THE BYE BYE MAN (2017)

Studio:       STX Entertainment
Director:    Stacy Title
Writer:       Jonathan Penner
Producer:  Trevor Macy, Jeffrey Soros, Simon Horsman
Stars:     Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Michael Trucco, Doug Jones, Carrie-Anne Moss, Faye Dunaway, Jenna Kanell, Erica Tremblay, Cleo King

Review Score:

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Summary:

Three friends are driven mad by haunting hallucinations after accidentally invoking the name of a supernatural boogeyman.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Madison, Wisconsin – October 20, 1969 – Driven mad with fear that they know the name ‘The Bye Bye Man’ and may have said it to others, newspaper reporter Larry Redmon murders eight people with a shotgun before drinking poison to kill himself.

Present Day – Buchanan Williams University student Elliot Wright, his girlfriend Sasha, and his longtime best friend John Henry move into an old house off-campus. Sasha is the first of the trio to hear strange scratching noises along with the sound of a dropped coin in the attic.

The three friends throw a party in the house. Elliot’s older brother Virgil attends with his wife Trina and young daughter Alice. While exploring the attic alone, Alice finds a dropped gold coin and places it on the nightstand.

Elliot later puts the coin in the nightstand drawer and it immediately falls back on the floor. Elliot opens the drawer and sees the phrases, “don’t think it, don’t say it” scrawled repeatedly all over the drawer bottom’s lining. Elliot removes the lining and sees ‘The Bye Bye Man’ written into the wood.

Sensing something strange about the house, Sasha has her psychic friend Kim Hines cleanse it with sage. Elliot, John, Sasha, and Kim then conduct a séance. When Kim says, “don’t think it, don’t say it” while entranced, someone asks, “what?” Elliot responds, “The Bye Bye Man.” The lights immediately go out and Kim briefly collapses to the floor.

Following the séance, Sasha starts getting sick. John grows increasingly angry. All three friends begin hearing scratching noises and dropped coins, having haunting hallucinations, and experience various visions of a frightening man in a black robe accompanied by a vicious hound.

While Sasha goes to see their landlord Mr. Daizy to ask about the strange nightstand and the Bye Bye Man mystery, Elliot does research at the university library. Elliot is led to a dead file written by Larry Redmon. Elliot discovers Larry was investigating Samuel Hutcherson, a teenager accused of murder who claimed the Bye Bye Man made him do it. Larry never finished the report because of his own killing spree several days later. While noting for Elliot that all other traces of the story seem to have been erased, librarian Mrs. Watkins says the Bye Bye Man’s name.

Elliot implores Kim to conduct another séance. Kim washes blood off her hand, puts a hammer in her bag, and rides with Elliot to go back to the house. While discussing the Bye Bye Man along the way, Kim confesses that she told her roommate Katie Williams about the Bye Bye Man. Elliot admits that he told Mrs. Watkins. Kim insists that they cannot tell anyone else because repeating his name perpetuates the Bye Bye Man’s curse.

Kim thinks she sees a tragic car accident on railroad tracks and forces Elliot to pull over. Kim races toward her vision of an injured family to help. Elliot finds the hammer in Kim’s bag before running after her. Elliot is too late to stop Kim from being hit by a train.

As authorities process the scene, Detective Shaw explains that the train conductor saw Elliot chasing Kim toward the tracks with a hammer, implying he tried to kill her. However, after Elliot is taken in for questioning, Shaw reveals that police found Kim’s suicide note, in which she confessed to killing Katie as well as Elliot, Sasha, and John. Shaw asks Elliot what is going on and he insists he cannot tell her in order to protect her family from death. Elliot says the same thing to his brother when Virgil bails him out.

Elliot returns home and, thinking he sees John having sex with Sasha, knocks John unconscious with a baseball bat. After realizing that the Bye Bye Man tricked him with another vision, Elliot finds an address Sasha received from Mr. Daizy indicating that the nightstand came from Larry Redmon’s widow. Elliot throws the nightstand outside. Mrs. Watkins also calls Elliot after having murdered her entire family.

Elliot goes to see Redmon’s widow. She explains how Larry was driven to murder following his investigation, but insists he was a hero for erasing the evil by killing everyone he told before they could pass on the name.

Redmon’s widow gives Elliot a gun, claiming that the only way he can stop the curse is to kill everyone he told and then himself. Elliot insists there must be another way, and that he can depower the Bye Bye Man by not believing in his illusions.

Redmon’s widow stokes the fire in her fireplace and is suddenly consumed by flames. She begs for Elliot to shoot her. Elliot shakes free of the vision and, seeing that Redmon’s widow is safe, leaves believing he knows how to beat the Bye Bye Man.

Racing back to the house to save Sasha, Elliot ignores a vision of John in the road that tries to distract him. However, Elliot ends up running over Mrs. Watkins and accidentally kills her before flipping his car.

Back at the house, John regains consciousness. John envisions Sasha as Kim on the attack and Sasha sees John as Elliot retreating, leading to a chase between the two of them.

Elliot rushes home on foot and finds John stabbing Sasha. Elliot shoots John with the widow’s gun, but discovers he was tricked into killing Sasha by another hallucination. The Bye Bye Man appears with his hound and shows Elliot a vision of Virgil’s family dead.

Virgil and Alice arrive at the front door, begging to be let inside. Elliot bars the door and insists that they leave. With the Bye Bye Man closing in and his urge to say the name to his brother growing, Elliot shoots himself in the head. The house starts burning.

After authorities arrive, Virgil drives Alice home. Alice shows her father the gold coins she retrieved from a nightstand with funny writing left by the trash. Virgil asks what the writing said, but Alice explains she couldn’t read it in the dark.

Police pull John out of the house and escort him to an ambulance. Detective Shaw insists that he tell her what happened and John begins whispering in her ear.

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Review:

The one thing I knew about “The Bye Bye Man” going in was that common consensus overwhelmingly appeared to pinch its nose in the movie’s direction.  Red-rimmed score boxes dominated reviews.  My mind was massaged to prepare for a piss poor production of ‘2017’s worst horror film’ proportions.

It’s possible my score might have been red too, had I gone in blind during opening weekend with whatever standards others apparently had.  Instead I was steeled for a cinematic disaster.  And maybe that partly explains why my flipped opinion lands on the contrarian side of the coin.  Because while popular POV assured me I’d want a pitchfork in one hand and a torch in the other, I came out of “The Bye Bye Man” wondering what was supposedly so awful that a hate-fueled tizzy would be warranted.

Three college friends rent an off-campus house that comes furnished with the sounds of dropping coins, scratching at walls, and haunting hallucinations of a hooded man and his hellhound.  You’re not supposed to say his name.  You’re not even supposed to think it.  But after finding strange scribbles carved into a nightstand, a séance with a psychic inspires one of them to mutter ‘The Bye Bye Man’ and evil is unleashed.

Elliot seemingly sees his best friend John making moves on his girlfriend Sasha.  John thinks he sees maggots crawling from the psychic’s head.  Sasha comes down with a cough.  Okay, Sasha’s corner of the curse isn’t so bad, but eeriness escalates from there.

Nightmares of torn out eyes, bloody visions of the boogeyman, and deepening dementia now torture each person.  It’s only a matter of time before bodies begin dropping.  Elliot and the others have no choice but to solve the mystery of how acknowledging an urban legend infected their heads.  And they have to do it without anyone else knowing the Bye Bye Man’s name, or else his curse will continue.

“The Bye Bye Man” isn’t necessarily noteworthy.  It’s a standard supernatural suspense yarn featuring routine college kid carnage.  Yet for a PG-13 thriller left to freeze on a January release doorstep, which is really the right ruler for measuring, “The Bye Bye Man” is a perfectly passable popcorn production.

Say what you want about the script and few people will argue.  Only someone suffering from a Bye Bye Man hallucination would defend the writing as a highlight.  But effort put into production value is another story.

“The Bye Bye Man” opens on a continuous shot that would make Brian De Palma jealous, and choreographs intense action into its flashback for a pretty powerful prologue.  First up after switching to present day is a boom shot establishing a campus from overhead.  A lazy horror film would only plop down a tripod, yet this crew is going up on a crane.  Wherever the movie may cut corners, it isn’t in camera setups.  Economically creative cinematography almost earns “The Bye Bye Man” an ‘A’ for above average presentation.

Back to the screenplay.  That’s where “The Bye Bye Man” leaves an elephant, lion, and bear in the room that there are no ways to ignore.

For all the flaws that are forgivable, an unpardonable sin is that the titular terror isn’t intriguing.  The Bye Bye Man’s skinny silhouette and simple hooded robe have him looking like Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw.  He doesn’t speak.  His dog does any dirty work, which isn’t even very dirty.  Worst of all, the Bye Bye Man doesn’t have an origin.

Maybe the source story the film is based on, “The Bridge to Body Island” by Robert Damon Schneck, explains why the Bye Bye Man has a hound of Hell at his side to begin with.  Maybe it explains why he rides a ghost train bearing repeating numbers, or drops gold coins on the floor to announce his presence.  What we know for certain is that this adaptation explains none of these things, leaving the movie’s main man to be a mishmash of mythology without context.  Without context, what exactly is supposed to be scary?  Scratch marks etched into brick walls?

Jonathan Penner’s script sets aside space for emotional beats involving Elliot’s older brother and niece, as well as the testy triangle with his other two roommates.  However, “The Bye Bye Man” never gets around to doing any essential development on side stories.  Characters come off kind of vacuous, more or less functioning as punching bags and pincushions for Bye Bye Man and plot progression to manipulate however they please.

Still, even the collective weight of suspect CGI, underused star power, overly on-the-nose use of “Bye Bye Love” on a car radio, and the oddest relationship any student has ever had with a university librarian, who also has peculiar timing for when to walk in the road, can’t add up to a complete dealbreaker.  Why?  Because this is par for the course among the film’s potboiler peers.

“The Bye Bye Man” is as good/bad as “Rings” (review here), the first “Ouija” (review here), or any other go-to example of rubber-stamped, studio-style scares.  What this means to say is there is a place for this kind of formulaic fright film.  That place may not be on the home video shelves of hardcore horror fans.  But for online streaming queues with indiscriminate interests in supernatural suspense, it fits as fair filler.

Review Score:  55

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