1980: "The Boogeyman"

                               The Boogeyman is an 1980 horror film about a brother and sister (Jake and Lacey) haunted by the ghost of their mother's dead lover (who was killed by the brother), who uses a haunted cracked mirror (which is broken by Lacey after seeing his ghost-image in it) to get revenge on the siblings. It's also worth noting that this film was directed by German actor, Ulli Lommel, who is associated with the New German Cinema movement (especially with celebrated director Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and iconic pop artist, Andy Warhol. Then he directed this, and a bunch of other crap afterwards.

                             The Boogeyman is an awful, clunky mess. It is abound with logic leaps and vague details that barely register as a narrative. We have the basic framework (two siblings trying to fight the demons of their past) but the stuff in between is horribly blurry and muddled, like the cracked mirror itself.
                             The opening scene establishes this vagueness early on. The siblings look on as their mother and her companion are about to make love. The lovers catch them (the male companion is also abusive, implied by an off-screen slap) and the man ties Jake to his own bed (not sure what this punishment achieves; also, Lacey is not punished, even though she's just as guilty). Lacey cuts Jake free and Jake stabs the man to death viciously. Cut to years later, Lacey is married with a kid (though traumatized) and Jake doesn't talk, though this silence is also vague (was it because he was haunted by the memory of the stabbing? was it years of being institutionalized that brought him to silence? I don't know!). The movie never dwells on Jake and the fact that he's a mute psychopath. He nearly strangles a woman at one point, and I'm like, "Why are we worried about ghosts? We already have a killer in our midst!"
                           Lacey's husband wants to help Lacey confront her past so they go to the old house where the murder took place. Lacey sees a mirror in the room where he was murdered and sees the ghost of the murdered man in the reflection, so she shatters the mirror in fright. The husband picks up the mess and....keeps the mirror? Not only that, he miraculously reassembles the mirror from all the broken pieces, which is strangely impressive but impossible.
                          This, of course, leads to a series of killings, where there are no rules to how the killer ghost operates (how far do you have to be from mirror glass shards, or light refracted from said mirror, to not get horribly murdered?). Then the mirror is finally destroyed by being thrown into a well because.......mirror and glass apparently don't mix?

                          The more I think back on this film, the stupider I begin to feel for even dwelling on it. Don't bother with this dumpster fire.