When are Hollywood writers and directors going to learn? Once you show us the "monster," it's no longer scary. I don't understand this obsession with CGI and special effects; this movie isn't original by any means, but it works reasonably well - until the special effects guys take over toward the end. Besides showing us what the Boogeyman looks like, they also give us a climax that is much ado about nothing. Apparently, they believed that they could cover up the flatline of an ending by making us dizzy and distracting us with the power of giant fans off-screen. It's disappointing because Boogeyman could have been a pretty good scary movie.
There is a reason that this kind of thing-in-the-closet movie with all of the standard horror clich's keeps being made - quite simply, it works to some degree. At some point in our childhoods, we all were scared of the dark and the monster in the closet (or under the bed), and my own feeling is that we adults are also - deep down inside - still a little afraid of the proverbial Boogeyman. Silly it may be, but I wouldn't go to sleep with a closet door left open for all the tea in China. The basic premise works because we can all identify with it. Boogeyman starts out following the traditional path - the child in bed intro, the spooky closet door phobia, the creepy old house where everything squeaks, and the movement of nasty little somethings just outside our field of vision. Then the filmmakers expanded things out a little and added another perspective - that's okay, even though I and probably most viewers saw right through it from the very beginning. Then they just blew it.
Not only did the filmmakers put a face on the Boogeyman, they decided to make the latter stages of Boogeyman really weird, completely pulling the rug of believability out from under the entire audience. As long as Tim (Barry Watson) is continually dealing with his fear of dark closets and all the other creepy aspects of his childhood home, you're pretty much right there with him. Then the movie sort of slaps you in the face and tells you it's just a movie by introducing impossible twists and then bringing the Boogeyman out of the closet. This causes an immediate disconnect with the audience, and so it is that the final big scenes are more laughable than frightening - and, since we're not completely wrapped up in the big special effects ending, we have time to think about a few weaknesses that turned up earlier in the story.
Although I thought the movie was rather effective up to a point toward the end, I have to round my 3.5 stars down to three. Boogeyman does have some spooky elements to it, but it doesn't answer all the questions it raises, its twists are a little too easy to see through, and the big ending leaves you feeling limp rather than excited - and, like several others, I had a few Darkness Falls deja vu moments while I was watching the movie. If they had just left the Boogeyman in the closet where he belongs, this might have been a four star effort.
On a final note, I would just alert viewers to the presence of a tiny bonus scene at the end, following the final credits - it's not much to sneeze at, but it's there.
