The Boogens (1981) is memorable to me for four main reasons.
My dad disdained horror movies, aside from occasional forays into more prestige offerings like The Exorcist or Poltergiest. For whatever reason, he watched The Boogens.
The Newhart Show referenced The Boogens.
Back then we got a magazine every month called Orbit. It listed all of the cable channel schedules. Each issue had a glossary of all of the movies showing that month and a short description of them. Whenever we got a new Orbit, I sat down and laboriously read the movie glossary, trying to hunt out hidden gems.
I still remember the description of The Boogens:
“They look like big ugly turtles with tentacles…”
Whoever wrote that one-line summary deserves a handshake. It’s poetry.
Finally, The Boogens possesses a modicum of charm as a creature feature. It has no big names; it’s cheap; its scope is limited; but you can tell those involved tried.
Picking Boogens
Rebecca Balding plays the heroine of The Boogens. Balding may have not gotten much of a career out of the film, but she netted a husband. Balding and the director, James L. Conway, fell in love on the set of The Boogens. They are still married today. Balding went on to appear in a number of TV shows like Matt Houston, MacGuyver and Beverly Hills 90210.
Fred McCarren is the movie’s affable leading man. McCarren showed up in Xanadu, but most of his career was spent on TV, as well. He had roles in shows like The Dukes of Hazard, Remington Steele and more before dying at the relatively young age of 55.
Anne-Marie Martin plays the babe in The Boogens. She resembles a Caucasian Salma Hayek or perhaps the sister of Colleen Camp. Martin appeared in other horror films like Prom Night and Savage Harvest, a hidden gem where Martin helps Tom Skerritt battle lions in what is, essentially, a siege film. Martin went on to marry Michael Crichton and co-wrote Twister with him.
I like to think Martin wrote one of my favorite stupid moments in cinema:
“Is there an F5?”
*dramatic silverware clink*
Groovin’ Boogen
Jeff Harlan is the comic relief of The Boogens. If you look at him cross-eyed, you might think he is Dana Carvey. Most of Harlan’s career was spent in TV (I’m seeing a pattern here) and continues to this day. For example, Harlan recently appeared in the Roseanne revival.
John Crawford plays a miner dude. Crawford came from old Hollywood and appeared in roughly 4,500 movies, including Zombies of the Stratosphere and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. Got to love the guys who treated movie-making like a nine-to-five job.
Med Flory plays another miner dude in The Boogens. Flory also had a blue-collar career in movies and showed up in small roles in everything from Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor to Magnum P.I. He was also 6’5. I wonder if Flory had to fend off amorous advances of Martin. If Martin married Crichton, she must have had a thing for tall dudes…
Finally, Jon Lormor rounds out the main cast as the creepy old man. He mostly hovers around in the background looking simultaneously pensive and dangerous. Lormer has also been in a lot of stuff. Most people will recognize him from turns in The Twilight Zone and Creepshow.
The aforementioned James L Conway directed The Boogens. He did nothing to transcend the genre, but he delivered a generally coherent movie. Surprise, surprise, Conway also ended up doing a lot of TV stuff. Conway knocked around numerous Star Trek series and is still going today. He recently directed an episode of The Orville.
The Boogens have a couple of writing credits, but in the interest of brevity, we will mention Jim Kouf as the main one. Kouf also has a decent record of producing work that might not be earth-shattering but is competent. He wrote things like Up The Creek, Stakeout, The Hidden and Rush Hour.
Wiping Boogens
The Boogens makes use of one of my sneaky favorite story settings — mines.
Something naturally spooky exists about mines. You are underground in dark, dank tunnels. The tunnels might collapse. The tunnels might flood. You might dig up treasure or you might dig up something scary. Mines are like oil rigs as horror movie locations — they should be used a smidge more.
Right off the bat, The Boogens does a competent job setting the scene. The opening credits are a montage of old-time mining photos and old-time newspaper headlines that build the world. The sequence gives the viewer just enough of a framework to hang their imagination on.
Information delivery is a fascinating thing in storytelling. Too many details can overwhelm a viewer and make them check out. On the other hand, too few details can frustrate the viewer with a lack of answers. It’s a tricky balancing act to provide the right amount of exposition.
Boogen Movin’
Once the opening credits pass, The Boogens gets into first gear…and pretty much stays there. It is a low-key movie. The film mostly orbits the house where all of the characters are staying. Occasional jaunts to the mine and to a bar happen, where everyone is amazed by Martin’s uncanny ability to sink the eight-ball whenever it is two inches from the pocket. A regular Minnesota Fats is Martin …
Otherwise, the movie is content to maneuver around the house and use monster POV to generate suspense. Obviously, they don’t want to show the monster and the single location doesn’t give them much to work with. To break up the monotony, their solution is to use a dog as both a potential victim and in a bait-and-switch.
Upon reflection, they actually get a lot of subtle mileage out of the dog. A filmmaking lesson probably exist there somewhere. Rather than stalking person after person around the house, using a dog riffs on the formula and gives the movie a tiny bit of freshness, like putting some strawberry in a rhubarb desert. You might not notice its presence overtly, but you’d be less joyful if it was absent.
Boogen Woogen Bugle Boy
Does The Boogens inspire joy?
The Boogens is second-tier all the way, but it’s enjoyable to watch a movie that contains no sense- and physics-assaulting CGI sequences, identity politics, social messages, self-awareness or despicable characters. The people who made The Boogens probably earmarked ten percent of its budget for beer.
It’s that kind of movie.
What about The Boogens themselves?
The movie title is false advertising. There are no Boogens, plural. The filmmakers could only afford one Boogen. The creature does, in fact, look like a big ugly turtle with tentacles, but I would argue that its ugliness is more adorable than terrifying.
Biologically, the Boogen has fun traits. It’s amphibious and has stalking abilities. It has claws on the ends of its tentacles and can “whip” it’s victims to death, along with grabbing them. Practically, the puppet is a bit clunky, which is another reason they don’t show the creature until the last five minutes.
Due to its limitations, The Boogens is a movie that could be effectively be remade in the vein of The Thing, The Fly and The Blob. Enough meat is left on the bone with the story that could be leveraged into creating something new and entertaining.
Boogen Book
I have the novelization of The Boogens. The book offers a bit more plot than the movie. For example, a touch of conspiracy is present in the book that does not exist in the movie. The book has a villain that is lacking from the movie. Furthermore, the Boogens are less lizard-like in the book. They are more on the spidery side, with tentacles instead of legs and slimy like octopuses.
On the other hand, the movie does a better job than the book when it comes to the fate of the characters. The book spends its time developing the heroes, shallowly to be sure, only to dispatch them with absolutely zero fanfare in the final pages.
The climax of the book can roughly be approximated by the following sentences:
Main Character A and Main Character B got trapped in a closet and died. Main Character C and Main Character D didn’t see a creature behind them. It grabbed them and dragged them away into darkness. Meanwhile, the villain drove away, reflecting on how none of it is really worth it. And he was impotent.
Huh, says I?
Oh well, I still admire the lurid compactness of the novelization. I like a 1000-page tome as much as the next guy, but I miss the days when you went in a book store and had about a million slim paperbacks to choose from, and they all had crazy covers and were not merely reprints of best-sellers. Meanwhile, all of those squeaky metal racks in libraries were also packed with secondary market stuff.
Essentially, that is the feeling a movie like The Boogens invokes. The Boogens does not belong on any Top Ten list, unless it is a list of mine/horror movies where it would be sandwiched between Mother Lode and The Strangeness, which has a vagina monster eating an action figure.
Smearing Boogens
If you ever feel the need to check out The Boogens, YouTube has a nice HD version available. In the meantime, here’s the trailer…
Stephen King loved The Boogens. He wrote a review of it in Twilight Zone Magazine, which helped it gain traction with the public. King called it a “wildly energetic monster movie.”
That might have been the cocaine speaking. I’d call The Boogens “a mildly decent way to spend ninety minutes revisiting a throwback to simpler times.”
