By writing this review, I'm afraid I've condemned you all to death. Sorry about that. But if it makes you feel any better I'm likely dead as well; killed by a film plot that effectively tells you not to think of pink elephants under threat of death. Forget House by the Cemetary's trailer warning you that "you may have mortgaged your life!" by watching it; The Bye Bye Man will kill you simply via the power of bad memes.
Or through just being a bad movie. You decide.
After a 1969 prologue where a man goes on a little rampage with a shotgun through his friends and neighbours because of some nebulous reason of them telling each other something, we start off properly in the present day where three college students - Elliot, Sasha and John - are looking at a house to rent together. The house they're looking at seems perfect for them and they decide to rent it, although Sasha feels slightly uneasy about it, even though she can't say why. They move in and furnish the house, but start to find two old coins on the floor several times, no matter where they put them, and they have no idea where the coins have come from in the first place. Elliot also finds an old nightstand with a drawer that has "Don't think it Don't say it" written in a spiral pattern on a paper insert inside the drawer, and "The Bye Bye Man" helpfully carved into the bottom of the drawer. Later on, at a housewarming party, the three friends hold a seance with the help of another girl named Kim who claims to be psychic. Kim seems to connect with something bad during the seance, repeating the words, "Don't think it Don't say it," to which Elliot helpfully supplies the name, "The Bye Bye Man". After that, the four of them start to experience hallucinations, missing time and far worse things, and it seems to start to spread to those around them as well. Who or what is The Bye Bye Man, what does he want and can he be stopped?
The Bye Bye Man was actually based on an urban legend; a chapter of a book by Robert Damon Schneck called The President’s Vampire: Strange-but-True Tales of the United States of America. The chapter in question is called The Bridge to Body Island and it contains a hell of a lot more backstory and explanations for the Bye Bye Man's origins and motives, but for some reason the film cut most of this out, presumably so they could fit some more jump scares and useless tension scenes with the twee child they shoehorned in. Having looked up the original story I now feel quite cheated and angry at this movie, because the bits they cut out were the best bits of the urban legend. For example, he had a dog called Gloomsinger that was made up of the eyes and tongues of the Bye Bye Man's victims (he was also a serial killer, you see) that were then animated by voodoo. That sounds bloody awesome! I'd watch the hell out of a movie with that concept! Why couldn't we have had that in the movie? Instead, we get just a couple of appearances of a wolf-like animal with a bad case of road rash who just growls a lot and doesn't do much else. Such a disappointment.
And then there's the big sell of the film, the Bye Bye Man himself, who turns out to be another disappointment. When I first saw him, my immediate thought was, "Hey, he looks like Slender Man's homeless cousin." Turns out I wasn't that far off the mark because the Bye Bye Man was played by Doug Jones, that hard-working genre actor who appears whenever they need someone to play a tall, spindly creature and who also played Slender Man/The Operator in Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story. So let's just call him SlenderHobo and leave him at that. And he's also very anticlimactic because SlenderHobo doesn't seem to actually do anything once he arrives on the scene. He just grins, pokes our erstwhile protagonist in the forehead and leaves, and then suddenly the house is on fire. It seemed to be worse when he wasn't there, with the hallucinations, murder sprees and... unexplained bouts of pneumonia.
The Bye Bye Man is clearly meant to be a teen horror film, which might mean that I've missed the point as I'm well out of that age range, but I don't think it even succeeds at that. Instead, it's a pre-teen horror film, with all the plot and subtlety sanitised and scrubbed out so that it consists of nothing but jump scares, artificial tension that leads nowhere and the occasional shot of a girl in their underwear for the ten-year-old boys to hoot over. It's a dull film, with dull characters and dull events that fall into plot holes half of the time, and it's made all the worse when you know all the stuff they cut out of the original story to make this pile of unfortunate digital effects.
And I swear that house would have cost way too much for three college students to rent.
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