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49%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #14,276
...out of 20,698 movies
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Set in the midwest town of Rankin, "Boo!" revolves around the mysterious drowning of Emma Manning, a death that still haunts the small community and is grist for adolescent games that turn into terror. Rankin's twenty-something townies taunt the rich kids at the local college with tales of death. Kera is a curious local drawn to the mystery... no matter where it takes her.
--TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: March 3, 2005
In the opening scene of our feature film, we find old man Porter Manning (Rusty Mann) asleep in his rocking chair. His wife Emma (Molly Kaufman) comes out of the bedroom and goes into the kitchen, grabs a huge butcher knife, walks up behind Porter, puts it to his throat, and... nothing. She sets the knife down and leaves the house, and starts to walk around town in her nightgown. At this point, we can see that she has clearly gone insane over something, as she's talking to herself and singing to an unseen person. She arrives at a bridge, which she ends up falling into and drowning. This was in 1982, and her body was never found, says security guards Jack (Jason Lovett) and Morello (Fred Margison), the two who were telling this story to a group of college girls decked out for a costume party. Morello disagrees with a few of the details that Jack told, however, and claims that Porter was the one who drowned Emma, and that he has now gone insane and walks around town searching for her out of guilt. While it's true that crazy old Porter does indeed walk around the town, and it's also true that his wife is now deceased, nobody around the town really seems to know what exactly happened on that day and who, if anyone, is to blame. With the college girls sufficiently freaked out due to the story, they request that Morello walk them back to their party, which he agrees to.
As the group are heading through the park and back towards their party, all sorts of ghostly happenings involving Emma and Porter start to occur to the girls and the security guard. Each of them is about to shit their pants in fear, when it's revealed that it was all a prank setup by Jack, the other security guard. His buddies Stacey (Amanda Howard), Mark (Bryan Irzyk), Eddie (Michael Wollner), Kera (Lauren Carter), and Laurie (Allyson Voller) helped carry to it out, due to the groups hatred of the rich kids that come to their quiet little town of Rankin for the college that was established there. Sheriff Newman (Mike Dekovic) soon shows up and fires Jack from his security job as a result of the prank, and orders that no more of this foolishness be attempted. Fast-forward to the next day, and the gang is holed up in Kera's parent's ice-cream shop discussing what they'll do next. Since the sheriff ordered that no more pranks be pulled on the college kids, they decide to have a contest to see which of them can scare the other the best. As they're discussing the contest, Will (Aaron Siegel), one of the college boys, walks in and demands that they not pull anymore of those pranks on the girls. Since it'd already been decided to do such, he is about to leave... but not before Jack explains the contest, and ask him if he wants in. He agrees, and the contest is now on... but how much of the Porter / Emma story was true, and could their actions have awoken Emma's spirit?
This movie received quite a bit of praise when it made its way around the festival circuit, but honestly, I don't see why. The storyline has been done to death in previous movies, it plays out more like an episode of than a horror film, and it leaves too much open to debate in the ending moments. Well, to clarify that last statement... a good amount of the storyline is explained during the final scene, but one huge detail is left unanswered, which seemed to be an obvious setup for a sequel. I can understand leaving a small part of the plot open for a second entry into the series, as you do have to have some sort of hook to put asses in the seat later on down the road... however, when the part that they leave open was a huge part of the movie, it really doesn't work and and, for me, left me quite unsatisfied when the credits started to roll. When the whole movie builds up the "what really happened on that fateful day" angle, and then, just prior to seeing the credits roll by the main character basically says "we're not going to tell you in this movie, nah nah" with a huge, shit-eating grin on his face... it pretty much invalidates all of the effort that went into building up the storyline.
As the movie progresses along, the story is played out by a group of inexperience actors who, while not horribly bad in their roles, really didn't do a great job either. Now, instead of having these kids play out a horror ghost film, as one would expect from the cover and the description, we wind up with a teen drama with a bit of ghostly happenings thrown in as almost an afterthought. Kera is worried that her friends won't like her after she goes to college, she wants out of this small town, a romance between her and Will is teased, and a whole lot of pranks happen to the whole lot of the group. Maybe I was expecting too much, but in my view, the ghostly part of the movie (the main focus if the title and cover are to be believed) shouldn't have been pushed to the side to allow all of this teen angst junk get some screen time.
Overall, this would be one to avoid unless the idea of mixing a teen drama and a ghost story sounds like something you'd enjoy. It's not completely bad, as there is a handful of good scenes - the scene involving Jack and his first encounter with the ghost in his house was excellent, for example - but as a whole, the film really doesn't work out. 3/10.
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