Worth Mentioning - It's Burning Through to My Soul

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Demonic Toys and Stephen King.

BABY OOPSIE (2021)

Back in 2010, writer/director William Butler was tasked with making a sequel to the 1992 Full Moon classic Demonic Toys – and while the Demonic Toys 2 he delivered did feature the return of demonic toys Baby Oopsie Daisy and Jack Attack, they were overshadowed by other supernatural characters that were part of the story. So I wasn’t thrilled to hear that Butler would be back at the helm for another Demonic Toys project – a movie that’s a solo outing for Baby Oopsie (as you can tell from the title) and was released in chapters as a web series. Thankfully, the chapters were then assembled into a feature length version of the story, which has a running time of 76 minutes.

The first project to be filmed at the newly purchased Full Moon Manor in a Cleveland, Ohio suburb (because of course one of my favorite movie companies would start operating in my home state right after I moved), Baby Oopsie centers on Sybil Pittman (Libbie Higgins), who hosts a web program called All Dolled Up, “Cleveland’s only program dedicated to the restoration and preservation of dolls”, and shares a house with her wicked stepmother Mitzy (Lynne Acton McPherson), who threatens to sell off the house and throw away Sybil’s dolls. Watching how the pair interact, it’s no surprise to find that Sybil fantasizes about murdering Mitzi... and given what sort of movie this is, we can probably expect something terrible to happen to Mitzi by the time the end credits start rolling. Same goes for Sybil’s horrible boss Karen (Diane Frankhausen), and maybe the young guys who bully her on her way to and from work. There are some nice people around her – like Kristy (Marilyn Bass), who rents a room in the Pittman house, and neighbor Ray-Ray (Justin Armistead) – but that doesn’t mean they’ll be any safer than the people she can’t stand.

Baby Oopsie comes into Sybil’s life with the surprise delivery of a package containing the doll’s damaged head. Sybil does what she does: she restores the doll’s head and gives it a new body. And sure enough... soon enough... the evil doll comes back to life to start killing people again. Baby Oopsie isn’t much to look at this time around – oddly, the movie named after the character has the worst design of the character – but the doll is just as nasty and foul-mouthed as ever. While Butler got Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos to provide the voice of Baby Oopsie in Demonic Toys 2, this time it’s voice actress Jill Bartlett, who did a good job of delivering the lines. (Although my favorite Baby Oopsie voice will always be the legendary Frank Welker’s version of the character in Dollman vs. Demonic Toys – where the character happened to be a male, despite being a female in every other Demonic Toys project other than Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, which wasn’t a Full Moon production.)

Between scenes of killing Sybil’s enemies, Baby Oopsie torments Sybil, who has a history of mental illness, and causes her to start questioning her own sanity. Obviously Butler named her in reference to the book Sybil, which received a popular TV movie adaptation in the ‘70s where Sally Field played a woman named Sybil who had dissociative identity disorder. 

I thought Butler had proven with Demonic Toys 2 that he didn’t really have the right ideas to be working within the Demonic Toys franchise, so I was both surprised and disheartened to hear that the franchise had been handed over to him again with this Baby Oopsie project. It took me a couple years and a couple tries, but I was finally able to make it through Baby Oopsie, and found it to be better than I expected once I settled in and gave it a proper chance. Again, Baby Oopsie isn’t really the sort of movie (or web series) I hoped to see from a Demonic Toys project... but I suppose it’s a step up from Demonic Toys 2, because at least it does focus on the Baby Oopsie character.

THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

I became a horror fan at a very young age. In preschool, I was already watching some movies that not even some adults can handle – the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example. But while horror became my favorite genre to watch and read, that doesn’t mean a piece of entertainment didn’t mess with my head now and then. I’ve previously mentioned that childhood viewings of the Stephen King-inspired anthology Cat’s Eye left my young self convinced that a breath-stealing troll lived in the walls of my home. Another time King scared me senseless came when I read his collection of short stories Night Shift while spending a month at my grandmother’s house out of state. The story called The Boogeyman really freaked me out and left me scared of the darkness in my bedroom – and the closet in that room – for a portion of my stay. 

King’s The Boogeyman is incredibly creepy. I would love to see a faithful adaptation of it that’s just as creepy... but it’s not very likely to happen, because the story is about the title creature killing off a family’s young children – we’re talking infants and toddlers - one by one. It’s not a marketable concept. So it wasn’t very surprising to see that the movie we did get based on The Boogeyman, directed by Rob Savage from a screenplay by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman, has very little to do with the source material. The portion of the film that’s directly based on the story only takes up a few minutes, when the great David Dastmalchian shows up as a character named Lester Billings and walks into the at-home office of therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) to tell him the story of an evil being, a shadow monster, killing his children one by one. Lester quickly exits the picture... but the boogeyman lingers in the Harper home, going after Will’s teen daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and younger daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair).

The story Beck, Woods, and Heyman came up with to continue the ideas presented in the short story beyond the events that King told us about works well enough, and Thatcher turns in a terrific performance as the heroine who sets out to save herself and her younger sister from this creature that feeds on fear and murders children. The problem is, when you’re dealing with “the boogeyman” you need to make sure the character is the most terrifying, evil being imaginable. And the creature in this movie is absolutely not that. It’s just your typical movie monster that jumps around and screeches, coming off like a slightly more sophisticated version of the alien monsters in A Quiet Place, which was also written by Beck and Woods. This vision of the boogeyman is a total letdown.

Despite the disappointing title character, The Boogeyman does make for a decent horror viewing experience. But I don’t think anyone is going to be as scared by this movie as I was by King’s story when I was a kid.