BOOGEYMAN II (1983)
Article 4015 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-27-2012
Directed by Bruce Starr and Ulli Lommel
Featuring Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel, Shannah Hall
Country: USA
What it is: Sequel

A woman who suffered possession by an evil mirror goes to stay with a friend in Hollywood who is married to a movie director. When she tells her story, the movie director is urged by various people to make a movie about it. But a shard of the mirror still exists…. and it doesn’t want a movie made about it.

To start with, I’m going to point out that a good fifty percent of this movie consists of footage from the original THE BOOGEYMAN. When this movie popped up on my list, I quickly found out that a DVD release of this movie was not to be trusted; apparently, it featured new footage of Ulli Lommel telling the police about the events in the first two movies, cuts twenty minutes of the new footage added for this sequel, and substitutes even more footage from the original movie. I therefore held off on trying to net the DVD version of this one, and opted for one of the original VHS recordings of the movie. Yet, I can’t help but feel a bit nagged by the sense that fighting for the integrity of seeing the original version of this sequel seemed something of a silly cause for me, especially as I have little love for the movie to which it is a sequel. Still, though I think this sequel comes across as cynically motivated, the DVD re-edit seems even more cynical.

Now, to the movie. If it has any advantage over the original movie, it’s that it’s a bit more coherent. But that’s only because the mirror seems to have an agenda in this one, where in the original, it just killed anyone around. On the other hand, the murders are sillier and even more poorly staged than in the original, the script is agonizingly bad, and the acting is phoned in; I’m not surprised that the writer was given no credit. I gave Ulli Lommel a co-directing credit above because IMDB did (with the comment that he was uncredited), though I don’t know if it was solely for the fact that half of the movie is from the original, which he did direct. The credited director is Bruce Starr, and it’s is sole directorial credit, and I assume that he’s responsible for the dreariness of the new scenes.

I’d dismiss the movie utterly if it weren’t for one thing; I’m a little intrigued that Lommel is playing a film director in this one who is ambivalent about selling out to do a horror film. If the trivia section in IMDB is true, Lommel could have had a bigger budget for this movie, but he didn’t want to work for a bigger studio and wanted to make it as an independent film, hence the re-used footage and the cost cutting. For some reason, this leaves me wondering just how much Lommel’s character was a reflection of what he was really thinking and feeling at the time. It’s all speculation, of course, but for me, that was easily the most interesting element in this otherwise worthless sequel.