In localizing horror within the confines of a long-shuttered structure, The Boogens puts a new face on the old haunted house trope utilized in countless novels, stage plays, and in such films as The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House (1973) and The Shining (1980). The backstory of unfortunate occurrences, the testimony of an addled survivor, the trip to the archives, dire warnings, strange sounds in the night and a sins-of-the-fathers angle of karmic retribution point to a time honored tradition; the script even provides the labyrinth of subterranean shafts that serve the Boogens (never named in the film) as a conduit to consumption with the equivalent of a secret sliding panel in an egress into the cellar of the protagonists' rented home. Made for $600,000 (nearly twice the budget of Halloween), the film benefits from the same old-fashioned, no frills approach that producer Charles E. Sellier, Jr. brought to such quasi-documentary, family-oriented ventures In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), The Mysterious Monsters (1976) and Beyond and Back (1978). Sellier and director James L. Conway enjoyed greater license on this Taft International Pictures release in the form of cursing, sexual frankness, and discreet nudity but the charm of The Boogens is in the just-the-arguable-facts approach of those Sunn Classic Pictures hits, which seasoned even its Biblical subjects with the tawdry aftertaste of tabloid exploitation.
Given the film's budget, it would have been unlikely for The Boogens not to have turned a profit yet a sequel never materialized. Despite the endorsement of horror novelist Stephen King (who praised it as "a wildly energetic monster movie" in Twilight Zone Magazine), the film faded into the background of a decade lousy with franchised fright. In retrospect, it is not difficult to appreciate why The Boogens failed to become a horror event on par with Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), which seems a possible inspiration. Both on a technical and a narrative level, The Boogens seems behind the curve of what was then becoming the state of the genre. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) jumped through the same hoops (complete with a menu of unsuspecting characters falling victim to an alien entity) and its descent into the maelstrom has lost little shock value over the intervening quarter century.
A box office dud at the time, The Thing has since been canonized as a modern classic, having gained currency with the passage of the same years that buried The Boogens in obscurity. With so many 80s horror films having been rebooted for the New Millennium (Friday the 13th [2009], My Bloody Valentine [2009], Fright Night [2011]), enterprising producers might consider dusting off The Boogens for a new audience and providing a more generous budget that would allow the title creatures to chew more than just scenery.
Producer: Charles E. Sellier, Jr.
Director: James L. Conway
Screenplay: Bob Hunt; David O'Malley (screenplay and story); Tom Chapman (story)
Cinematography: Paul Hipp
Art Direction: Linda Kiffe
Music: Bob Summers
Film Editing: Michael Spence
Cast: Fred McCarren (Mark Kinner), Rebecca Balding (Trish Michaels), Anne-Marie Martin (Jessica Ford), Jeff Harlan (Roger Lowrie), John Crawford (Brian Deering), Med Flory (Dan Ostroff), Jon Lormer (Greenwalt, the old man), Scott Wilkinson (Deputy Blanchard), Marcia Reider (Martha Chapman), Peg Stewart (Victoria Tusker).
C-95m.
by Richard Harland Smith
