THE BOOGEYMAN (2023) – Complete waste of time with this boring and pointless attempt at horror
Rating: ⭐
It is hard to imagine that a full-length feature film with a 90 minutes running time can be made based on a 12 pages short story by Stephen King. Making a full-length movie or even an epic trilogy from short stories is not unheard of in Hollywood. In fact, this has been done very successfully by Ang Lee with his adaptation of the short novels Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution. Another example of how this can be done with excellent results is the Hobbit trilogy by Peter Jackson. Alas, director Rob Savage is no Ang Lee or Peter Jackson. Instead of a fast-paced horror thriller, we have a slow burn movie that is neither engaging or scary. The 90 minutes actually felt like eternity and I could not wait for the movie to end. This is an example of how NOT to adapt a short story into a full length movie.
The plot of Boogeyman is focused on a family of three comprising of a teenage girl and her younger sister and their psychologist father. They are grieving from a tragic death of their mother and struggling to some to terms and get back to their normal lives. Out of nowhere they suddenly find themselves the target of an unseen presence in their house, the so-called Boogeyman. An explanation of its existence is barely given and we are just supposed to accept this. The melancholy mood of the characters are not particularly interesting as we have seen this sort of things before a thousand times in other better movies. The jump scares are also annoying as the payback from them were often not worthy of the preceding built up suspense.
A major problem with this movie is that much of the action takes place in the dark so we can hardly see anything. I am not sure why some reviewers and viewers gave such enthusiastic comments about how wonderful and scary the creature design was. I feel like they much have watched a different movie from me because The Boogeyman I watched so dark it was impossible to catch it properly. Nothing scary about something you cannot see. Another major demerit is the dull and unremarkable script.
The Boogeyman is one of the worst horror movie I have seen in recent times and definitely not worthy of a viewing by horror fans. The Stephen King association is a gimmick and merely serves to give King a bad name after this.