRECTOR: Bruce Pearn

STARRING: Suzanna Love as Lacey

Shannah Hall as Bonnie

Sholto Von Douglas as Joseph

Ulli Lommel as Mickey

QUICK CUT: In Hollywood, a bunch of people gather at a party to discuss their next project.

THE MORGUE

Lacey - A young woman who has suffered numerous tragedies and is more than willing to flashback through them

Mickey - A director feeling pigeonholed into making horror movies, and is resisting the demands of the market to make another horror movie.

TRISK ANALYSIS: EDITOR'S NOTE: I am legit still waiting for my DVD to arrive, so I improvised and found the movie on YouTube, in a very poor quality. Once I have the movie in hand, I will replace the images with, hopefully, better quality images. Just keep that in mind for any quality comments I make.

EDITOR’S NOTE THE SEQUEL: Finally got an actual disc in (that was a journey, ugh) and have uploaded new images. I decided to keep the original YT version’s title alongside the official DVD version above, since holy shit.

Welcome back, Triskelions. Another month, another movie, and my seemingly endless problems over the summer continue into September. I swear, everything that can go wrong, has, with all of my movie choices. But I digress. All that matters is getting the words and the snark out to my loyal readers, so let's just get to it.

Remember The Boogeyman? Remember how I already reviewed the third movie, thinking it was the second, because this franchise is an utter disaster? Well, here I am with the *second* movie in the franchise, the ACTUAL Boogeyman II, or as it is sometimes called, Revenge of the Boogeyman. And this...this sure is a thing.

The movie opens up on a movie being made, and the director of that movie is Mickey, played by writer/director Ulli Lommel. And they shove in some none too subtle commentary, because he very much DID NOT want to make this movie.

And that's when Lacey, from the first movie, shows up. And not the same actress in a different role, but 100% the same character. Which begs the question, what happened to the rest of her family, because they didn't ALL die. Oh wait, they do at least quickly brush aside that the kid is staying with his paternal grandparents, so they at least gave some consideration to the question.

Filming wraps for the day, and Lacey, with her friend Bonnie whom I THINK is supposed to be Mickey's wife, gather for dinner, while the girls catch up.

They conversation eventually drifts to those pesky murders, and Lacey explains they'll never find the killer, because he doesn't exist and oh fuck me here we go.

Not even eight minutes in, and remember how BM3 liked to reuse footage? Well, this is where that proud tradition started.

We go through three straight minutes from the first movie, recapping the opening scenes, covering how their mom's boyfriend was a perv, tied the kids up, and culminates in Joey stabbing the guy. And the quality is so poor, it feels like I'm watching AVP: Requiem all over again.

Following a brief pause back to the present movie, and a few more scenes back in the reused footage, we finally get back to John Carradine's scene at least, and then they replay the entire scene back at the old house, complete with the delightfully ridiculous kid shouting BOOGEYMAN! before getting crushed by the window.

Somewhere during all this, Bonnie asks Lacey if she wants more wine, and fuck, pour me a glass too, I need it for all this.

Following all that reused footage, everyone is tired and heads to bed. Mickey and Bonnie lay in bed for a bit talking, and they don't quite believe Lacey's story. They think it's just her brain trying to process the tragedy and protect her. This plot thread will go nowhere.

Bonnie also declares that Lacey's experience would "make one hell of a movie". YES BUT IT SHOULDN'T MAKE THREE.

Oh, and just to be clear, at this point in the movie, 24 minutes in, 12 of those minutes have been reused footage from the first film. And that's including opening credits in the runtime. So far, all that has happened in THIS movie, is people sitting around and talking.

In Lacey's room, Mickey wanders in to chat, and she shows him a box she has, and shows all the mystical wards against evil she keeps inside it. Fortunately, no dildo in this one. But this is all to protect her from the one last shard of mirror she keeps in the box with the rest. Which begs the question; why not just destroy it??

The next day, everyone is hanging around the pool, and the light reflecting upon the water sends us back into EVEN MORE reused footage, the bulk of the beach scene, and more reused deaths.

We get a weird flashback, of not old footage at least, explaining where Mickey's butler came from, for some odd reason. Made all the more odd by how it's just "we found this poor butler walking down the street and he followed us home."

The butler continues to be sus though, as he heads into Lacey's room, and steals he shard of mirror, hopefully getting an actual plot going after over 30 minutes. He's been lurking around listening to all these stories, and it's at least nicely done seeing him becoming enthralled by this idea.

But night falls, and they have a party in Lacey's honour to welcome her to Hollywood, and give us a whole bunch of victims I don't actually care about.

The flashbacks were coming from…INSIDE THE MOVIE.

While they all sit around the pool, Bonnie says hey, why not tell them what happened in the barn, and nooooOOOOOOOOOOO.

So we recap the end of the first movie, yet somehow DON'T do the barn scene!, and okay okay, I think we should be clear of the reused footage now...with only 30 minutes left to this movie to deal with its own plot.

The guests take it all in, and one of them asks to hear the part about the beach again, and DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE I SWEAR BY THE PHOENIX.

We get a LOT more sitting around and talking, since there's a lot of new characters to make a bare attempt at trying to establish before they're all slaughtered.

Eventually the movie focuses in on two of the guests as they are stalked by an unseen presence, who keeps looking at the gardening tools. And shaking them at the camera. FOR SEVERAL MINUTES. YES THEY ARE VERY NICE KILL SOMEONE ALREADY.

Finally the killer obliges me, and just so we are very clear here. Yes, there has been a ton of death so far, but all in flashbacks and reused footage. This is the first truly original death in the entire movie. And it happens with just over 20 minutes left to go.

And to be quite honest, that's really all the movie is from this point to the end; a series of death scenes to get rid of the slew of characters we just met.

The guests talk to Lacey trying to convince her to sell the rights to her story, but she says no one would ever make a movie about her mirror. And she's right! THEY WILL MAKE FOUR.

But whatever, we get some more deaths, while guests try and leave, but they need to be slaughtered first. I guess the Boogeyman isn't too keen on anyone making his story into a movie.

IF ONLY HE HAD TRIED HARDER.

I will say this about the movie, at least the deaths are almost all fun and/or creative. It helps make the back half of the movie feel a significant step up, once things get rolling.

Following a few more deaths involving barbecue tongs and a corkscrew, Lacey finally notices the shard of mirror has gone missing.

And seriously, almost everyone has been killed at this point, and not a single person has noticed, because everyone is so isolated doing their own thing. It's kinda frustrating.

That's when they search the house, find a few dead bodies, and run into, gasp surprise, the butler carrying the shard of glass around. They wrap things up quickly by shoving him in the pool and drowning him. I feel like he had an interesting story we never got to see.

And huh. Who’da guessed it. The butler actually DID do it, for once!

Mickey returns home, because he apparently left at some point?? and makes snarky comments as he comes across the bodies, and sadly it gets lost in the quality of the movie. I only know it's snark, because I know that *tone* like the back of my hand.

With the butler dead, they bury his body in an unnamed grave in the hills, and Lacey tells us that since she knows the secret of the evil force behind the mirror, only she is immune to it...AND THAT MAKES ZERO SENSE. And does that make everyone she told also immune to it? I mean, they know the secret now, right? RIGHT??

Anyways, we get one last thrill as the fist of Joseph bursts forth from his grave, and makes the car Bonnie is sitting in SQUAWKING EXPLODES.

Oh, and they do give a brief nod to that the evil force was doing this, before things close out, because it didn't lile people making light of the situation, and thinking it's all fun and games.

Oh no, the mirror is focusing the intense rays of the sun into a solar death ray!

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: Not great. Very dark, almost unwatchable at points. Feels like I am staring at black soup half the time, with characters floating in darkness.

EDITOR’S NOTE 3: THE QUICKENING: The above comment on video quality was, as I have mentioned, from a crappy YT upload. The new images are from the official DVD release. And they are MUCH better. I haven’t done a full watch through yet, but it’s a huge upgrade to at least “watchably average”. Although, that scene around the pool, with everyone lit from underneath, is still laughable. But the flashbacks look better, the whole movie looks better, and I can at least see what’s going on most of the time.

Audio: Bare minimum tolerable.

Sound Bite: "People don't want psychos and slashers. This Halloween stuff is old hat!" HAHAHA

Body Count: There’s plenty of death here, but much like Return, it’s all on a technicality. The first two acts, all the deaths are in the flashbacks. Also, since we then get dumped a LOT of characters, hastily breeze past their names, and never really get to know them, I did my best to get the names right. And uh, one of the characters I swear straight up disappears.

1 - 10:30 and we get a repeat of the mother's death

2 - Reused sockhead death

3 - Reused scissor death

4 - Reused window death

5 - Reused medicine cabinet death

6 - Reused car death

7 - Reused second car death

8 - Reused priest death

9 - Sandor gets hedge trimmered, in our first REAL death at almost 52 minutes!

10 - And I imagine Constance was soon to follow.

11 - Javier? gets an electric toothbrush in his mouth.

12 - Cathy gets shaving creamed to death?

13 - Bernie gets hosed

14 - Sally gets a tailpipe down her throat

15 - Priscilla gets barbecue tonged in the neck

16 - Jim gets corkscrewed

17 - Lacey drowns the butler to stop the mirror.

18 - The mirror explodes the car and kills Bonnie

Best Corpse: The poor girl getting her face shoved onto the tailpipe and killed by exhaust is just the righyt kind of ridiculous.

Blood Type - F: There’s only the barest trickles of blood. Almost every single death we see the weapon strike, and it immediately cuts. It plays very safe.

Drink Up! Every time Joseph appears

Movie Review: Okay, let’s get this out of the way; this movie is a mess. The first half of the movie is almost pointless. Once we get past the front loaded flashbacks, it DOES genuinely pick up. And there’s a good core of an idea here. No, really! I love the idea of a director who does not want to direct a horror movie, doesn’t want to be bothered with such sleaze, and the subject of said movie is so annoyed at people making light of his accomplishments that he rises up to slay them all. Unfortunately, the movie is half baked - literally! - and the Actual Movie is too short. We never get to really know any of the victims, and the movie doesn’t go far enough with its core strengths. Lean into Mickey’s plight, make it even more meta, ditch the flashbacks, and actually developed your characters, and there’s genuinely a good movie in that. But. That is not this movie. So it only gets two out of five shards of mirror.

Entertainment Value: As I said earlier, the kills are fun, they are the strength of this entire series. But it takes so damned long to get to them, and they just don’t feel very motivated, since we don’t know the characters. I do love that they are committed with whatever is to hand, that is very fun. These movies are so frustrating, because the hints of brilliance are there, but the flashbacks man, the flashbacks. They are so unnecessary. I have seen the first movie SO MANY TIMES, and I genuinely quite like the movie!, that I am actually starting to turn against it with how much it is being strip mined for these sequels. They could have actually made a fun, interesting sequel here, if they just tried the tiniest bit harder. Two out of five tailpipes.