Bye Bye Man lacks scares, logic

Douglas Smith in The Bye Bye Man. Image courtesy STX Entertainment

Sometimes all a person can do is sit back and admire a movie as awesomely dumb as The Bye Bye Man, which at least proves even bad horror movies offer some entertainment value. Because, really, that's all this movie has going for it; any ambition to succeed as a piece of horror ends up unfulfilled from the title onward, left to better actors and more talented filmmakers.

Let's talk about that title for a second though. The title doubles as the name of the character haunting the three way-too old college students (played with little skill by Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount and Cressida Bonas) who move away from the dorms to a decrepit house in the woods. Astoundingly, multiple decision makers decided the phrase bye bye man was not only a good idea for the name of a supernatural entity – one whose name alone is enough to drive people into violent insanity, according to the script – but of the product being released for mass consumption. People are paid a lot of money to prevent movies from being titled The Bye Bye Man, and yet it now exists to linger in the dregs of horror moviedom, floating toward the bottom of the Netflix scroll for eternity.

So why call the villain Bye Bye Man anyway? Bye Bye Man never deigns to explain how the black-hooded being earned such a moniker or its origins in the first place. That's not a requirement for horror films to have, but for a movie that already pads its run time out with silly divergences and fattened scenes actually having a proper mystery for the characters to solve would offer a more organic and logical route for the script to take. The hunt the film does offer results in no helpful information to the characters, which is either a point toward the inherent existential futility of staving off death or poor writing. Occam's razor points toward the latter.

For the record, the movie doesn’t make the name work as an invocation for fear. It also doesn’t have the titular entity (played by Doug Jones) do anything either. Sure, the guy creeps around in a black hooded cloak and points at Smith's face in the cliché horror style, but his evil doesn't extend much beyond raising his fingers and staring ominously. The Bye Bye Man offers the deistic villain who sort of inspires bad things but is never shown actively participating in the bad things that arise in his wake. He and his poorly digitized hellhound are more like vultures than anything, giving the humans the hard work before they swoop in and pluck out a few eyeballs for show. The Bye Bye Man is sort of like Freddy Krueger, if Krueger lacked motivation, guile, ingenuity, charisma, and a sense of humor, among other attributes. His lack of involvement in the proceedings makes him less captivating as a nightmare figure. If you're going to show the evil, at least have it do something evil besides stalk unenthusiastically.

The one quasi-redeeming factor about The Bye Bye Man is how seriously the filmmakers, director Stacy Title and writer Jonathan Penner (who, per IMDB, are spouses) take the events depicted in this film. Little to no hilarity is intentional, and the actors follow along for the ride, aside from the screen consuming cameo by Faye Dunaway (although the other too good for this movie actress, Carrie-Anne Moss, plays it straight). It is the one saving grace to this very bad film, because Penner's dialog devolves into proper hilarity when the occasion arises. (One line in particular, involving a father comforting his daughter about the fate of her dead uncle, really needs to be seen on YouTube.) The film is loaded with many unnatural lines containing a lot of inane craziness delivered by people who are committed to this terrible experiment in horror that it at least offers a few chuckles to pass the time. Really, Penner's script might be the best worst part of Bye Bye Man, as the dude makes some really, really weird choices like having a young child attend a drunken college party and the entire scene involving Dunaway. The script doesn't reach bad-good status, but it is about as entertaining as Bye Bye Man gets.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Horror

Ask Away

Target audience: Horror fans and anyone looking to waste money.

Take the whole family?: This would still cause some problems for younger kids, but keeping it within three years of the PG-13 recommendation is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just avoid it.

Did this film ever stand a chance?: Not really given the early January release date. This is the dumping ground for bad movies, especially bad horror films, in which the studios hope a lack of better options can boost box office returns. This strategy has worked in the past – Paul Blart somehow made more than $100 million – but finding a decent film this time of year is like finding a pin in a pile of rotting fruit; it's in there somewhere, but the effort to find it just isn't worth it.

Watch this instead?: Nightmare on Elm Street greatly succeeds at everything Bye Bye Man flails at. Also always worth a watch are Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, which do the creepy house thing better than Bye Bye Man.