Cucuy: The Boogeyman (2018)

Directed by Peter Sullivan [Other horror films: Summoned (2013), High School Possession (2014), Ominous (2015), The Sandman (2017)]

This is definitely one of the better flicks I’ve seen on Syfy in the last few years, surpassing my admittedly low expectations of it rather easily.

Focusing on the Latin American-based mythology of Cucay or the Sack Man, the movie had a strong Spanish feel to the film, which is something that I generally don’t care for. Here, however, they made it work, a big part due to the characters themselves who were mostly solid. It helped too that the story was pretty well-done, especially for a television flick.

Bella Stine did pretty good for as young an actress as she is. Both Marisol Nichols and Pedro Correa did commendably also, though it did take a bit for Correa to grow on me. The star of the film, and also the strongest performance, was Jearnest Corchado, who came across quite well as a strong teen fighting for her sister.

Another somewhat surprising aspect of the film is that the design of the titular Cucay isn’t that bad. At first, it does look a little ridiculous, but like Correa’s character, it grew on me after a while. I’m somewhat reminded of the 2017 Syfy film Stickman, in which the story was decent, but the design was terrible. Here, luckily both the story and special effects are superior.

So too is the ending. Instead of tacking on a hideous downer ending in the last two seconds of the film, they do something a bit differently, and though the effects of the specific scene I’m referring to are sketchy, I really liked the implications.

Most modern-day television movies don’t blow me away, and this one didn’t either, but I certainly recognize it as clearly one of the stronger efforts in the last few years (the only other one that really comes to mind is Neverknock from 2017). For a television movie, you could certainly do worse than this one, and though it doesn’t really add much to the genre, I was happy with the final product.

8/10