Around
1954, the animation studio mogul Walt Disney in an effort to raise money for
the impending development and opening of his original theme parks across the
country such as Disneyland, set his
sights on opening a series of programs for television broadcast. After landing a deal with the ABC network, Walt Disney’s Disneyland was born with
shows like Davy Crockett capturing national
attention as well as securing the financing and promotion of his long gestating
Disneyland theme park.
Between
the inception of Walt Disney’s Disneyland,
the television program changed names from Walt
Disney Presents to Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color as well as hands from ABC to NBC and continued on
well past Mr. Disney’s death in 1966 before becoming The Wonderful World of Disney.
Up until his death, Disney hosted most of the programming himself and it
wasn’t until the mid-80s with the newly retitled The Disney Sunday Movie found a new host with then CEO Michael
Eisner and the television series found a new home back on the ABC network from
1986 to 1988.
During
this time, the Disney Company unveiled on their weekly Disney Sunday Movie a series of original television movies aired on
both the ABC network and their own Disney Channel. Much like Walt
Disney’s Disneyland, the weekly program hosted by Eisner was intended to
boost sales in the amusement parks and renew interest in original content after
the failure of The Black Cauldron and
their own attempts at horror with The
Watcher in the Woods and Something
Wicked This Way Comes underperformed at the box office.
Meanwhile,
outside the Disney stratosphere, a screenwriter by the name of Michael Janover
was busy shopping around a horror comedy called Cheap Thrills which would have predated things like the Wayans
Brothers’ Scary Movie by almost
twenty years. Initially pitched to
Columbia Pictures with Cheech and Chong in mind, this Airplane! styled comedy with jabs at Dracula and The Exorcist
almost happened until a certain gag managed to offend the staunchly Catholic
CEO of the studio and the project was scrapped altogether.
Catching
wind of the project’s demise, Disney approached Janover with the prospect of
doing Cheap Thrills on a smaller
scale for television with the screenplay’s subversive humor toned down
considerably for family audiences. With
the little tweaking and some influences courtesy of Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye with the segment The Ledge involving a man clinging for
his life to a high-rise skyscraper as the antagonist taunts him with
‘Boogey! Boogey! Boogey!’, The Disney Sunday Movie Mr. Boogedy was born.
Running
a brisk forty-five minutes long for the Disney
Sunday Movie television slot, the low-budgeted family horror-comedy Mr. Boogedy follows gag-gift salesman
Carlton Davis (Richard Masur of The Thing
and Stephen King’s It) and his wife
Eloise (Mimi Kennedy) and their three children into the fictional New England
town of Lucifer Falls as they attempt to set up shop and business in an
abandoned home that turns out to be haunted by an evil spirit from the Colonial
period by the name of Mr. Boogedy.
Amid
a mixture of goofy sight gags and PG rating level scares akin to Disney’s own Hocus Pocus, the quickly shot and
assembled Mr. Boogedy prominently
features a cackling glowing green ‘hamburger faced’ demon in a sparkling magic
cloak that frankly feels like a poor man’s Emperor Palpatine but it manages to
work anyway. Co-starring John Astin as the eccentric landlord/local historian,
future Buffy the Vampire Slayer
starlet Kristy Swanson and future Married
with Children star David Faustino, the short film is a silly spooky family
friendly endeavor which unlike the failed theatrical Disney horror outings
proved to be a minor hit. Spawning a
cult following, this charming little Disney TV flick remains imperfect, gleefully
silly and even annoying at times.
Carlton
Davis, for instance, lives, breathes, eats and shits out practical jokes and
pranks for the entirety of the film when wife Eloise isn’t croaking out one of
the most irritating nails-on-chalkboard cackles in movie history. And yet characters like John Astin’s
wonderfully expressive and hilarious Neil Witherspoon and the dated mid-80s
Disney charm make it all worth the watch.
More than anything, Mr. Boogedy
functions a time capsule of how family friendly Halloween oriented
horror-comedies would or would not come to be in the ensuing years.
Sensing
a hit on their hands, the Disney Company flirted with the idea of treating Mr. Boogedy as a pilot for a potential
running television series at one point.
Deciding on testing the waters for such an endeavor, both screenwriter Janover
and still active television director Oz Scott reunited with much of the cast
for the film for a feature length sequel intended to follow the ongoing antics
of the Davis family and the ghostly sorcerer.
Had
it worked, one can only speculate just what kind of television series this
short film would have developed into.
Moreover, up to this point Mr.
Boogedy proved to be far more successful than the previously mentioned
theatrical feature family oriented horror films the Disney Company took a stab
at. Unfortunately, Disney and the Davis
family would not strike gold with round two.
Bride of Boogedy (1987)
Only
a year after the events of Mr. Boogedy,
Disney’s longer, more expensive sequel catches up with the Davis family who
have since landed a local gag-gifts shop and become increasingly involved with
the residents of Lucifer Falls such as staging a town carnival and fending off
an angry man-child (Eugene Levy) jealous of the Davis’ newfound financial
success. It would seem they’ve done away
with the evil Mr. Boogedy and his magic cloak, or so they thought. Gradually regaining his strength from beyond
the grave, the titular supernatural villain is determined to retrieve his magic
cloak and wreak havoc on the family which cast him out into the depths of Hell
and manages to demonically possess more than a few characters to do his
bidding.
Due
to scheduling conflicts, the lovable John Astin and Kristy Swanson were unable
to return and in their place are a cavalcade of truly annoying characters and,
remarkably, a padded out running time with less than half of the meat and
potatoes offered by the first film. Instead
of Astin’s eccentric Neil Witherspoon, we get Leonard Frey as his brother
Walter and the overacting which Astin managed to make funny and engaging comes
off as cloying and irritating with Frey.
What’s
more, if you were turned off by Carlton and Eloise Davis in the previous film,
they all but double down on the very characteristics that made them so annoying
in the first place. Where Mimi Kennedy’s
grating cackle in the original treaded a fine line between mildly amusing and
irksome, she all but beats the “gag” so far into the ground here that the
casual viewer in the midst of surfing nightly cable TV programming are inclined
to change the channel.
Overqualified
Ghost and Better Off Dead actor Vincent Schiavelli shows up in this too as an
undertaker in an underutilized performance and we’re treated to a myriad of
peculiar small town locals we could care less about as this thing bores
on. Some of the visual effects are
indeed superior to the first film, as are the set pieces and production values,
but in the end it hardly matters. To say
Bride of Boogedy is dead on arrival
would be putting it too modestly. Where
the first film worked for having brevity, this sequel drags like a flea bitten
dog trying to wipe the itching off its ass.
A
shame because for all the extra money and additional cast members and expanded
running time, this one all but killed any notion of a Mr. Boogedy television series from ever happening. Having grown up with the short TV film as a
child, Mr. Boogedy still has a
certain modicum of nostalgic value. I’m
glad to have seen Bride of Boogedy
once if only to tell others with authority to avoid it like the plague.
- Andrew Kotwicki