The Bye Bye Man (2017)

[runningscared]

Movie: The Bye Bye Man (2017), directed by Stacy Title

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’14”/mile, 01:09:39 (recovery run)

 

So I was poking around through the depths of Netflix’s horror section again, looking for something unfamiliar but hopefully not too taxing—sometimes you just don’t want to have to think too much, you know?—when I came across something called The Bye Bye Man. Every instinct I possess screamed inwardly at me to keep looking, just pass that mess right on by, because if anyone has poor enough judgement to make a horror film with a title as brick-stupid as The Bye Bye Man, nothing good can come of subjecting oneself to such punishment.

 

But get this: turns out I’m an optimist. Judge not a movie by its title and all that, right? Plus, the odds were certainly in my favor that it wouldn’t exactly be a David Lynch think-a-thon, so maybe I’d get lucky and I could coast right through a surprisingly scary and rewarding yet ill-titled hidden gem.

 

Yeah, it’s… it’s not that. The Bye Bye Man (good lord, I feel my soul die a little every time I type that name) is a decently turned-out and surprisingly good-looking flick that just misses on almost every other level. The script is fatally flawed, the acting is generally sub-par, the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for range from bland to annoying, and there’s just very little reason to care about anything that happens. That said, here’s what happens!

 

Elliott and his girlfriend Sasha are moving off-campus with Elliott’s best friend John. They’ve rented a suspiciously cheap old house together, because what could ever go wrong in a suspiciously cheap old house? At first it’s just little things like doors slamming shut on their own, the sound of coins rolling across the floor, a nightstand with crazy spiral writing in it and THE BYE BYE MAN carved into the drawer bottom, no big whoop. But after their housewarming party, Sasha’s friend Kim holds a seance, she senses something bad coming, Elliott says “The Bye Bye Man” out loud, and the lights go out.

 

Thereafter, everything goes wrong: Sasha gets sick, Elliott starts hearing weird scratching noises in the night, John and Kim have a Disappointing Sexual Encounter™, and pretty much all of them start hallucinating things to make them turn against each other. (Gotta love supernaturally-induced love triangles.) Elliott starts researching the Bye Bye Man—you know what, I’m just gonna start calling him “Glenn” for the sake of my digestive system—and finds out the last guy to investigate him was a reporter who wound up killing everyone he told the name to back in the ’60s. Meanwhile, the more he says or thinks the name, the closer Glenn gets—he visits the reporter’s widow in hopes of learning how to break the curse, and you know what, we’re going to leave it there, because somehow they got Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway to play the widow and even SHE can’t get you to care about what’s happening.

 

Really, if you’re going to watch The Bye Bye Man, watch it as a study in how to take a potentially interesting premise and kill it with a thousand cuts. Like, maybe don’t write your protagonist as a 100%-virtuous Perfect Boyfriend because it smacks of author-insert and it’s hard to take anything else seriously after that. And maybe give the woman who inspires his perfect love more personality than the average coatrack. And if you’re going to have a little girl attending a college housewarming party, maybe have someone—anyone—make some reference as to how that might be a little unusual. Oh, and it helps to have a solid villain, and Glenn himself is… pretty creepy-looking, I guess? But there’s not much to him other than looking creepy.

 

See, the single biggest problem with The Bye Bye Man is not, surprisingly, its ridiculous title. (No, really!) It’s the choice to leave out even the tiniest smidgen of backstory into who Glenn is. This leads to all sorts of motifs and elements being completely untethered and lacking context. Like, trains figure heavily: there’s footage of a train and bloody clothes on the tracks that is shown more than once, including early on in the establishing flashback scenes. You spend the whole movie thinking you’re eventually going to be told what the deal with the train is. Ditto the coins, and the weird inside-out-looking dog. Nope. You get zilch. I mean, they probably blew half their budget on the unconvincing CGI inside-out-looking dog, and without any backstory, literally no one would have any reason to notice if they’d just left him out altogether and paid for better actors. I mean jeez, at least tell us his name! 

 

Unless it’s Bye Bye Dog, in which case, we don’t want to know.

 

…It’s totally “Bye Bye Dog,” isn’t it?

 

Ugh.

 

(I’m calling him Chuckles.)