Someone help me find the title of this movie. I saw it as a kid in the 80's and don't remember much about it. I remember some mines and two couples in a house, and these tentacles were coming out of the air vents to grab them. My initial probe into "The Boogens" was something along these lines. I have been shocked to see the number of similar inquiries out there.

 

It seems a LOT of people saw this as a kid, got scared, want to know what it is now that they're adults, and have no idea where to start other than describing the tentacles. Equally amazing is that this is enough information for knowledgeable horror movie buffs to accurately discern the movie in question.

 

Unfortunately, while "The Boogens" obviously made a huge impact (maybe “huge” is a generous adjective, but I'm going for dramatic effect here) on a number of kids in the 80's, it has never had much of a presence in the market. I spent years tracking down a copy, only finding an overpriced VHS version, and settling for a bootleg DVD for a number of years until it was finally released officially. There are far worse movies that have been far more easily attainable and are still much cheaper to acquire.

 

Of course, all of that raises the question of whether this kid-scareathon is worth the time to watch as an adult. Should you go to the trouble of tracking this down? That’s what I hope to answer with this review. Now that I'm 4 paragraphs in I guess I'll start getting on that topic.

 

"The Boogens" is an old-fashioned B monster movie. Back in the 20's a silver mine was closed due to unsafe conditions that resulted in the deaths of a number of miners. Years later a group of modern prospectors who specialize in reopening old mines begin an exploration of this particular one. The hired hands and their girlfriends move into a nearby house. And the mayhem begins. Shafts from the mine connect to the house's cellar and the predatory boogens see an opportunity to get a meal. They begin terrorizing the couples and the miners, but because they tend to attack then drag the bodies to their lair nobody recognizes the danger until it's too late.

 

The action starts off slowly and builds gradually. We know something bad happened in the past, we see people dragged off, then we see tentacles reaching out for people, and towards the end of the movie we finally see the boogens in all their glory. There's very little real struggle until roughly the last quarter of the movie. Up to that point we have a lot of the miners exploring their claim and mulling over the skeletons they find as we get to know the couples as the main characters. Trish, an aspiring writer, does a little research into the history of the original closing of the mine and Roger spends a lot of time lamenting his lack of sex due to being away from his girlfriend for several days.

 

It's a slow buildup of the mystery of the creatures and what is going on. That's not necessarily the best approach to a monster since we, the viewers, already know we're dealing with monsters. In fact, I think a lot of monster movie buffs might find the initial pace boring since most modern horror movies tend to have a fast pace of tension and horror. What helps is that the movie has a good sense of humor. I laughed more than once during this which is part of the reason I like returning to it. So it can be fun, and it does offer some suspense pretty early (is a boogen going to get her when she goes down to the basement?), it just has a slow pace for a while. All of that pays off, though, because the tension that doesn't pay off with a monster attack is likely to be followed by one with a hungry boogen.

 

I also laughed when I wasn't supposed to. The boogens, when they are fully revealed, really look like evil muppets that could be cute if you defanged them. I guess that's why we don't see them more than we do. I suppose it might have been unsatisfying to not see the monsters at all, but the tentacle scenes are definitely better than the face-to-face encounters even if they are not altogether convincing either.

 

The acting is not bad though don't go expecting award-winning dramatizations. Few if any of these actors are likely to be recognizable. I find them amusing, though, and Rebecca Balding (Trish) has a girl-next-door cuteness that I like.

 

Let me just lay all my tentacles out on the table here. I love this movie so much that I watch it every single year during the Halloween season. It's not the best made movie ever, but it's loads of monstery fun. Just remember it's early 80's and low budget. If you keep that in mind you're less likely to have your expectations high enough to be let down much even if you don't have the same appreciation for it that I do.