It’s January and that means it’s time for an awful horror movie. This year’s incarnation of that oddly persistent tradition comes in the form of The Bye Bye Man, a film so nonsensical that even its own writers don’t seem to understand how its villain works.
The Bye Bye Man is basically a cross between The Ring and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Kind of. The titular character operates as a curse of sorts; once you read or see his name, he gets into your head and…. stuff happens. I’m not sure why a lot of the stuff happens, but it does. He can make you see things that aren’t really there. He can also make you not see things that are there. I think. I’m largely assuming that ability, as I have no other explanation for a character standing on railroad trucks and being dumbfounded by the arrival of a train that has been loudly heading toward her. He can also make you kill your friends and family. Sort of. This point is also a bit unclear, as characters explicitly state that he is forcing them to commit acts of violence. But at other times, they are consciously killing people in an effort to prevent the further spread of the curse before offing themselves to seal the deal. So the Bye Bye Man can make you kill people to prevent his own continued existence….I guess. I don’t freaking know. This villain’s sense of self-preservation is lacking.
But the B-B Man isn’t the only one seriously lacking in the survival skills department. His victims are driven mad in stunningly quick fashion and seemingly resort to murder-suicide as their first option in the face of adversity. Their problem largely amounts to hallucinations. That is problematic, sure, but one might try to learn to live and function with them before just saying “screw it!” and going on a killing spree. If you found out, in the course of your day, that a demon was making you hallucinate to get you to hurt your loved ones and then you stumbled upon your best friend having sex with your girlfriend, would you A. Consider that the hallucinations may be causing this and you might want to take a minute to assess the situation or B. Immediately grab a baseball bat and swing at your friend’s head? If you went with the latter option, then you would fit in very well in this movie. The main character even has an epiphany, lifted directly from A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which he realizes that the B-B Man derives his power from belief and fear, and that one must only not believe in him. There is no basis for this realization and perhaps the character simply wrote it off between scenes because he promptly forgets this in the next scene and goes on not knowing that hallucinations are a thing.
I haven’t gone into much detail about the Bye Bye Man himself, largely because the movie didn’t either. He is a generic looking villain in a black cloak, a bit sith-like, and he makes the aforementioned stuff happen. I’m hard-pressed to remember another horror villain that neither speaks nor actually does anything, instead relying on his victims to take themselves out through their own incompetence. The only thing that he actually does is point at people in an ominous fashion, so there is that. What is somewhat fascinating is the number of elements that are introduced and then never explained. There are a pair of coins that are shown repeatedly and seem to be of some relevance and importance to the Bye Bye Man. I’m not sure why, as this element is never explained. Neither is the association of trains with our villain. Several times we hear train noises that seem to signal his arrival (assumedly for more ominous pointing) and we even see footage of a train spliced into the film without elaboration. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he prefers to commute to his victims via train? Oh, and he has a dog. More of a hell-hound, really. Imagine the dog-monsters protecting Gozer at the end of Ghosbusters, except in god-awful CGI. This thing is never named and its purpose is never explained, he just shows up periodically and seems to hang out in the closet in his down time.
I also haven’t into too much detail about the characters and this is because I don’t remember them. I don’t want to be too critical of the young actors, all of whom were unfamiliar to me, because the script gave them nothing to work with. They could be perfectly fine actors or they could be terrible, but this film gave me no basis for that determination with characters and dialogue so forgettable that I am now struggling (less than 24 hours later) to name a single character in the damn thing. The only actors that I recognized are Faye Dunaway (!) as an exposition dump and Carrie-Ann Moss, who provides the film’s single somewhat effective scene in the form of a police interrogation. Even Doug Jones is wasted as the title character, as the villain’s complete inactivity fails to justify the need for Jones in the role.
I must also comment on the film’s rating, as the initial R-rated cut was trimmed to a PG-13. I generally dislike PG-13 horror, but this was a particularly blatant case of absurd editing. People are shot point-blank with a shotgun without a drop of blood to be seen. A sex scene is edited so awkwardly that my friend turned to me and inquired “how are they both on top?” I don’t know, man. As with everything else in this movie, I just don’t know.
Please don’t go see this. I have seen worse horror movies lately (Shut In, The Darkness, The Other Side of the Door), but this is clearly designed as a franchise-starter and I don’t want to be stuck with sequels every year. I can go without knowing what was up with the damn train.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bye_Bye_Man#/media/File:The_Bye_Bye_Man_poster.jpg
