In this film, an earthquake breaks open a secret vault hidden beneath an apartment block. The block is due to be demolished soon, but not everyone has found a new place to live, and the boy from one flat emerges from the vault with a book bound in human skin and vinyl recordings made by those who hid it there. He starts to play the records, with horrific consequences.
The boy's mother (Alyssa Sutherland) is possessed by the evil dead (or is she, having died, now the evil dead herself? I've never been quite sure), and mayhem ensues. The three kids turn to their aunt (Lily Sullivan) for help. Bodies are mangled, blood is spilled, neighbours pop around, and there comes a time when nothing but a shotgun and a chainsaw will do.
Before I go on to explain why the film was for me mildly disappointing, it's only fair to mention that I saw it on a Cineworld screen that was not particularly bright. I saw two other films the same day, and so I saw how much more effective the trailer of The Boogeyman was on a better-lit screen. That said…
The biggest problem for this film is that it doesn't follow Evil Dead, the tepid 2013 remake, it follows Ash vs Evil Dead, which took the insanity of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness and turned it up to 11. That show took things to such bizarre extremes that Mrs Theaker told me off for waking up the children with my unconscious expostulations.
This film does not do that. Compared to some horror films, it's not understated: horrific things happen to the kind of people who do not usually get seriously hurt in horror films, for example, and everyone still gets soaked in blood. It's an 18-rated film. But it never hits the heights of delirium that is this franchise's raison d'être.
And it's not funny. Nor was the original film, but it is part of what makes the sequels so special. There are a couple of amusing moments – the very first shot is a gag – but I didn't hear anyone in the cinema laugh.
Was it the evil dead that made the films so beloved? Or was it Bruce Campbell's reactions to them? I think perhaps the actions of the evil dead are so random, their powers so unlimited, that they don't lend themselves particularly well to a traditional horror film structure. They could win at any moment if they chose to – the only reason they don't is that they're having too much fun torturing everyone.
It's definitely not a bad film, though. It is quite literally hair-raising at times, and there are some very striking images. The moment when the title appears on screen is superb – and perhaps raised my expectations for the film too much.
On television, with every gruesome detail visible to the eye, perhaps it would make it to a fourth star. ***
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