review: THE BOOGENS. like boogers, except not really.

To simply say I had bad taste as a child seriously robs my lack of judgment in film of any real gravitas. I didn't just have bad taste, it was as if the phrase had been created just for lil me. The b-flicks that Gilbert Gottfried introduced for "USA Up All Night" were what made life living (well, that & a piping hot bag of Pop Qwiz, washed down with a few gulps of Crystal Pepsi for the few months it lasted on store shelves). To this day, my own personal mission is to rediscover every awful movie I watched way back when and record my thoughts on them, some twenty odd years removed. Some memories are more prominent than others, but one that has always stood out in my mind was of small, critter-like creatures attacking workers in a factory and/or mine.

Eventually, I stumbled across the monstrosity known as The Boogens and thought maybe, perhaps, this was the film I remembered. Unfortunately, it is not. I like to think that even as a child who found Kid Cuisine meals to be the epitome of good eatin', I would have turned my nose up at this thing and actually gone outside to, uh, play. A few off-screen kills, a most hilariously obnoxious romance, and a single creature that turns the plurality of title into one big, fat lie make this the perfect movie for those with the more masochistic of tendencies. If it was at all possible to market it in pill form, sales of Ambien would plunge.



A rather good opening montage of old newspaper articles establishes the backstory: a coal mine in Silver City, Colorado, is closed after unexplainable accidents over a number of years that claim the lives of numerous miners. Naturally, after a few minutes pass, some Einsteins reopen the mine. A large pile of human bones is discovered and...well, no one does anything. They just leave them there. Lovely working conditions, stumbling around a dark mine with various mandibles under foot.



Two of the young mine workers, Roger and Mark, are anticipating the arrival of Roger's girlfriend and another chick who's tagging along with her. The landlady of these chicas decides to prepare the house she's renting to them and, unfortunately for her, she has no idea that her evening is going to be a week of yellow shitstorms rolled into a mere few hours. After almost hitting a deer and getting her land yacht of a vehicle stuck in a ditch, she's forced to set up camp at the rental property for the evening. We suffer through ten minutes of nothing until she wanders into the basement (shock!), awakens whatever is down there, and gets attacked & hopefully killed by something because her face is beginning to grate.



Roger's girlfriend, Jessica, and her Mary Sue bestie, Trish, arrive the next day. Trish and Mark suddenly embark on a romance after knowing each other for about three-quarters of a "General Hospital" installment and we have to suffer through it for nearly an hour before anything else occurs. Roger bites the big one while his gal is playing pool at the local drink and the other two halfwits make sweet love. Long tentacles grab him from under his truck in the garage and an unseen creature finally kills him. Mostly offscreen, of course.



Not long after, Jessica decides to bathe and as she's soaping up her unseen breasts, large claws emerge from the heating vent in the floor. Now is the time for Jessica to put her detective hat on and go investigate exactly what those noises are. Quickly, something grabs her and starts to pull her down into the vent, but she escapes and throws a kettle at it. It wants your flesh, not English Breakfast, Jessie. Fortunately for us, the thing finally kills her (onscreen!) by slashing the plasma out of her with its claws.

At this point, I was just fucking exhausted by this picture and wanted it to end. I still had twenty some odd minutes to go and the lethargic pacing was torturing me. I wanted to go all Sally Field on it and tell it that if mothers ran the world, bad movies like this wouldn't make it past storyboarding.



Turns out the house is located directly above the reopened mine and this weird ass scaly creature (seriously, that thing looked liked a miniature Sleestak adopted for use as a hand puppet on Mister Roger's Neighborhood) was coming in through the basement to KILL. And it was only one Boogen. Not plural as the title suggested. What a fucking rip. I guess The Boogen wouldn't have the same verbal jolt to it as The Boogens, but still. False advertising. They kill the thing by, get this, DROPPING A STICK OF DYNAMITE INTO THE MINE SHAFT. Premature ejaculators aren't even that anticlimactic.





My quest for the film I still have memories of in my cavernous mind still remains. Long nets of white cloud my memory, while this movie is suffering banishment in VHS obscurity. Perhaps one day, we'll both find our prince.