Tim (Barry Watson),twenty-three years old and a successful editor for a magazine, is scared of dark closets and cupboards, because, as a child, he saw his father pulled into a wardrobe by the Boogeyman. When Tim's mother dies, he returns to the family home, where, once again, he finds that the creature that likes to lurk in dark places is still up to his old tricks.

Boogeyman begins in exactly the same way as Monsters Inc.: with a frightened boy cowering in bed, imagining that everything in his darkened room is a monster. Unlike Monsters Inc., however, this supernatural tale from producers Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi (of Evil Dead/Spiderman fame) is a load of old toss!

Utilising a vast array of pointless visual gimmickry, and relying on an annoying amount of cheap scare tactics to keep its audience from nodding off, Boogeyman is yet another bland Hollywood horror which concentrates on delivering style over substance, winding up resembling an MTV music video in the process.

Towards the end of the film, director Stephen T. Kay gives up on any pretence that he knows what he is doing, and lets loose with a barrage of really bad CGI effects in a finalé so utterly awful that I wince just thinking about it: after flying through all kinds of interspatial doorways, Tim counts to 6, hits a toy bird with a baseball bat (turning it into a flock of real birds),smashes a spherical electric plasma lamp, and breaks his action man figure, thus destroying the objects that have caused his fear and, consequently, the creature. Easy when you know how!

I've recently gained a desire for horror films, and for some reason now enjoy being scared, having watched this I must admit there are more scares watching episodes of Scooby Doo. This film is proof that reviews generally work, and the fact that this film has generally dire reviews is no accident.

The basic story of the film, a young guy Tim, who has a vivid imagination and a fear of the Boogeyman sees his father carried off by the Boogeyman, and is haunted in later life by the fiend, but does he exist, or was he just a coping mechanism? The trouble is that after ten minutes of the film you simply couldn't care less, a very weak story, poorly devised characters and absolutely no scares.

Do yourself a favour and ignore it, I wish I had!! 3/10

Anyone expecting genuine horror from the producers of the EVIL DEAD trilogy – that is, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert – will be sorely tested by this stinker of a film which offers neither horror or chills in a mindless ramble through a bunch of horror film clichés, all done on a PG-13 rating. Yep, that's right, don't go expecting any gore whatsoever in this movie, or anything remotely horrific. Instead it's a dark and downright dull film, made by a nobody MTV director who has fun with all his camera shots but who can't direct his way out of a paper bag when all is said and done. The best bits of this movie have a real EVIL DEAD 2 feel to them – no surprise considering the producers – but the scares are less than half as good and the whole film has a "seen it all before" feel.

Astonishingly, it takes over an hour before things get going in the movie, if you can call it that. Until then we get a talentless actor wandering through dingy corridors and having doors pop open in front of him; repetitive, yes, scary, no way. The look of the film is polished but it's so derivative and, in the end, empty, that I would prefer a hundred cheesy B-movies a la CROCODILE than sitting through this again.

The cast is a bunch of nobodies, aside from Raimi throwing in his favourite actress, Lucy Lawless, playing the boy's mother in yet another blink-and-you'll-miss-it performance. The appearance of the 'boogeyman' at the film's climax is a hilarious example of how NOT to do CGI on a budget; this ghoulish spectre looks like something out of an '80s computer game, and its two dimensional appearance sadly doesn't cut the mustard in the modern world of effects-driven blockbusters. It would have been better to stick with a man in a rubbery suit. On that note, fans intrigued by the premise will no doubt have a lot more fun with the '80s Troma release, MONSTER IN THE CLOSET.