BOOGEYMAN 2

Eighteen-year-old Laura is still traumatized by the tragic death of her parents, who were killed in front of her eyes by a black being dressed when she was only eight years old. To try to cure her obsessive fear of the Boogeyman, a character to whom Laura attributed the murder of her parents, the girl has herself admitted to a clinic where they attempt to heal patients afflicted with pathological phobias. But from the moment Laura becomes part of the small community of phobics, everyone around her begins to die in the strangest ways. Do you remember "Boogeyman – The Boogeyman"? No? Well, sometimes the mind tends to remove harmful experiences. It is a 2005 film directed by Stephen Kay and produced by Sam Raimi's Ghost House, a watered-down, inconclusive, and boring horror like few others, which, despite the heaviest criticisms received from the public and critics, brings home a tidy sum of nearly 50 million dollars in the United States alone (against a budget of 20 million). It is easy to predict, therefore, that the thing would not end there and so here comes the old dusty Bogeyman who has been waiting for three years inside the wardrobe to scare some careless teenager again. But perhaps it would have been wiser to leave this Boogeyman inside the wardrobe because "Boogeyman 2 – The Return of the Boogeyman" is not able to arouse even the slightest emotion in the viewer, but only many yawns and at times even irritation. It is necessary to inform the viewer that "Boogeyman 2" is a home video product, thought as such and distributed in the States only in video stores. In Italy, however, it surprisingly arrives on the big screen, preceded by a publicity blitz as if it were the sequel to "Titanic"; and naturally, entering the room, you find yourself watching a classic home video product, made by inexperienced directors without imagination and with a cast of actors recycled from some TV series and eager to gradually enter the world of cinema. "Boogeyman 2" is a film out of time, an innocuous slasher movie that would have made sense to exist only if produced at the end of the 1990s, after "Scream" had relaunched the fashion of teen-horror with a white weapon. Seen today, especially if the viewer is raised on bread and horror, a "Boogeyman 2" does not have many reasons to exist: it is unbelievably predictable, boring as rarely happens when dealing with a series of murders, and made really badly. The choice to want to base the film on a meager puzzle to solve is wrong, since the debut screenwriter Brian Sieve does not manage to play in an intelligent way with the identities of the characters and their psychologies. Furthermore, wanting to build a slasher movie with supernatural premises in a psychiatric clinic with young and phobic patients means forcefully recalling to mind successful horrors such as "Nightmare 3 – The Warriors of Dreams" and "Bad Dreams – Living in Terror", compared to which this "Boogeyman 2" becomes smaller and smaller. The rhythm, then, is as bland as one can expect; despite the film being built on an accumulation of corpses, the viewer's interest really struggles to stay awake and the murders themselves are not very imaginative (they always rely on the law of retribution) and staged in a very sloppy way despite not being shy about showing blood and guts. I do not want to be harsh on poor Brian Sieve, who writes a screenplay in which everything smells of already seen and the characters are built with plasticine, after all this happens often in the slasher movie, let alone if we are dealing with a sequel for home video of a very poor film... However, adding also unintentionally funny dialogues and unlikely (or impossible) narrative solutions is really too much. When Dr. Allen (played by a bewildered Tobin 'Enigmista' Bell) begins to impart amateur psychiatry maxims and comes out with phrases like "...in scientific terms your fear is called 'fear of the Boogeyman'..." one ends up really in ridicule. Not to mention then absurd solutions to isolate the protagonists like cell phones that do not have coverage in the city, so, without reason, or all exits are blocked because the computer and phones do not work (???). In short, a disaster. Anonymous direction of the debutant (another one!) Jeff Betancourt, who fails to emphasize even a single moment of tension. "Boogeyman 3" is also on the way, always destined for home video (who knows if they will have the courage to distribute it in theaters here?) and directed by Gary Jones, a name a guarantee...try to take a look at his filmography and you will realize!