Blame it on the boogey

REVIEWED - BOOGEYMAN: The only real surprise in this brain-atrophying horror film, which recently topped the US box-office during the post-Christmas effluent discharge, is that, rather than being a rip-off of Halloween, it is a pale, empty imitation of The Shining.

On the whole, this is a bad thing. Ghastly slasher films tend to be enlivened by the occasional beheading; ghastly ghost stories - Is that what this is? - are generally just plain boring. Perhaps the censor, now committed to providing detailed information about precisely what shocks await the sensitive viewer, should append warnings to the posters of those movies that clearly contain too little violence.

Frankly, the plot of no film since Last Year at Marienbad has so confused me, but, for what it's worth, the picture begins with a father reassuring his son that there is no such thing as the Boogeyman and then (oh, the irony) being sucked into a cupboard by that very fiend.

Some years later the lad, now Jessica Biel's brother out of 7th Heaven, journeys home from the city to bury his mother (played in flashback and as a ghost by Xena, Warrior Princess) and to come to terms with what's in every closet and what's under every bed.

It seems that the hero's hometown has, in the years since he left, been rezoned as a rest home for those creaky horror staples no longer of use even to Stephen King. Mad-eyed, blue-skinned children stalk the night. A bath fills with gunk the texture of mud and the colour of arterial blood. A crazed raven throws itself at a car windshield. Will the protagonist find himself being urged to spend "just one night" in a haunted house? He will.