The Bye Bye Man
Director - Stacy Title
Writer - Jonathan Penner
Starring - Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Creddisa Bonas, Carrie-Anne Moss, Doug Jones, Faye Dunaway
Remember This? is a new feature meant to highlight films that got big releases and then quickly vanished from our collective consciousnesses. In most cases, all involved are probably happy for this but I feel like their shame should be preserved. A rough guide for films appearing in this column is a film must have received a wide release in at least 2000 theatres according to BoxOfficeMojo and have been released during the last calendar year. Bonus points will be awards to franchise movies that get quickly abandoned because of their higher level of difficulty. The Bye Bye Man, a PG-13 horror film dumped into theatres in January was quite obviously destined for complete dismissal by the public but it is warranted? Yes. After watching it I can definitively say nobody else should ever watch this movie.
The Bye Bye Man was released on January 13, 2017 in 2220 theatres. Over it's first weekend it grossed over $15 million before audiences learned their lesson. In its second weekend, The Bye Bye Man dropped almost 75% and quickly vanished from theatres in early February grossing a total of $22 million. What could have kept audiences away from a movie called The Bye Bye Man? Let's investigate.
One of the main criticisms The Bye Bye Man faced during its theatrical release was its rating. Released as a PG-13 movie it relied heavily on poorly constructed jump scares and bloodless deaths for its horror elements to prop up a weak story driven by terribly acted and drawn characters. Well good news. It fixed that problem. The Bye Bye Man received a home video release in an unrated version which means when people you don't care about die for reasons you don't care about at least you get to see blood. One person gets stabbed through the face with scissors! Another guy drinks a shit ton of poison and gargles up blood after he shoots several people with a shotgun! Multiple people get his by moving vehicles! Does any of it make sense? No, of course not but there's blood!
Ok, let's step back for a minute and talk about what this movie is about. It features a villain who will kill anybody who learns his name. Maybe if his parents has chosen a nicer moniker than The Bye Bye Man he would have grown up to be a little nicer. If he even grew up at all. He's portrayed as some sort of supernatural demi-god thing closer in vein to Freddy Kruger than the many serial killers populating slasher flicks who find themselves restricted to existence on our boring old physical plane. The Bye Bye Man seems to travel around in some astral or spectral plane as he feels like announcing his imminent arrival by filling the heads of his victims with terrifying visions like a falling coin. There's other stuff he uses as visions but he loves that coin thing. He just manifests a coin into existence and it drops to the ground. I guess that's scary if the characters are scared of money.
Let's detour a little bit because frankly nothing about The Bye Bye Man makes sense. I need to move onto the human characters because my brain will break trying to figure out what The Bye Bye Man's endgame even is.
So these "human" characters. Elliott (Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Bonas) and his best friend John (Laviscount) decide that dorm life isn't for them and decide to rent a spooky old house on the edge of town to live in during their college years. While the obvious set up here is for a party house (and yes, they do have a party complete with a game of baseball possibly choreographed by Tommy Wiseau), no that's not the plan. You see, Elliott just wants to be a responsible married grown up with kids and shit and is so sure he's found his future wife he can't stop thinking that she is fucking John whenever he has left the room. This is our "hero." At least he's not the worst written character here. That might be John, the black jock who's entire character development beyond those two words seems to be "owns a Mustang" and "doesn't actually want to fuck Sasha." Or Sasha, who's character seems to be ditzy, nervous blonde who only exists to get killed in a generic horror movie such as this but because she's such an important part of our "hero's" lifeplan she has to live for just about the entire movie. Also, she has no desire to fuck John. Her psychic friend does though. Yes, there's a psychic friend. And I'm not joking here but she seriously tries to seduce John with the line "I'm hungry" while being dropped off in his Mustang after a night where they didn't bone because he couldn't get it up. Let's add inhibiting the libido of college-aged men to the list of The Bye Bye Man's powers.
Oh shit, I'm back to him now aren't I. Where'd I leave off last time, coins? So in addition to conjuring money and deflating boners he causes Elliott to constantly be picturing John just plowing Sasha. And he will just magically appear in rooms as a jump scare but won't really do anything. Sometimes he even brings his demon dog that likes eating the faces of dead people. Now let's throw this out there because this is actually a potentially potent horror idea. The Bye Bye Man doesn't ever directly kill anybody in this movie. He merely messes with people's brains until they kill each other or themselves. That's a neat twist on the slasher genre. It's kind of hindered though by the fact that he is constantly showing up to menace people until Elliott briefly realizes that he can just ignore him by not being scared. He kinda quickly forgets that and gets scared again about 2 minutes later though.
So I'm just going to go back to the people now because this Bye Bye Man is seriously breaking my brain. He just doesn't make any sense! So after Elliot picks up the physic for a reason I can't remember, and honestly probably never mattered, they're just driving along until she gets out of the car and runs in front of a train. She does this because the Bye Bye Man made her see things. Then the world's worst and most checked out detective shows up played by Carrie-Anne Moss who seems to constantly be wondering when she's going to start getting good scripts again or even scripts on the level of The Matrix sequels which look like The Matrix compared to this piece of garbage. Det. Trinity takes Elliott in, hears his spiel about a crazy dude killing people because they know his name. No, the movie still hasn't explained why yet but maybe it surely will later. It's only like half over at this point!
So Det. Trinity lets Elliott go because she hasn't got time for this shit and probably just wants to get home and watch Scandal or something with a bottle of wine and fuck the multiple murders that have already happened. Elliott then goes to Faye Dunaway's house because her husband was the original guy who learned the Bye Bye Man's name. He was a reported who learned the name then proceeded to shotgun a bunch of people to death because he told them the name and then drank the bottle of poison. Because of this Faye Dunaway has a bunch of insights into The Bye Bye Man's deal, I guess. I mean her husband didn't tell her anything. She even says that. But I guess when your husband says, "babe, I gotta kill a bunch of people because I told them a scary man's name and if I don't kill them he will" you just kinda roll with it. Her insight into The Bye Bye Man is that he apparently just wanders around whatever spectral plane he and his dog live on until he hears his name in which case he decides to go fuck that guy's life up. Why? Doesn't matter. Is this Bye Bye Man some sort of cursed man? demi-god? evil spirit? manifestation of the devil? I have no idea and I'm pretty sure the screenwriter doesn't either. Now I'm not saying I need a big Bye Bye Man origins movie but how bout some hint as to his motivations? Surely that's not too much to ask.
Ok, no my Bye Bye Man anymore. He's a stupid character and I'm done with him. Back to Faye Dunaway. If you thought Carrie-Anne Moss couldn't care to try, Faye Dunaway seems to be longing for the sweet embrace of death to save her from this movie. She sells being completely set on fire with all the excitement and horror of a comatose person reacting to their annoying relative shoving a balloon in their unresponsive face. Faye's 100 times more dynamic and energetic reading the wrong Best Picture winner than she is trying to save an annoying 20 year old from something called The Bye Bye Man.
So now before you read this and get all excited to see this terrible movie thinking it will be the special kind of The Book of Henry bad, it's not. It's just awful. There's maybe a handful of laughably bad moments but for the most part it's characters you don't care about trying to save themselves from a monster you don't give a shit about. If you must watch an immortal, unbeatable horror monster stalk and murder a bunch of young people watch It Follows. I watched The Bye Bye Man so you wouldn't have to. Nobody should watch this movie.
Schurmann Score - 1/10
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One of the main criticisms The Bye Bye Man faced during its theatrical release was its rating. Released as a PG-13 movie it relied heavily on poorly constructed jump scares and bloodless deaths for its horror elements to prop up a weak story driven by terribly acted and drawn characters. Well good news. It fixed that problem. The Bye Bye Man received a home video release in an unrated version which means when people you don't care about die for reasons you don't care about at least you get to see blood. One person gets stabbed through the face with scissors! Another guy drinks a shit ton of poison and gargles up blood after he shoots several people with a shotgun! Multiple people get his by moving vehicles! Does any of it make sense? No, of course not but there's blood!
Ok, let's step back for a minute and talk about what this movie is about. It features a villain who will kill anybody who learns his name. Maybe if his parents has chosen a nicer moniker than The Bye Bye Man he would have grown up to be a little nicer. If he even grew up at all. He's portrayed as some sort of supernatural demi-god thing closer in vein to Freddy Kruger than the many serial killers populating slasher flicks who find themselves restricted to existence on our boring old physical plane. The Bye Bye Man seems to travel around in some astral or spectral plane as he feels like announcing his imminent arrival by filling the heads of his victims with terrifying visions like a falling coin. There's other stuff he uses as visions but he loves that coin thing. He just manifests a coin into existence and it drops to the ground. I guess that's scary if the characters are scared of money.
Let's detour a little bit because frankly nothing about The Bye Bye Man makes sense. I need to move onto the human characters because my brain will break trying to figure out what The Bye Bye Man's endgame even is.
So these "human" characters. Elliott (Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Bonas) and his best friend John (Laviscount) decide that dorm life isn't for them and decide to rent a spooky old house on the edge of town to live in during their college years. While the obvious set up here is for a party house (and yes, they do have a party complete with a game of baseball possibly choreographed by Tommy Wiseau), no that's not the plan. You see, Elliott just wants to be a responsible married grown up with kids and shit and is so sure he's found his future wife he can't stop thinking that she is fucking John whenever he has left the room. This is our "hero." At least he's not the worst written character here. That might be John, the black jock who's entire character development beyond those two words seems to be "owns a Mustang" and "doesn't actually want to fuck Sasha." Or Sasha, who's character seems to be ditzy, nervous blonde who only exists to get killed in a generic horror movie such as this but because she's such an important part of our "hero's" lifeplan she has to live for just about the entire movie. Also, she has no desire to fuck John. Her psychic friend does though. Yes, there's a psychic friend. And I'm not joking here but she seriously tries to seduce John with the line "I'm hungry" while being dropped off in his Mustang after a night where they didn't bone because he couldn't get it up. Let's add inhibiting the libido of college-aged men to the list of The Bye Bye Man's powers.
Oh shit, I'm back to him now aren't I. Where'd I leave off last time, coins? So in addition to conjuring money and deflating boners he causes Elliott to constantly be picturing John just plowing Sasha. And he will just magically appear in rooms as a jump scare but won't really do anything. Sometimes he even brings his demon dog that likes eating the faces of dead people. Now let's throw this out there because this is actually a potentially potent horror idea. The Bye Bye Man doesn't ever directly kill anybody in this movie. He merely messes with people's brains until they kill each other or themselves. That's a neat twist on the slasher genre. It's kind of hindered though by the fact that he is constantly showing up to menace people until Elliott briefly realizes that he can just ignore him by not being scared. He kinda quickly forgets that and gets scared again about 2 minutes later though.
So I'm just going to go back to the people now because this Bye Bye Man is seriously breaking my brain. He just doesn't make any sense! So after Elliot picks up the physic for a reason I can't remember, and honestly probably never mattered, they're just driving along until she gets out of the car and runs in front of a train. She does this because the Bye Bye Man made her see things. Then the world's worst and most checked out detective shows up played by Carrie-Anne Moss who seems to constantly be wondering when she's going to start getting good scripts again or even scripts on the level of The Matrix sequels which look like The Matrix compared to this piece of garbage. Det. Trinity takes Elliott in, hears his spiel about a crazy dude killing people because they know his name. No, the movie still hasn't explained why yet but maybe it surely will later. It's only like half over at this point!
So Det. Trinity lets Elliott go because she hasn't got time for this shit and probably just wants to get home and watch Scandal or something with a bottle of wine and fuck the multiple murders that have already happened. Elliott then goes to Faye Dunaway's house because her husband was the original guy who learned the Bye Bye Man's name. He was a reported who learned the name then proceeded to shotgun a bunch of people to death because he told them the name and then drank the bottle of poison. Because of this Faye Dunaway has a bunch of insights into The Bye Bye Man's deal, I guess. I mean her husband didn't tell her anything. She even says that. But I guess when your husband says, "babe, I gotta kill a bunch of people because I told them a scary man's name and if I don't kill them he will" you just kinda roll with it. Her insight into The Bye Bye Man is that he apparently just wanders around whatever spectral plane he and his dog live on until he hears his name in which case he decides to go fuck that guy's life up. Why? Doesn't matter. Is this Bye Bye Man some sort of cursed man? demi-god? evil spirit? manifestation of the devil? I have no idea and I'm pretty sure the screenwriter doesn't either. Now I'm not saying I need a big Bye Bye Man origins movie but how bout some hint as to his motivations? Surely that's not too much to ask.
Ok, no my Bye Bye Man anymore. He's a stupid character and I'm done with him. Back to Faye Dunaway. If you thought Carrie-Anne Moss couldn't care to try, Faye Dunaway seems to be longing for the sweet embrace of death to save her from this movie. She sells being completely set on fire with all the excitement and horror of a comatose person reacting to their annoying relative shoving a balloon in their unresponsive face. Faye's 100 times more dynamic and energetic reading the wrong Best Picture winner than she is trying to save an annoying 20 year old from something called The Bye Bye Man.
So now before you read this and get all excited to see this terrible movie thinking it will be the special kind of The Book of Henry bad, it's not. It's just awful. There's maybe a handful of laughably bad moments but for the most part it's characters you don't care about trying to save themselves from a monster you don't give a shit about. If you must watch an immortal, unbeatable horror monster stalk and murder a bunch of young people watch It Follows. I watched The Bye Bye Man so you wouldn't have to. Nobody should watch this movie.
Schurmann Score - 1/10
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