Boogeyman II (Bruce Pearn, 1983)

Also known as Revenge of the Boogeyman, Boogeyman II is a sequel to 1980's The Boogey Man, and, as we can already tell by the filmmakers not caring that "boogey man" was two words in the first film, is a monument to laziness, barrel-scraping, and the "fuck it, this'll do" attitude. Boogeyman II, an occasionally hilarious act of bad faith, should be re-released in 2019, the pinnacle year of bad faith (at least until next year). For now, used VHS and YouTube are your best bets. It's a harder film to track down than the original Boogey Man. (Almost every horror blog warns us to avoid the 2003 "director's cut" DVD, which is somehow even worse than the VHS cut.)

Ulli Lommel, the co-writer and director of the first Boogey Man (and who I wrote about in detail in my review of that film a few months ago), was approached by a Hollywood studio to make a big-budget sequel to the first film, which had done very well as an independent release. Lommel had no interest in making a sequel or working within the system, so he told Hollywood to get stuffed. He then decided to make the sequel independently at his own home and turn it into a meta art film about sequels and his own reluctance to make the movie. It's a fascinating idea, but Lommel is not that great when it comes to execution (especially compared to his mentor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose own film about the disaster of making films, Beware of a Holy Whore, wipes the floor with Boogeyman II). What we get is a film that doesn't work as either a horror movie or a self-aware meta-commentary. It's turgid postmodern slop with some reasonably (often unintentionally) funny moments.

Boogeyman II ends up playing as a cheaper retread of The Boogey Man mashed together with rejected outtakes from Altman's The Player, which is honestly kind of interesting. I doubt Robert Altman or that film's screenwriter Michael Tolkin was influenced by Lommel, but the small-time wheeler-dealers of the film industry make up the bulk of the characters in both, and several lines of dialogue (one aspiring young actor says he's working on a movie that crosses Star Wars with Smokey and the Bandit; an investor bemoans the budget of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (a then-flop before becoming a cult movie years later) and says she could have made 18 movies with the money) could have been spoken in Altman's movie a decade later. That is the extent of my comparison of Lommel to Altman. Back to the boogey man, or boogeyman.

The film begins with the star and co-writer of the first film (and Lommel's then-wife) Suzanna Love being driven through Hollywood by a mysterious man. She arrives at the Hollywood Hills home of  childhood friend Shannah Hall (Bonnie Lombard) for some rest and relaxation after the terrifying events of the first film. Shannah is married to filmmaker Mickey Lombard (Lommel), a European art film director trying to make it in the American exploitation market. Lacey (Love) tells Shannah and Mickey what happened to her, and the audience gets 40 full minutes of footage from the previous film (an amazing 85 minutes in the "director's cut" DVD version). To make it worse, the flashback footage is made darker to signify that it's a flashback, so it's hard to tell what the fuck is going on. Fortunately, I'd seen The Boogey Man a handful of weeks ago, so I did indeed know what the fuck was going on. Unfortunately, it made this chunk of the film incredibly boring.

As Lacey tells her tale, padding the only 75-minute film by half its running time, the mysterious driver eavesdrops creepily. He is Shannah and Mickey's live-in help, Joseph (played by the incredibly named Sholto Von Douglas), and he loves skulking and hiding around the house to hear what people say to each other in private. The couple hired Joseph because he appeared out of nowhere and was walking up their hill (cool move). Later in the film, when Joseph can't be found, Mickey remarks that "he probably walked down the hill to another house."
For nonsensical reasons, Lacey keeps a shard of the broken possessed mirror from the first film, and she tells Mickey about it. Joseph overhears and steals it, unleashing mayhem. Meanwhile, Shannah decides Lacey's tale of the boogey man should be made into a film, directed by a reluctant Mickey, and she invites some industry weasels to a party in an attempt to get some financing and cast some parts. Lacey doesn't want a movie made about this part of her life, but Shannah moves ahead anyway. The boogey man proceeds to massacre the party guests, but on a shoestring budget. This is mostly hilarious and involves someone offscreen shaking inanimate objects onscreen, including a toothbrush, a shaving cream can, a ladder, a weed whacker, and most hilariously, a wine bottle opener (which looks like a tiny man bouncing his arms up and down). Truly terrifying.

Lines are read mechanically, as if from cue cards. The small child of Shannah and Mickey is introduced, then completely forgotten about once the mayhem begins. (Her voice is also weirdly double tracked and given echo in one pool scene, for no discernible reason.) Shaving cream is terrifyingly sprayed in a victim's face. One young actor interrupts a young actress by shushing her and saying, "Be quiet now. Let's pretend we're in a silent movie." Joseph pushes everyone to try his dessert, but only Lacey responds. (We never see this dessert!) Yes, this movie is bad.
The film's director is credited as Bruce Pearn (sometimes billed as Bruce Starr), a cameraman who has no other directing credits, but Lommel apparently directed much of it uncredited. This is not surprising. On the positive side, the kills are funny, it's short, and I did like the Tangerine Dream-esque synth score by Tim Krog.