For the movie industry the first two months of the year are like an Internet caf. It’s where all the worthless, uninteresting characters show up.

You know, those vaguely sketchy yet wholly boring folks who at first glance might seem the least bit intriguing, yet upon further review are about as captivating as playing multiplayer ‘Worlds of Warcraft’ with a dial-up connection. ‘Boogeyman’ (the retarded movie, not the retarded titular antagonist) is one of those guys.

Much like the bulk of horror movies that suck so bad they make the mediocre ones seem refreshing, ‘Boogeyman’ suffers common pitfalls. There is the requisite over-reliance on quick cutaways ‘enhanced’ with different color filters and mega fast motion that sloooooooooows down just when appropriate. A hero (this time a boy who lost his father to his closet when he was eight and has to revisit the terror 15 years later) who is nearly as good at being unsympathetic as he is leaving his mouth halfway open in shocked surprise for extended periods of time. And the true tie that binds, a ridiculous ending that both makes no sense and brings little real resolution to the simple conflicts which drove the plot.

The director seems to have little faith in the idea that he is making a lingering, creepy film born from juvenile paranoia and rooted in the shadows of every half-lit room. Instead we get a speedy zombiesque specter in shitty CGI with a bad case of ‘the grabbies.’

Despite a few jumps at the beginning, most of the chills are predictable and by the end of the movie, just flat out tame. But without any kind of grounding interest in the characters, it wouldn’t matter if every one of the them got sucked through a closet (pretty much true), traveled through space and time to accidentally, yet conveniently, leave DNA evidence at the scene of their girlfriend’s death (actually true) or set up a campy break dancing sequel tentatively titled ‘Boogeyman 2: Electric Boogaloo’ (which would have made the last 15 minutes slightly more tolerable if true).

‘Boogeyman’ is kind of like Vincent Price without the moustache. You could buy Price’s routine because he looked the part, there was nothing about his persona that didn’t make you believe he was just as off-kilter as he sounded. Without the follow through, he is just a bald dude doing a ‘creepy voice.’

‘Boogeyman,’ without any real character development, honest chills or outright logic is just some lame looking guy annoying that dude from ‘7th Heaven.’

Published on February 3, 2005 at 12:00 pm