Boogeyman

Ooooh no … there’s scary things coming out of the closet again ! An excellent first 5 minutes of Boogeyman gets you on the edge of your seat but you end up yearning for the same feeling of jaw-dropping tension in the rest of the film and never quite finding it. Briefly, a young boy goes through a nightmarish experience and yes it’s all to do with something nasty in the closet. Later we see the boy as a young adult, he’s lost his father by then and when his mother dies, he feels he must be brave and return to deal with her papers, returning for the first time to the house that contained so many scary moments for him as a child.

Will he be able to confront his demons or will the boogeyman be there to scare him again ? Director Stephen T Kay attempts to inject new life into the horror genre by taking a fairly standard horror set-up a Japanese horror sensibility – with plenty of little surprises you might not expect. Unfortunately the result is still too predictable and the film isn’t as scary as it could have been. Full marks for the scares at the beginning but the rest doesn’t quite live up to it.

Matt Arnoldi