... aka: Stephen King's The Boogeyman
Directed by:
Jeffrey C. Schiro
Movies
with the name Stephen King attached to them were flying off video
store shelves like hotcakes in the 80s, so some wily distributors got
their hands on some student / independent short subjects based on the
author's work and released several videos to cash in on the craze. King
himself had offered up his stories to amateur filmmakers
for a mere $1, "...as a way to give back a little of the joy the movies
had given me." The resulting shorts would go on to be referred to as his
"dollar babies." As part of the deal, a copy of the finished work was to
be sent to King and none of the films were to be sold for a profit or
screened theatrically without the author's permission. As a result, only a
small handful of these actually made it out to the masses. Schiro, a
student at NYU who took a stab at King's story "The Boogeyman" as his
graduate thesis and didn't go on to do much else afterward outside of
editing TV shows, was from all
indications the very first "dollar baby." He also became one of only a
select few whose effort gained nationwide distribution when it ended up on
the tape Stephen King's Night Shift Collection, where it was paired
with Frank Darabont's euthanasia drama The Woman in the Room
(1983); King's personal favorite of all the shorts. A second Night
Shift tape contained Disciples of the Crow; an adaptation of
"Children of the Corn" shot in 1983 by John Woodward. Of these early
shorts, the three aforementioned titles are apparently the only ones King
had enough faith in for people to see. Other early shorts, including I
Know What You Need (1984) by Rik Joel Carter, Last Rung on the
Ladder (1987) by James Cole and Dan Thron, The Lawnmower Man
(1987) by Jim Gonis and Cain Rose Us (1989) by David C. Spillers,
may have a place on King's shelf but remain mostly unseen by
others.
Lester Billings (Michael Reid) is having a hard time keeping his
family together. Well, actually, he's having a hard time keeping them
alive. As the film opens, he's just discovered the body of his 4-year-old
daughter Shirl in the bathtub. Not long before that, his 5-year-old boy
Denny was found dead in his bed. Policeman Sgt. Garland (Terence Brady)
shows up to investigate but can't get anything out of Lester or his useless wife (Mindy Silverman), nor can he
really prove Lester or anyone else for that matter had any involvement in
either of the deaths. The coroner's report for both has written them off
as crib deaths and each was found with a contusion on their head, but
that's not enough evidence for a conviction. Lester goes to see
psychoanalyst Dr. Harper (Bert Linder) and finally lets the cat out
of the bag and tells him everything he couldn't tell the police; namely
that both of the children had actually encountered the Boogeyman, who came
out of the closet late at night and killed them. Is the erratic, paranoid,
unhinged-acting Lester, who's prone to bouts of anger, actually an insane
child murderer... or did the Boogeyman really do it?
This is easily my least favorite of the three early King shorts I've seen
thus far. The sound design is pretty good, but the editing, photography
and lighting are poor, the overbearing synthesizer score gets to be pretty
annoying and the acting ranges from flat and wooden to histrionic and
over-the-top. Reid's central turn as the disturbed father would have
benefited a bit from more shading and nuance, though it's unfair to really
blame him since the role is written that way. Now all of these debits
would have been OK had this actually gone somewhere interesting, but it
doesn't. The resolution is so poorly done and edited that it doesn't even
really provide a concrete explanation, though I just assumed it was intended to stay faithful to the source story. The Boogeyman was shot on
16mm on a budget of 20,000 dollars and runs 28 minutes. The same story would be filmed multiple other times. Actually, there are currently three different versions listed on IMDb for just 2013 alone!
★1/2
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