The Boogeyman/The Devonsville Terror 1999 Horror Movie Review

Director Ulli Lommell graduated from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s stock company to become a director in his own right, and his horror films have garnered something of a cult following. The Boogie Man, a slice of post-Halloween slasher gore, follows the legacy of a murder perpetrated by a young boy on his mother’s sadistic lover. Decades later, the boy is mute, his sister haunted by memories of the fateful night, and the murdered man’s evil spirit escapes from a shattered mirror to begin a reign of slaughter. Lommell’s direction is plodding and sloppy and his writing stilted (it’s not helped at all by his stiff cast), but he provides the gruesome payoffs: scissors in the neck, a skewer through the back of the head, a pitchfork through a torso. The Devonsville Terror again charts the legacy of evil, this time in a family cursed to repeat the vile acts of their witch-hunting ancestors. When three independent women move to a small Massachusetts town, the chauvinist family decides to put them in their place, but could one of them actually be the reincarnation of a vengeful victim? Lommell exhibits none of his mentor’s subtlety or grace, but he manages to create a genuinely eerie and off-putting mood between scenes of violent and sadistic murders and casts two familiar horror icons in supporting roles (John Carradine in The Boogie Man and Donald Pleasance in The Devonsville Terror). While these flourishes may appeal to die-hard horror fans, others will prefer to stick with the classics. —Sean Axmaker