The Bye Bye Man (Review) (2017)
The Bye Bye Man (Review) (2017)
The Bye Bye Man is shocking! So shockingly bad that it’s an insult to the genre and to the audience it is aiming at making a few quid from. It’s template-horror with nothing to hang the horror on, instead we have a half-formed, nay barely formed, nemesis, in the title character that’s intended to scare us but if only we knew why we are meant to be scary. It’s not just the concept of the bad guy, or lack of one, that is at fault when it comes to The Bye Bye Man as a whole, everything about it sucks big time.
It’s 1969 and Larry (Leigh Whannell, yep the same one who wrote the miserable Insidious series) is having a bad day. He’s strolling around his neighbourhood in broad daylight, armed with a rifle, and shooting folks dead after asking them if they might have said the name they aren’t meant to say. No one nearby thinks to call the police – after all it’s a quiet neighbourhood, repeated gun shots and victims screaming wouldn’t exactly go unheard – so he’s got free reign to kill a few people before we jump forward to present day.
We are now lumbered with three college buddies who are moving into an old house off campus. It’s a rather huge house for three people and one of them comments about the place feeling creepy. Does the creepy feeling put the threesome off moving in? Nah! They move in anyway! I wish I could tell you more about our threesome but it’s not like the folks behind The Bye Bye Man bothered fleshing them out enough beyond given them a vocation, a gender and their names.
There’s Elliot (Douglas Smith), a youngster so stupid that it makes your teeth ache, his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas), vapid, and best friend John (Lucien Laviscount), equally vapid. Spending time with this threesome becomes wearisome so fast that you’re wishing for The Bye Bye Man to make his appearance and kill them all off within fifteen minutes of screen-time elapsing, if not sooner. Unfortunately our titular character doesn’t seem to be in that much of a hurry to do anything at all, you kind of forget that he’s what the film is about.
Other franchise starters, such as Candyman (which this bares the closest resemblance to) or the original Elm Street, explained the mythology pertaining to their bogeyman, but The Bye Bye Man doesn’t even try. Instead writer Jonathan Penner elects to throw in so many elements from better, much better, horror films, rather than remember he’s writing his own, that it fails to become its own beast. Quite how the likes of Doug Jones, Carrie-Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway got caught up in this nonsense begs a much larger question than all those posed by this ill-conceived and annoying concoction.
Why is he called The Bye Bye Man? What’s with the constant references to trains? What’s with his Hell Hound and those coins? Why does he take so long to do anything? You can’t say his name or even think it but how did this situation come about? There’s too many questions left unanswered and that squashes out any thrills or chills that may have resulted from a film that really wants to be the next horror franchise but fails because it lacks any coherency.
