Starring: Ulli Lommel, Suzanna Love, John Carradine
Directed by: Ulli Lommel
Image Entertainment
There are cheap, stupid movies, and there are cheap, stupid rip-offs of
movies, and then there's Boogeyman 2: Director's Cut. In a
nutshell: this is NOT the 1982 sequel to director Ulli Lommel's
low-budget supernatural slasher movie--it's the fucking original movie
tarted up with scenes from the second movie (all shown in fast-forward).
These are interspersed shot-on-video segments with Lommel reprising his
Boogeyman 2 role of Mickey Lombard, the arthouse
director hired to make a movie version of the events in the first
Boogeyman. Lommel/Lombard, looking like the sort of guy
you'd see muttering to himself in the enema section of a porn store,
babbles incomprehensibly to an off-screen interrogator about his arthouse
background and how degrading it was to make a horror film--an
uncomfortable parallel to Lommel's own life (he an associate of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder and began his directing career with highbrow efforts
like Tenderness of the Wolves before hitting rock bottom in
America).The method behind the madness of Boogeyman 2: Redux only makes sense after watching the short interview with Lommel which accompanies the feature on this disc. Lommel describes at length how he didn't want to make Boogeyman 2 and only did so after a full-court press by investors and the producer of the original film. The experience was clearly a painful one for him, and so Redux could be seen as an attempt to "erase" the film and replace it with one that obviously holds more pleasant memories for him--i.e., the first Boogeyman. I'm sure this "redux" version pleases Lommel, but to then take this repackaging and release it under the "director's cut" aegis is a bald-faced screw job to the DVD consumer. I'm gonna give Image Entertainment the benefit of the doubt and assume that they weren't aware of Lommel's little scheme when they put out this disc with packaging that explicitly describes a movie that is not on this disc; if they were aware that only fragments of Boogeyman 2 were on this disc, then the blame lies equally with them for this shit show.
No extra points awarded. The DVD includes clips from Boogeyman 3 and 5 (there's a 6 and 7 on the way, too), which frankly look like porn filler. If there's anyone out there eagerly waiting for these films, get help, now.
--Paul "Not to be meddled with" Gaita