Four 80s horror slashers gone mostly bad

I needed a break from all the modern crap I’ve been streaming, so it was back to the 80s horror archives in my collection—my horror movie comfort food.

THE BOOGEY MAN (1980)

Considering it was released two years after Halloween and one year after The Amityville Horror, it isn’t too surprising that the house in the opening scene of The Boogey Man looks like the house in which Annie babysat little Lindsey, and the main house in the movie is pretty much the Amityville house in brick.

The opening scene is scrumptious 80s perversion. A little boy and girl watch as their mother gets sexy with a dude in the living room—by putting a stocking over his face! Creepy. Even worse, catching the kids spying, they tie the little boy down to a bed as punishment! So when his baby sister comes and cuts him free using a knife with a big blade, you can guess what he does next.

Flash ahead. The sister is now grown with kids, and her brother—now a mute—lives with her. That’s his coping mechanism for what he did as a child. She, on the other hand has nightmares about being killed by stocking face, so her therapist—John Carradine(!)—tells her to go to the house where it happened to get over it. She does just that, sees stocking face in a mirror (still there from when she was a child…okay), and smashes it.

Then, well…I guess his trapped soul is released from the mirror. Heavy-breathing killer POV goes around slaughtering people in various, inventive ways. Seriously, characters are just tossed in to be killed off by an unseen force (that breathes heavy?), and it often makes them kill themselves…after cutting off their blouses….

Not for nothing, but stocking face wasn’t even a killer! Worse thing he did was tie a brat down to a bed so he could fuck the kid’s mother in peace. So if this is his spirit, who is he trying to get revenge on? This angry spirit is just killing off random people.

Don’t worry. It gets worse, with a sliver of mirror glass attaching itself to the main sister’s eye then shooting deadly green laser light as a priest shows up to exorcise her. WTF?

REVENGE OF THE BOOGEYMAN (1983)

Okay, after I posted this blog, it was brought to my attention (Thanks, Jason!) that the first sequel to The Boogey Man was Revenge of the Boogeyman (aka: Boogeyman 2), which came out two years later. Never knew this existed because we never had it in my video store.

This total cash-in sees the return of the main girl, played by Suzanna Love. She actually co-wrote the first film with her then husband Uli Lommel, who also directed the first film but did not direct this sequel. But get this. The weak storyline has the main girl come to California to meet with a friend…a director played by Uli Lommel! He’s being pressured to make a movie about her experience. So…she spends half the movie recounting what happened in the first movie, in the form of flashbacks of most of the movie!

When that is finally done, there’s a Hollywood party. Random people sit around a pool trashing movies like Halloween and De Palma’s Blow Out before being killed off by someone who is probably pissed off that they have no taste in horror movies…and also carries a sliver of glass from the first movie’s mirror. The kills are unique and sometimes awesome—for instance, while bending over one chick is whacked in the ass with a ladder, which causes her to deep throat a car’s exhaust pipe—but they are pretty much all shot in darkness with just light on the victims. This stark and effective visual is probably due to the movie having no real budget to go with its lack of plot. The point is, fast forward to the second half of this film, because all that matters are the death scenes.

To confuse matters even more, at some point, Uli Lommel, who didn’t even want this sequel to exist, recut the movie and called it Boogeyman 2. I’m not going to bother watching it, because apparently, it’s comprised almost entirely of footage from the first film, with some interspersed footage of him as a director who trashes the idea of making a movie called The Boogeyman for a big movie studio. Ah. Film therapy. Feel better, Uli? Apparently not, because now he has Boogeyman: Reincarnation on the way. As for Boogeyman 2, sadly, this bogus “director’s cut” sequel (even more bogus than the original “Revenge of ” cut) is the one that got a U.S. DVD release (because, yes, I totally would have bought the first bogus cut for my collection).

Now, as a bonus, here’s the brief on the 1994 sequel Return of the Boogeyman, which is included on the DVD of the first The Boogey Man (and is also known in some countries as Boogeyman 3).

A chick is under the care of a therapist because, well, she’s having nightmares—of virtually the entire first movie. Yep, here we go again. Another sequel comprised mostly of footage from The Boogey Man. The therapist is trying to determine what the nightmares mean, but it’s obvious to me. She’s suffering from flashbacks of having watched The Boogey Man on VHS in the 80s. To make matters worse, the name of Suzanna Love’s character has been inexplicably changed. Here’s how Return of the Boogeyman plays out when you remove all the footage from the first film:

At least Revenge of the Boogeyman gave us a kill montage in the last half hour of its running time.

BLOODY MOON (1981)

Bloody Moon has it all—incest, bad disco scenes, violence (and gore) against naked women, and the usual nonsensical Euro horror sleaze scenarios.

During a costume party, a man and woman go off for sex—but the only thing getting off is the guy’s mask. Half the dude’s face is fucked up, the woman reacts in a most hurtful way (she screams), so…he hurts her back. Fatally.

Not many years later, fucked face is released to his sister’s care. They’re nasty, hateful old mother runs a school for young women, so soon after asking his sister to rekindle their love affair (ew) and her saying it’s not a good idea, fucked face begins stalking the female students. Really, sis? You didn’t see that coming?

One girl in particular finds herself present every time a victim is murdered, yet every time she brings someone to the scene of the crime, there’s no body! She begins losing her shit and spends the entire movie running around campus frantically like she’s being chased, even though it’s usually broad daylight, no one is chasing her, and people everywhere are like, “Bitch, what’s up? Chill!” She even has to dodge a falling boulder at one point. WTF? Bloody Movie is really bad—and it’s actually kind of boring.

The kills are pretty gruesome good in true Euro horror fashion, and I think an actual snake might have had its head sliced off for art’s sake (not cool). The most delightfully absurd scene has a chick going voluntarily to an abandoned building with an unseen person, and then giggling as she’s tied down on a slab! WTF? The giggles stop when a fucking log-splitting saw blade begins spinning. Even better, when some kid wanders by and tries to intervene—let’s just say, if a director hacks off a real snake’s head for a movie, think he gives a shit about splatting a fictional kid character’s head? Awesome.

Plenty of body reveals and a sloppy twist finale save the last few minutes of this Euro trash, which is only memorable thanks to it’s most ridiculous moments.

SATAN’S BLADE (1984)

Yes, it’s as bad as they say. For starters, the Blu-ray, instead of being properly cropped to widescreen, was slapped together in full screen, so you see boom microphones throughout the film. While the title credits feature awesome 80s synth horror music, sadly, the rest of the movie has a melodramatic crap soundtrack —along with loads of melodramatic dialogue and lots of outdoor scenery.

There’s a virtually pointless bank robbery subplot. Then a bunch of friends comes to a ski resort. The lady who owns the place talks about some evil spirit she believes lives in the mountains. Next, the friends sit around talking for about an hour. Okay, not true. There’s ONE interruption. A freaky killer with a deformed face creeps in and slaughters the women. This scene is dark, eerie, and features great horror music. It’s also…a fucking dream.

Finally, in the last 20 minutes, everyone is offed with simple stabs. Here’s the other thing. The killer? Well, the killer is…a hand that comes from off screen holding a blade. That’s it. I kid not. We never see a killer—unless you want to count the awful reveal at the end.

How does a director make a movie that has a superb dream sequence with a standout killer destined for icon status…and then make the rest of the movie a piece of shit with a killer hand? Dude, if you’re out there still not living this down, I feel your pain. On the bright side, you’re movie got a defective Blu-ray release.

DESTROYER (1988)

Well this is some cheesy 80s fun. A serial killer’s execution goes bad at a prison. A bit later, a film production comes to the now abandoned prison to shoot a female exploitation flick—not knowing the crazed killer is still fully operational!

You’d think this must be some low budget, direct-to-video indie crap since it’s not a well-known 80s flick. Instead, it stars 80s favorite Deborah Foreman (Valley Girl, My Chauffeur, Waxwork, April Fool’s Day), reuniting with another 80s favorite: Clayton Rohner (April Fool’s Day, Just One of The Guys, Modern Girls).

Plus, the director of the exploitation film within this film is…Anthony Perkins(!), and the killer is big, beefy NFL player Lyle Alzado, who is awesome in his role.

Pure eighties slasher fun is sure to be had, from the mounting body count to the mounting booby count. A crew member makes reference to the guy that never dies from Halloween, the kills are just the right amount of violent and gory, and Deborah Foreman as the final girl is icing on the cake—especially considering there’s one long-ass chase and battle sequence, topped by a hokey final scare that’s so totally 80s.