It was, uh, bad.
Between the end-of-year release of holiday blockbusters and the Oscars in February, there is an awkward period in the film industry where major studios typically dump their low budget, low-potential crap that no one wants to see. With the media more interested in covering the awards show nominees and audiences less apt to spend money on films after an expensive holiday season, this trash — garbage, if you will — can be subtly dropped into theaters and subsequently forgotten with very little negative press in the process. We are currently in the middle of this period.
The Bye Bye Man, directed by Stacy Title and written by Jonathan Penner — and, ironically enough, sporting an awful title and a poorly-penned screenplay — is the quintessential January flick, complete with tired cliches, a level of scariness that rivals your average Nicholas Sparks novel, and a devastating lack of intentional humor or self-awareness. It takes after recent January horror/ thriller flops such as 2016’s The Forest, 2015’s The Boy Next Door, and 2012’s The Devil Inside and even builds upon their vast degree of god-awfulness in an egregious triumph of stupidity that would make Adam Sandler blush.
With a name like The Bye Bye Man and an IMDb score that currently stands at 3.8 out of 10, I went into this movie with incredibly low expectations. Had there been a few solid jump scares, some decent suspense building and a couple halfway-believable performances by the main cast, I would’ve been pleasantly surprised and said a few nice things in this review. But the sheer ineptitude of this motion picture has left me at a loss for nice words — the entire main cast couldn’t claim supporting roles in a high school play, the soundtrack is woefully out of touch with the movie’s tone, the costume design of the primary antagonist consists of a cheap Halloween costume and some PlayStation 2-grade CGI, the dialogue holds no purpose other than to provide needless exposition and the characters are never fleshed out beyond surface-level stereotypes (jock womanizer, oblivious but well-meaning boyfriend, unfaithful and shallow girlfriend). I would say the mere 96-minute runtime was a welcome surprise, but my unceasing boredom led the experience to feel about as long as my marriage to my third ex-wife. (Badum-tss, dad joke.)
If you’re still reading this, I’m not entirely sure why. The movie sucked, you could’ve figured that one out early on. If you’re here for literary interest, and you want to see what clever conclusion I’ll think up this time, well too bad. An underwritten movie deserves an underwritten conclusion. Skedaddle.
Zero stars (out of five).
