Writer/director Ulli Lommel is nowadays a very notorious and even quite hated individual because he unleashes multiple downright insufferable straight-to-video horror stinkers on the market every single year, but there once was a time when he was a promising filmmaker. In the very earliest phase of his career he made the near-brilliant "The Tenderness of Wolves" and throughout the early eighties he made a handful of inferior but highly amusing horror movies, like "Brain Waves", "The Devonsville Terror" and "The Boogeyman". That last one is definitely a minor 80's classic. The story is pure hokum, but the film is full of absurdly grotesque murder sequences and extreme gore. Ulli Lommel and his buddies must have been so proud on their accomplishment that they decided to re-use all the best footage to fill up almost three quarters of the sequel. Yes, you read that right: "Boogeyman II" is stuffed like a Christmas turkey with key footage of the original, and that's the main reason why it receives so many negative reviews around here. Personally I didn't mind all that much, because it's been a couple of years since I watched it. This way, I get to re-watch all the fun parts (like that awesome mouth-to-mouth impalement sequence) without having to sit through the dull parts. Part two takes place in Hollywood, where survivor Lacey is staying with friends to recover from her trauma. Through long and extremely detailed flashbacks, Lacey tells the story about the murderous spirit in the little piece of mirror to befriended actress and her husband director (played by Ulli Lommel himself, with his atrocious German accent). Naturally they want to exploit Lacey's bizarre thriller story and turn it into a horror movie, but then the Boogeyman returns to kill them all during a typical Hollywood pool party. "Boogeyman II" is 50 minutes of stock footage and 25 minutes of non-stop new murders. The new massacres are very lame in comparison with those of the original, though. Death by electric toothbrush and suffocation in shaving gel, for example. The film still got included in the infamous list of video nasties, but only because of the stock footage of the original and not because of the ridiculous new murder set pieces.
Review of Boogeyman II
