Review of The Bye Bye Man (2017) by Matt C — 31 Jan 2017

It's isn't that often that I go to see a movie knowing that it'll be terrible, but my MoviePass subscription makes walking into shitshows a lot more bearable. The Bye Bye Man is one of those movies that seems to fall out of the cursed orifice of January movies, one that's pretty much offensively lazy.

Even at 96 minutes including credits, this movie manages to pack in more horrible acting, flat cinematography, nonexistent characterization, and lame dialogue than you'd expect from this type of movie.

All the while, it's boring as hell with only a few moments of unintentional humor. It's the type of movie that has you think, "Wow, these filmmakers were some lazy bastards," and then does nothing but reinforce that fact for the rest of its runtime.

It's something so one-dimensional that it's just a point in the middle of space with no purpose, so frail that it might as well not exist. I don't know why I'm going to even try giving a plot synopsis, but whatever.

Basically, there's this entity called the Bye Bye Man that makes people hallucinate freaky stuff, which leads to their demise. After the movie opens back in 1969 and shows just how bad acting can be, it cuts ahead to present day where Discount Dane DeHaan (Douglas Smith), his Boring-Ass Girlfriend (Cressida Bonas), and Token Black Guy (Lucien Laviscount) rent out some old McMansion that's way out of the price range of a few college kids, and then they start getting terrorized by a vague antagonist that rips off everything from Freddy Kruger to Candyman as well as pretty much anything else you can imagine.

That's pretty much it. For all intents and purposes, nothing could have happened at all, because the movie is utterly pointless, as are the cardboard caricatures that populate the movie. It's directed by Stacy Title and based off of a script by her husband, Jonathan Penner, and if I were to describe The Bye Bye Man in one word, it would be "flat": flat acting from people with zero charisma; flat cinematography that looks like it was shot on an iPhone and then desaturated; flat writing that's so clichéd and predictable that it borders on dramatic irony throughout; flat "horror" scenes, a few of which feature people getting shot or beaten with there's no blood in order to secure a PG-13 rating; flat CG that looks like it's from a '90s TV show.

All of the actors' behavior makes it impossible to believe what's supposed to be happening, and it's an extra punch to the groin that this dialogue is so bad that not even great actors could make it work.

Everyone speaks in one language, and that language is exposition. The kicker is that it's just so boring, so much so that I don't know why I'm even bothering to write more of this review. It doesn't deserve any more of my time; I've granted it far too much.

Some of the worst movies that I've ever seen bring me to a point of insatiable rage, meaning that they are, in a weird way, effective. The Bye Bye Man isn't that. There are no highs and no lows.

It's just... there. Barely. 1.8/10, disastrous, D-, leagues below average, etc.