SAY BYE-BYE TO THE BYE BYE MAN

 "You wanna watch something stupid?"

The plot, if you can call it that, follows a group of college friends who move into a creepy old house off campus. When one opens an antique nightstand and finds ‘The Bye Bye Man’ scribbled inside, he unleashes a terrifying and violent mass delusion in the group that leads to hallucinations, insanity/hysteria, murder, and suicide. 

The Bye Bye Man is based on an urban legend, that of a man born with Albinism in Louisiana in the 1920s. Teased mercilessly by his peers, as he grew older The Bye Bye Man turned violent and became a serial killer. He eventually goes blind and crafts a demon dog (named Gloomsinger) for himself out of the pieces/parts of his victims. The Bye Bye Man develops telepathy as well, so he can sense whenever someone thinks or says his name. He travels by train. Naturally, almost none of this is conveyed in the final product (there are less than a handful of hallucinations of a train in the first act, but these aren’t given any explanation). 

At least The Bye Bye Man isn't long. It's a still a total waste of time though with absolutely zero development whatsoever for our titular antagonist (and what kind of name is The Bye Bye Man anyways?). Most things are given no explanation (and likely little thought). For example: We see Elliot (played by a weepy-faced Douglas Smith. Dude also looks on the verge of death throughout. WTF?), our lead, be exposed to ‘The Bye Bye Man’ by opening the nightstand. As to how his group of friends is exposed though is never shown nor implied. 

The Bye Bye Man himself also doesn’t come across as any real threat. He doesn’t kill a single person during the run time. Every death is dealt by someone afflicted with The Bye Bye Man Delusion (it’s never referred to as such in the film, but is a moniker I made up).  The Bye Bye Man compels those he infects to kill others, but he himself doesn’t appear to partake in the slaughter.

The character design of The Bye Bye Man is unimaginative, derivative, and lazy. He is a pale, ‘Gentleman’-looking ghoul (as in the character from Buffy). He wears a black rain coat/rain jacket and tends to hang out in corners of rooms or in dark spaces. It almost feels like the filmmakers took inspiration from sleep-paralysis demons for The Bye Bye Man’s look. The decision to involve Gloomsinger, The Bye Bye Man’s blood-soaked demon dog, in the film is appreciated (though he doesn’t do much either).

The Bye Bye Man is rated PG-13, and boy does it show. There is minimal blood throughout. In fact, the first act is almost completely bloodless.There’s a scene where multiple characters are blasted away by a shotgun, with no blood splatter or visible wounds afterwards (you know they are clearly dead, but you still can’t help but wonder…). That said, even with a PG-13 rating, The Bye Bye Man can get shockingly dark.

The Bye Bye Man deals heavily with themes of suicide and mental illness/hysteria. The way it goes about presenting these themes is gross and disgusting. We have characters urging others to commit murder and suicide because it’s the only solution. What’s worse: the film seems to fall in favor of this position.

A movie following characters who are trying to maintain their grip on reality and not kill anyone while researching the entity responsible for their insanity has the potential to be (at the very least) interesting. Unfortunately, the husband/wife team of Jonathan Penner (Screenplay) and Stacy Title (Director. She passed away from ALS in 2021) fucked it up. 

The screenplay by Jonathan Penner (a recurring contestant on Survivor. Yes, THAT Survivor!) is pretty bad. Characters have little development, they act in unrealistic ways (the confrontation between Elliot  and an elderly lady played by Faye Dunaway comes to mind), and the dialogue is painfully bad. Some characters could/should have been removed completely (Here’s looking at you Carrie-Anne Moss, who appears in less than a handful of scenes and serves zero purpose), and as already stated we are given zero explanation for most events and zero back story for our antagonist. The third act comes at you like a speeding train, and the final resolution for  our group will likely piss most off. 

The direction by Stacy Title isn’t better. The Bye Bye Man looks consistently grey and muted. The film feels lifeless. There isn’t a good performance in the bunch (Douglas Smith as Elliot whines, pleads, and generally comes across as weak. A fault on the writing and direction). There is no sense of forward momentum throughout, and the film often feels like a sequence of events, or like it’s just moving from event-to-event.

In the end, The Bye Bye Man is about as bad as you heard. It suffers from an exceptionally weak screenplay, absent direction, a lack of character development, shoddy CGI, bad editing (just look at the way the deaths are executed in the first scene, no pun intended), obvious ADR, and an insulting ending. There was potential here, which makes the final product that much more disappointing. Don’t think it, don’t say it, don’t watch it!

0.5 STAR