Review of The Bye Bye Man (2017) by Thequietgamer — 23 May 2017

It's got a great concept, but it just doesn't use it. The Bye Bye Man is barely in his own movie! Instead the film decides to focus on the "don't say it, don't think it" aspect. The idea being that the more a person thinks about it, the closer he gets. Of course once someone hears his name they're obviously going to think about it. Like I said, it's a great concept with plenty of potential. The problem is that The Bye Bye Man is content to sit back and do nothing while his victims freak themselves out. He'll feed them little visions of things that aren't there, and wait for them to kill themselves. Unfortunately for the audience none of what he's showing them is scary.

Over the course of the movie we see that The Bye Bye Man's main approach to attacking these characters is to make our lead (Douglas Smith) imagine that his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend. He does this by playing on the character's already established insecurities. His best friend does get weirdly handsy with his girlfriend and openly flirts with her after all. None of which she discourages and even seems to kind of enjoy. All of this happens right in front of his face. Lucky for him he's "not the jealous type." So it's kind of nifty to see the villain play on that. But you know what it isn't? Scary. It's just not scary. Now eventually these visions start to get a little bloodier, but there's never any sense of tension or fear. Along the way Carrie-Ann Moss for some reason and has her talent totally wasted by being shoved into a do nothing role.

To top things off it's just not very well made either. With the exception of Moss, the cast is terrible. None of them can act. The worst offender by far is Cressida Bonas. Not only does she no emotion or believability, but her voice is awful. Every time she spoke I just wanted to stab myself in the ears. As soon as she opens her mouth it's like nails on a chalkboard. The characters themselves suck too. Everyone is there to make stupid decisions or bore us by being too slow to grasp what is obviously going on. Well, everyone except Lucien Laviscount. He's there to be an irrational jerk and hit on his best-friend's girl. How were we supposed to care about anyone here?

When watching this you'll naturally find yourself asking why The Bye Bye Man is doing all of this. He's a very enigmatic character, but not in a good way. The movie tells us nothing about him. A shame because he's the interesting part of the movie! It's one of the things holding this movie back. There's the potential here for a cool new horror movie villain. However, it doesn't capitalize on that like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th did by giving him a backstory. The other way they mess up is by barely having him in the movie. He's only in a few scenes. What the people making it failed to realize is that those scenes were the obvious highlights. The Bye Bye Man and his deformed dog that looks like it was pulled straight from the pits of hell are pretty cool looking and way spookier than some college student having visions about his GF and BFF hooking up behind his back.

The Bye Bye Man is simply a lot of wasted potential. It squanders it's main villain, puts nothing scary onscreen, and fundamentally misuses it's the few good ideas it does have. Now, there are plenty of bad horror movies out there. Ones that are lazily made, generic, and derivative like you wouldn't believe. The issue is often now that they are bad ideas, but that it's evident that the people involved just didn't really try. That's a frustrating thing to encounter, but not as frustrating as The Bye Bye Man. Here, the problem doesn't seem to be that nobody tried it's just that they had no idea what they were doing! I've rarely seen something so inept, so incompetent in execution. Never before has a trailer been so misleading. The movie needed to be more like that. Ergo, it needed to actually have the title villain in it! It's like people saw what they could have had here, but didn't know how to get it there. They took all the wrong paths and made a terrible movie. Just don't watch it.

3.