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For a good many years, this tight little monster-thriller remained hidden, hindered and buried in various legal red tape, leaving fans to only reminisce about its one-time theatrical run in 1981 and subsequent cable appearance two years later; if you were lucky enough to own a VCR back in the year of Return Of The Jedi, you taped this little masterpiece off a late-night Cinemax broadcast. Otherwise you periodically consulted Fangoria magazine and gazed with eager eyes upon their Video Eye Of Dr. Cyclops column to see what kind of genre fare, new or old, had made it onto video....maybe The Boogens would find its way there one day. God knows I looked pretty frequently....
The tale, scripted by Jim Kouf, moves at a rapid clip and begins with a lone motorist breaking down on a snowy mountain road and hiking the rest of the way to an old house set off the road. Once inside, she hears strange noises and is suddenly accosted and devoured by an unseen creature from a floor vent. Clearly this is not the house you want to rent.
If it sounds like too much has been given away here, it really hasn't. The storyline offers no real narrative innovation today, much like it didn't in 1981. It's the execution that makes The Boogens a must-see and a long-overdue addition to collectable home video.
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But thanks to a few merciful muses, not to mention a kind soul or two from the vaults of horror movie purgatory, James L. Conway's lean and mean tale of vicious subterraneous reptiles debuted onto legit home video a few years back. And watching it again some fifteen-plus years later only re-affirms what was apparent back in the day: This is how spuds-n-burger budget monsters movies are supposed to go.
But it is being rented by a group of young college-aged folk, including one Trish, played by Rebecca Baldwin (whose performance in the previous thriller Silent Scream was fantastic). And the important thing is that it's not just this house that is infested with these carnivorous little bastards: there's a myriad of underground caverns beneath the whole township which are now crawling with this particular brand of reptilian varmint.
And apparently it's nothing to new to a few of the old-timers in the area; later we come to find that many years back, a local mining operation was ceased because of attacks from these "boogens," and the mine was sealed up for all time. That is, until a very recent underground blast inadvertantly set the long-brooding tribe free to roam the underground and come up through various townfolks' basements to wreak their special brand of havoc.