By Christopher Houtz
Ahhh yes, the early 80’s, the salad days of the slasher flick. Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Burning, the list just goes on and on. For every good slasher released in those days there were ten that outright stunk up the joint. But then there were, well, slashers that were neither iconic nor complete horsie doo-doo.
What we have here is “The Boogeyman” – let me break this down for you. A brother, Willy (played by Nicholas Love) and sister Lacy (played by Suzanna Love) watch from outside the living room as their drunken slut of a mother plays a little sex game with her lout of a boyfriend. They get caught spying and this prize of a man gags and ties the brother to his bed. The mother sends the sister to her room. Sister sneaks to the kitchen, gets a butcher knife, frees brother, and brother murders boyfriend with said butcher knife while boyfriend is banging mom and sister watches on through the bedroom mirror. Not the most original set up, but it’s done well enough.
We jump ahead some 20 years and sister is married with a, oh I don’t know, 5 year old son, living with Aunt and Uncle on their farm with a now mute brother, her husband, the afore mentioned son, and a couple farm hands. The all American family. Brother grows up to be a big ole boy, all muscles (farm work I suppose), and likes to collect kitchen knives. I wonder how know one notices that about 30 knives have disappeared.
A letter shows up from dear old mom saying she is about to die and would like to see her kids one last time. This letter sets sister into a bit of a tizzy, and brother isn’t too happy about this idea either. So sister has some post traumatic stress shit going on that makes husband decide to take her to see a head shrinker played by none other than John Carradine. Together, doctor and husband feel it would be just a super duper idea to show sister the house she grew up in where the murder occurred. You know, so she can see it the way it is now and not the way she remembers it. Yep, sounds right to me…..take an emotionally fragile girl back to the place of her fears, with no clinical supervision, and plop her right down and she what shakes out. Simply brilliant!
Needless to say the result of this absolutely fantastic idea doesn’t go well. On the other hand, it sets in motion a series of events that are a lot of fun for us, the viewers, so good on them for the whole idea. The mirror sister watched the murder through is still in house and it gets a chair right to the face opening up a portal (or some such shit, hell they never really explain the how or why), for the ghost of the boyfriend to come through. Well, his will or essence comes through I suppose. He is able to psychically manipulate and maneuver real world objects.
This is where it gets fun. Boyfriend goes on a killing rampage for no particular reason, I mean this winner is killing everyone within any proximity to the mirror or shards of the mirror. Even the sunlight reflecting off the mirror is enough to set this whacko to killing some folks. Great stuff. The movie never sets up why he is murdering everyone – people who had nothing to do with demise what so ever. But hey, we do get to watch lots o’ killin’.
There is nosy priest, the husband finally comes around to believing in the mirror, a big showdown, some more killing, and brother, sister, and kid walk happily off into the sunset with not a care in the world. Or do they? You’ll just have to watch yourself and find out.
The soundtrack to this mess of a movie is perfect. It is so 80’s – very John Carpenterish. But it really is well done. It sets a mood of dread throughout. Me likey.
As for the film itself, you may think from what I have written that I didn’t care for it much, but the opposite is true. The Boogeyman isn’t quite violent or inventive enough in its kills to get you up off your feet cheering, nor is it done with a fun ‘fuck you’ sense of style and attitude that some of the better ones have. What “The Boogeyman” does have however is an interesting story, better than average acting, some ok special effects especially for the time, and a whole bucket load of entertainment value. In fact, I will go so far as to say this bad boy deserves more of an audience, a cult following if you will, than it actually seems to have.
Recommend for fans of 80’s unheard of slashers.
The Night Divides The Day (2001) – Micro-Budget SLASHER HORROR MOVIE REVIEW
By Geno McGahee
OK, let me begin by saying that I am a huge fan of micro-budget horror films. Despite the fact that these films lack in production value and acting talent, I usually find them very entertaining. There is a lot of heart in them and it usually involves a story-teller attempting to use the video medium as the route to get his idea to the masses. I enjoy the look of these sorts of films and when I first began watching THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY, I was excited. It was from 2001, but the look screamed 1980s. Other places have this film being released in 1999. Perhaps they were using a camcorder from the eighties to film this. Whatever the case, I was initially optimistic, but unfortunately, we have a total mess here.
Written and Directed by Jeff Burton, THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY involves a serial killer on the loose and a group of college kids going away camping. I’m apologizing in advance for not having the names of the actors involved in this. The IMDB page is pretty incomplete, but let’s just say that I can sum up the acting overall in this film as terrible. The writing doesn’t help the cause, but the acting is so flat and forced that it’s hard to believe any of these characters.
Sarah is a college girl and she’s out for a run. Fully aware that there is a killer out there, she gets nervous and runs faster, eventually meeting up with David. She kneed him in the nuts out of fear but soon apologized. David is monotone and his talks about vegetarianism and psychology were so boring and pointless. There is an idea that every sentence of the screenplay pushes the story forward. Jeff Burton defied that and proved his rebel ways by just using filler dialogue. Let them talk about anything without much of it pertaining to the story. It was like a found footage but it was shot as a regular feature.
Sarah, her sister, Gwen, David, some tough guy named “Leo,” and a few others travel to go camping and begin telling campfire stories. This is more filler as they set up the final kills of the movie. I kept wondering if this movie even had a screenplay. In the beginning, it credited three people as writers of this and I’m sure that if you sat them together and asked who wrote this, they’d point to one of the other two and say “he did it”! I hate to trash a movie, but when it’s this bad, I can’t allow one of my readers to suffer through it. I took the hit on this one.
Amazingly, this film has no redeeming value. In most films, I can find something and cling to it…the one good characteristic and be happy to give it a few points. Here, we have a terribly predictable slasher with very little slashing and no real story. It took three people to write this? Seriously? OK, I’m sorry. I’m off track here.
THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY is wretched. It’s one of the worst films I have ever seen and I make this one of my must avoid films. It was as bad as it gets.
Rating: 0/10
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