Bride of Boogedy, on ABC
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Caution: spoilers.

This is the sequel to Mr. Boogedy. It first aired in 1987 on "The Disney Sunday Movie." I probably saw it at the time, but I never remembered it very well, and always wanted to see it again. Then in 2015, both movies were finally released as a double feature on DVD, exclusive to the Disney Movie Club. So I watched the first movie on the first Sunday of October, and the second movie on the second Sunday. Whereas the first "movie" was actually more of a special (being just 45 minutes), the sequel was a true TV movie (92 minutes). I should say that the same actors who played Carleton, Eloise, Corwin, and Mr. Boogedy himself all reprised their roles (though I never would have known it was the same actor playing Corwin). Both Jennifer and R.E. were recast. Also, the character of Neil Witherspoon has been replaced by a Walter Witherspoon, who has the same job that Neil did. Presumably he's a relative, though no explanation is given about their relationship, nor is it explained why Neil isn't around anymore. (One could almost assume it's meant to be the same character, in spite of Walter looking nothing like Neil, and maybe the writers just forgot his first name from the original movie. I dunno.)

Anyway, I assumed, since this movie aired a year after the original, that it would be set a year later. (And Wikipedia says it is.) But I find that unlikely, since at the start of the movie, Carleton hadn't yet found a place to open his joke shop (Gag City, part of a major franchise). It's pretty unlikely that the Davises would have lived in Lucifer Falls anywhere near a year without the parents having jobs. Still, they've at least been in town long enough for most of the community to have gotten to like Carleton enough to elect him honorary mayor of their upcoming carnival, "Lucy Fest." But I'm getting ahead of myself. The movie starts with some guy sitting around a campfire telling a bunch of random kids a story about the Davises and Mr. Boogedy, a scene which obviously serves no purpose other than to recap the first movie. Then the scene shifts to a man named Elmer entering the Davis house, where the whole family (except Jennifer) play a scary prank on him. It turns out Elmer is Eloise's brother, as well as working for the Gag City franchise. He's there to tell Carleton that the company wants to give him a promotion, but Carleton declines, since he's gotten to like Lucifer Falls, and doesn't want to move away so soon after having gotten there. Meanwhile, they tell Elmer about Lucy Fest. And later he leaves town, but he promises to come back someday to play a prank of his own on the Davises.

Oh... and at some point in the midst of all that, we saw Jennifer walking home from a babysitting job, through some spooky woods. And she is apparently accosted by Mr. Boogedy, though he supposedly was gone for good, since his magic cloak had been taken from him in the first movie. Whoever it was that frightened Jennifer, it didn't really look like Boogedy to me. I mean, we don't get a good look at him at all, but he wasn't glowing green, or anything. Still, Jennifer was really scared, and when she told her family about it, she was upset that none of them believed her.

Sometime after that, at a town meeting, we see that a local store owner named Tom Lynch (Eugene Levy) is upset because until this year, he's always been the honorary mayor of Lucy Fest. Aside from that, we later see that he thinks Carleton's store is responsible for his own store's declining business. This is ludicrous for any number of reasons, but it helps set him up as the movie's antagonist. Meanwhile... um... lots of other stuff happens, and as I sit here writing this review immediately after watching the movie, I can't even remember the order it all happened. It really was full of totally random characters and scenes. But anyway, Carleton decides to open his store in a creepy building that used to be a house of horrors/wax museum. (I think in the first scene where we see the place, the wax statues were probably actual wax statues... or some kind of props... but I'm not sure. Because there's a later scene where they looked to me to be pretty obviously actors trying to be very still. So it was predictable that later still, they'd come to life. But if they were props in the first place, it would make no sense for the actors to have replaced them in the middle scene.) Anyway, the first time we saw them, we also meet a fortune teller named Madeleinska, who foresees Mr. Boogedy returning. This frightens all three kids, though their parents still don't take it seriously. Later, Corwin and R.E. both have the same nightmare about Mr. Boogedy, which freaks them out even more. And still their parents don't believe there's anything to worry about.

Um... anyway, Carleton and Eloise are mainly concerned with getting their store ready to open, as well as making preparations for Lucy Fest. And they decide to do a fake seance in the store. Meanwhile, for some reason, the kids go looking for the graveyard they'd seen in their dream. They find a statue of William Hanover (aka Mr. Boogedy) there. And they also totally randomly meet a creepy gravedigger named Lazarus (played by Vincent Schiavelli, whom I must have seen in other things). And they decide to take him to their parents' store, for a reason that wasn't immediately apparent. But I guess he wanted to be a ventriloquist in the festival. And um, he joins them at the practice seance, in which Eloise is the medium and Carleton is behind a curtain providing sound effects and speaking as "master of the spirit world." Meanwhile, Mr. Lynch is outside trying to sabotage things, and this unwittingly (and inexplicably) leads to Mr. Boogedy possessing Carleton.

Oh, I also wanted to mention that, early on, I figured the plot would involve someone pretending to be Mr. Boogedy, to scare the Davises away. My first suspect was a woman named Mrs. Hooter, who we see randomly around town a few times throughout the movie. My second suspect was Mr. Lynch. (If you check the Halloween Specials link at the top of the page, you'll see similar speculation about other characters, most of whom never really seemed like plausible suspects to me.) But I need to tell you that nothing ever comes of that. So maybe we're supposed to believe that it really was Mr. Boogedy that Jennifer saw near the start of the movie, though I find that pretty nearly impossible. Which is just one of the things that don't make sense about this movie. But I guess it doesn't matter.

Anyway, Mr. Boogedy is still trapped in the underworld (though he is able to access our world through the statue in the graveyard). So he controls Carelton, and uses him to retrieve his cloak, which was, for reasons I don't understand, in some other dimension or something. (There is no explanation as to how it got there after the Davises obtained it in the first movie.) And after Carleton gets the cloak and puts it on, he seems to go full-Boogedy, and starts chasing his family. But Elmer shows up, planning to finally play his prank... and I am not going to reveal what the prank was, but... it accidentally exorcises Mr. Boogedy from Carleton. But then, naturally, Mr. Lynch steals the cloak for himself, with plans to ruin the Davises' business as well as Lucy Fest. But eventually the cloak gets back to Boogedy himself, and he ends up being much more menacing than he was in the original movie (though less creative, since this time he's basically just zapping things). He also thinks Eloise is Marion, and tries to take her with him back to the underworld. But of course the good guys once again manage to defeat him.

And... I feel like I've said too much, but also left some things out, both intentionally and through forgetfulness. In any event, it was a weird and redonkulous movie. I'm really not quite sure if I liked it more or less than the original, so I've just given it the same rating. But I want to mention that I have long had a very vague image in my mind that I thought was of a scene from this movie (or the original), but now that I've seen both movies again, that scene was never in either movie. So maybe I've confused a scene from something else entirely, or maybe it's something I dreamt a long time ago. Or maybe it just got cut from the DVD release, I dunno. It's not important, but I'm a bit disappointed that the one thing I thought I vaguely remembered about the movie turned out not to be in it, because that means nothing about the movie was actually familiar to me. (And I really wish I knew what, if anything, the scene I'm thinking of was in.) Still, the movie was kind of fun, and I'm happy to have seen it.