Directed by Stacy Title
Starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Doug Jones, Carrie-Anne Boss and Faye Dunaway
I have had some really shitty luck with modern horror lately. How bad? I checked out The Bye Bye Man. And just how bad is that? Rings was better. That should about do it for the intro paragraph this week.
According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this flick was based on a part of a much longer work called "The Bridge to Body Island" by Robert Daman Schneck. I've spent a fair amount of time recently debating with the few people who I speak to (like, actually in person) that there have been plenty of cases where the movie based on the book is actually better. And yes, folks, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is way better than the much-more-book-faithful-but-completely-milquetoast 1997 TV remake. However, there is no possible way that this movie can be anything other than way worse than the short story that it comes from. The best way I can describe the story that we have here is that it's very familiar. It's kind of like the ghost movies that have been really popular with the kids lately, and it's kind of a ripoff of that whole Slender Man thing that's also big with the kids. So I guess what we have here is a movie that tries to be really cool and edgy, but instead kind of sucks. Folks, when the Lick Ness Monster reviews modern horror films, this is the kind of amazing insight that you are blessed with. On with the show.
The most important part of the screenplay is the first ten pages, and this is something that a lot of newer horror films really struggle with. It's difficult to explain why. We get an event that gives us the past evil and the reason to care, but so many of them just fail in that attempt despite doing everything right on paper. It just feels so paint by numbers. That's also what we have here, as the magical opening gives us a major rampage of death carried out by a man doing his best Howard Unruh impersonation. Google it. A whole bunch of people get wiped out by this guy's pistol, followed by a dire warning just before he blows himself away for everything to "not think it" and "not say it." Spoiler alert.
Flash forward fifty-some years to the present day. Unfortunately, just like in the aforementioned Rings, this means that we get to meet our extraordinarily vapid bunch of protagonist characters. Meet Eliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and their mutual friend John (Lucien Laviscount, and boy, that is a name that just begs to be used for a Reggae-singing professional wrestler). These three are college students moving into an off-campus house located not far away from where they attend school, and, that's pretty much it. There's really not much else interesting to say about who they are, although we'll get to some of the things they DO in due time. What you really need to know is that these actors are mediocre at best and outright offensively bad at worst. Cressida Bonas is especially awful as Sasha, and the scenes that eventually come of her attempting to emote her terror in the same voice you'd use while giving your address at the DMV are all the proof I need. This is the trio that we spend our time with, and it truly is a great timeline.
This is where the "spooky haunted house" section of the movie kicks in. The three friends (and two of them decidedly more than friends) start finding these mysterious coins all around the house. Eventually, the characters begin having weird hallucinations and hearing voices. Then, the titular Bye Bye Man - a hooded figure who reaches out to them like Tyraptus from the old Dragon Strike board game - makes his appearance. The hooded avenger is played by Doug Jones, a pretty familiar guy to those in the know who has made a career out of playing dark characters while caked in makeup. He does another commendable job here, but it's not like the surrounding material gives him much to work with. Thus, I declare his performance wasted. Yet more amazing insight.
See, the whole concept of the movie is the following: the Bye Bye Man is some sort of entity that thrives on fear. The introductory massacre was actually a reporter who covered an EARLIER atrocity involving a teenager killing his entire family, so the idea is that the entity spreads like a virus. Once you're afraid, you're already screwed. The coins are like his early calling card, and the hallucinations are the next step. Unfortunately, the movie takes a hard dive into ridiculous territory at the second stage as the Bye Bye Man uses his otherworldly powers to convince Eliot that his girlfriend is shacking up with John. It's just as enthralling as you'd expect. There's a couple of kills to bring this movie just above the government minimum before we hit the finale, and neither is especially impactful or memorable.
There is also this one ridiculous bit involving a creepy coat hanger that Eliot and Sasha keep in their bedroom that had me laughing out loud in the movie theater...but then it reminded me of one of my crippling childhood fears. Like most kids, I was scared of the basement. But for some mystical reason, the thing that scared me the most about said basement was the coat rack. I thought that getting shoved into this thing meant certain death at the hands of spectral boogeymen who would carry me into the world that existed beyond the coats, so I can at least kind of see where Eliot and Sasha wouldn't take this coat off the rack that occasionally turns into the Bye Bye Man. Thus concludes this week's edition of the epic Lick Ness Monster Biography Saga. Hope everyone enjoyed.
Amazingly enough, there's a couple of side characters played by actors who have been in some way better and much more noteworthy stuff. The requisite Police Detective character is filled by Carrie-Anne Moss, known to most as Trinity from The Matrix but known best to me as an early-'90s TV babe of the highest order on shows like Silk Stalkings and Forever Knight. There's also Best Actress Academy Award winner Faye Dunaway (!) as the Creepy Old Widow who gives us some much-needed exposition for key scenes, and it ranks right up there with her villain role from Supergirl as things that she'd probably like scrubbed from the resume. Just thought that I would mention these characters/actors, because I know that all nine of my followers would riot if I didn't.
This was another bad movie. Unlike Rings, there's not even the potential of what could have been to make me want to write more about it. The acting is bad, the characters are bad, the scares and tension are nonexistent, and the ending is another one of those modern horror endings that just made me roll my eyes and go "really?" These days, I pretty much get sexual arousal when a horror film just decides to END without the hint of more stuff to come. Alas, that ain't what we get here. Don't say I didn't warn you about this one. Stay far away.
* out of ****. Hey, at least it's not Rob Zombie's Halloween II.
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