DVD review (region 1 & 2)
Directed by Gary Jones
Starring Erin Cahill, Chuck Hittinger, Mimi Michaels
Release date Out now (region 1); 27 April 2009 (region 2)

The Boogeyman stalks some college girls. You know the rest...

Opening with an agenda-setting sequence featuring a naked pretty girl being attacked at bath-time, Boogeyman 3 revels in its clichés. To be fair, viewers don’t really have the right to expect anything too groundbreaking from this straight-to-DVD franchise.

Surprisingly, it’s a competently made effort, with a couple of neat shocks and a creepy sense of evil lurking in the dorm rooms. The formula of sex followed by death is strictly adhered to, but the variation here is that the dead enter a sort of netherworld.

The characters are entirely token - how could they be anything but? - and their deaths become increasingly flamboyant as the movie continues. Naturally, it’s impossible to care about any of them and, as is the way with most horror franchises at this stage, the central villain has become more and more prominent and less and less scary.

Boogeyman 3 is the kind of movie where you know every beat of the story before it happens and there is a certain satisfaction in that. For a genre that has been popular with the home viewing market for at least 25 years, the attitude of filmmakers still seems to be, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Jonathan Wilkins

VERDICT: 4/10
If you’re even thinking about watching this, you probably already know what to expect.