At The Movies: The Boogeyman a Stephen King adaptation haunted by stale ideas

The Boogeyman (NC16)

99 minutes, opens on Thursday, 2 stars

The story: Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and her young sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) are grieving their mother. Their therapist father Will (Chris Messina) continues receiving patients in his home office. A highly agitated man shows up, begging for a consultation. The man brings into the home an unseen passenger, one who will not rest until it has destroyed the family. Adapted from a Stephen King short story published in 1973.

The phrase “adapted from a Stephen King story” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

On promotional materials, invoking the name of the lord of horror writing gives the impression that the movie will be accessible. It will feature characters who live in a small town shrouded in a dark mystery, culminating in a visit to a house that is a focal point of evil.

That sums up this movie, except it lacks the stuff that good King adaptations have – surprises, strong characters and good scares.

British director Rob Savage, helmer of well-received indie scarefests Host (2020) and Dashcam (2021), appears to have a good grip on the story, at least for the first two acts.

At the start, the troublemaking entity is invisible and the sense of foreboding is strong. The chills are amplified by the use of shadows and camera perspective, especially in scenes in which Sawyer is in bed, fearful of what may lurk just beyond the open door of the closet. The slow reveals are handled exquisitely.

But the work also carries the typical list of King adaptation faults, the worst of which is the switch in the third act, when the supernatural horror chills are replaced by an uninspired monster hunt.

A multitude of imagined horrors is collapsed into one underwhelming physical reality.

Hot take: This Stephen King adaptation makes good use of the unseen to deliver scares, but the effort is undermined by the need to reveal too much about the monster in the film’s finale.

Red Line (NC16)

99 minutes, opens on Thursday, 2 stars

The story: Le (rapper-actor E.so) and his brother Chieh (Alan Kuo) are petrolheads who race their souped-up cars on Taiwan’s mountain roads. When tragedy strikes, Le loses direction. He meets Hui (Ella Chen), a doctor who will straighten him out and offer help as he solves a mystery involving a nameless driver, played by Hong Kong actor Andy Lau.

Some backstory about this curious jumble of a movie: This is a project in memory of late stuntman Blackie Ko and is the feature directing debut of his son, Jacky.

Lau gets a “special appearance” billing here as his screen time is miniscule. He is joined by other veterans making brief stopovers, such as Eric Tsang and Karena Lam.

Herein lies the first problem. Whenever a character played by an instantly recognisable A-lister like Tsang, Lam or Lau pops into view, one is yanked out of the world of the movie. It is like watching a commercial for a much better, classier movie while one is in the middle of a much more rough-hewn production.

When not lurching from heavy melodrama (death on the roads) to slapstick (skits involving patients on ambulance stretchers) to cringey romance between Le and Dr Hui, the story lingers on something even less appetising – the bromance between Le and his racing teammates, who happen to be a collection of lazy stereotypes (the masculine girlboss, the electronics genius and others).

The action scenes featuring cars and ambulances tearing up Taiwanese roads offer a reprieve, but even that is marred by cheesy computer-enhanced visual effects.

Hot take: This car-heavy tribute to a stuntman is riddled with tonal inconsistencies, with a story that should have been overhauled before it left the workshop.