Bye Bye Man, The (2017)

For reasons unknown, there exists an entity that appears whenever you speak, or think, its name – The Bye Bye Man. After which he appears and kills you. Extremely thin plot line, okay, but it’s horror so it might still be good, right?

I wanted to like this movie – like I really wanted it to be good, and not just because it was the first horror movie I’d managed to convince my fiance to see with me in theaters. I wanted it to be good because the trailer was so incredible! But, like most of my experience, I was let down. Starting from the beginning, it does start off strong. We see a man come home and kill his wife and neighbors in an effort to stop people from knowing The Bye Bye Man’s name. Flash-forward to the present, we see three kids, (I’m assuming teenagers?), leave school and meet up at a decrepit old house. It’s not until about ten minutes of dialogue do I realize that these kids are actually in college and they’re renting this house. I feel like we could have used some character development on these three before throwing one-layered shallow personalities on them. However, I know some of the best slasher movies are filled with one-layered characters, so I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

Speaking of character development, I have no idea of the backstory of the title character. The Bye Bye Man just shows up with his undead dog and kills people. We do get flashes of a scene involving a train, but no explanation. I feel like this was a missed opportunity on the filmmakers part. I don’t know, but it feels like chunks of the film are missing, like maybe they had a subplot where the Bye Bye Man was originally a homeless trainhopper and some freak accident caused him to become this way, and somewhere in the editing room they forgot to take out all of the train sequences. Maybe they ran out of money and had to scrap parts of the movie. Like one scene, where we see a child stick his head in one door, and the Bye Bye Man’s dog sticks his head out of another. Then, when the child leans back into the room, the dog slowly moves backward out of the room – almost as if they are in two separate dimensions. This is the best explanation I can come up with. Please go see the scene for yourself and explain that one to me. I really hope this movie was released before it was finished because the finished product doesn’t feel like a finished product.

Spoilers ahead because I’m about to get into the ending of the film. We finally get to see the Bye Bye Man close up, and man, does that special effects make-up suck. He looks like a costume you’d buy from Party City. Whatever, I can deal with that, but then all hell breaks loose! For whatever reason, he manipulates all of their minds into killing one another, then puts his finger on the remaining living college student’s forehead. Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door and the student’s brother and niece are on the porch. The student runs to the door, which I guess upsets the Bye Bye Man, because he starts throwing corpses of dead college kids all around the house. This upsets the student who proceeds to shoot himself in the head. The house burns down, everyone thinks it was a murder-suicide, and the credits roll following a bad joke from the student’s niece.

Wow, this was bad. What was that ending? Why spend all of this time showing the students run around and try to figure out the story behind the Bye Bye Man, only to just have everyone die in the end with no resolution? Who was the target audience for this film? Why was it edited so poorly? Alas, I’ll never know. All I can do is warn people, and let you decide how bad it is for yourself.

This movie is…

Not even good enough for a bad Friday night horror movie.

Cheers and goodnight.