The Bye Bye Man (2017)
In this day and age of seemingly endless remakes of and sequels to long-existing properties within the horror genre, it's automatically tempting when a horror film comes along purporting to stem from an entirely original idea. In other words, not another legacy sequel (or "requel," as they're commonly referred to by the hip, youthful audiences of today) to a horror film from the last century, nor a remake of a classic that wasn't necessarily begging for a makeover. On the other hand, when we think about horror, our first thought runs to the horde of icons who constitute the slasher subgenre: Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface (Bubba Sawyer or Thomas Hewitt, depending on the timeline), Jigsaw, Charles Lee Ray, or Pinhead. That doesn't mean that the slasher subgenre is the be-all, end-all of the entire horror genre, just that those villains essentially serve as the representatives thereof (and make up the most profitable Halloween costumes to boot). And no matter how much the genre evolves to reflect the fears and anxieties of our contemporary American society, the hearts of genre buffs will always belong to those gargantuan titans of terror.
So, how about a horror film that fulfills both cravings: an original storyline that isn't tethered to a franchise from the 70s-90s, and one that introduces a new addition to the costumed slasher lineup. Sounds like an instantly salivating prospect, and that's precisely what's suggested by the eponymous supernatural psychological teen slasher, The Bye Bye Man. In theory, the premise sounds like an intriguing amalgamation of supernatural bump-in-the-night chills, a portrait of psychological deterioration, and the bloody shocks of a good old-fashioned splatter fest. In execution, what the husband-and-wife team of screenwriter Jonathan Penner and director Stacy Title have delivered is one of the worst excuses for a horror film of the past decade, a bottom-of-the-barrel patchwork of bloodless violence, underbaked mythology, atrocious dialogue, and shallow relationship drama, topped off with a gallery of some of the most intellectually disabled characters to ever disgrace the screen. And to be clear, I don't mean these stick-figure archetypes suffer from actual mental disabilities; they just have a disconcerting tendency to make the most horrifically misguided decision a horror hater could love as an excuse to shout at the screen and shake their head in righteous superiority.
Adhering faithfully to the blueprint of the slasher subgenre, Penner and Title commence their addition with a classically structured opening scene to succinctly clue audiences in to their nominally original story. Title brightens the screen with an exterior shot of a white house in a seemingly drowsy suburban neighborhood that evokes the opening of David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, albeit set in the sunny daytime rather than the dark blue of early evening. The time period is 1969 in Madison, Wisconsin. A man named Larry Redmon (Leigh Whannell) pulls into the driveway and knocks frantically on the door, asking the woman who answers, Jane, if she told anybody about "the name," to which she casually discloses that, yes, she told her husband, who "thought it was funny." Horrified at this reveal and racked with guilt, Larry sincerely apologizes for what he's about to do as he returns to his car and pulls out a rifle, prompting Jane to shut her door and run away inside. But not quickly enough. Larry fires a bullet through the door and forces his way inside, executing Jane and Rick, only to find out from the latter that he's mentioned the name to someone else in the neighborhood, thereby sealing their fate in the process. Juxtaposing the brutality of his actions with a squeaky clean sweater vest and nerdy pair of bifocals, Whannell, renowned as the creator of the Saw and Insidious franchises before stepping up his game with an original and timely interpretation of a classic 1930s sci-fi horror property in The Invisible Man, demonstrates here that he's far better suited to the art of genre filmmaking than dramatic acting. Credit where it's due, Penner does a taut job of establishing the central conflict of his story in this flashback prologue: we learn that once the titular name is spoken and passed on by word of mouth, the person responsible for first sharing it must eliminate all they've told, lest the curse be spread to more victims. On the minus side, he and Title drag on this cold opener for way too long, draining it of the interest it might have fostered with unconvincing portrayals of fear, panic, and pain, along with a noticeable lack of gore where a lot would be essential. More on that last point later.
The story then jumps ahead to the present day, where Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend, Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and his childhood best friend, John (Lucien Laviscount), move out of their dorms and into a freshly purchased fixer-upper near their college. On the second night, the three amigos decide to throw a housewarming, inviting their friends and Elliot's older brother, Virgil (Michael Trucco), his wife, and their daughter, Alice (Erica Tremblay). On a nightstand in his and Sasha's bedroom, Elliot discovers scribblings of the phrase, "Don't say it, don't think it," written repeatedly, along with the name, "The Bye Bye Man." After everyone has gone home, Sasha invites her psychic friend, Kim (Jenna Kanell), to perform a seance to cleanse the house of any negative energies and spirits. At first, Elliot and John regard Kim's exercise with disbelief, condescension, and amusement, only to have their skepticism gradually dismantled as she demonstrates her ability time and again, aware of the deaths of Elliot's parents as well as the location of the keys he's placed in a pot on the kitchen stove. Soon, Kim's certainty and composure curdle into abject fear as she begins receiving messages of the writings in the nightstand.
Beginning the next day, Elliot, Sasha, and John gradually feel their sense of safety and sanity being inexplicably stripped, haunted by repetitive noises throughout their new home and bizarre hallucinations of a supernatural entity (Doug Jones) whose influence and power grow more oppressive the more they think about him. Sasha becomes sick with a cold that won't seem to dissipate, John finds himself growing more irritable and tense for no discernible reason, and Elliot becomes increasingly paranoid that the two people he loves and trusts the most are committing the ultimate betrayal behind his back.
Adapted from "The Bridge to Body Island," a chapter in Robert Damon Schneck's non-fiction book, The President's Vampire, The Bye Bye Man nominally tells an original horror story about a mythological creature who feeds on the fear of his victims and uses the ties that bind them as his primary weapon, eroding their perception of reality, turning them against each other, turning them into the monster they're desperately trying to escape and defeat. Conceptually, that's all well and fine, but in practice, Penner has merely utilized this hook as a springboard for an uninspired rip-off of Candyman and A Nightmare on Elm Street while lazily recycling just about every trope in the horror movie playbook known to man: three best friends renting a home located conveniently in the woods, hearing a repetitive series of unsettling sounds such as a gold coin clanging on the floor and scratching, wandering downstairs into the dingy cellar to investigate said strange noises, a silent, masculine supernatural entity who lurks and occasionally emerges from the shadows, the protagonist researching the history of said entity at a library, a psychic character whose special talent unwittingly unleashes paranormal torment on herself and her friends, and most egregiously of all, a relentless cascade of explanatory dialogue to inform the characters, and by extension, us, of what exactly they're up against and how to potentially overcome it.
Don't get me wrong, I love when husbands and wives work together to bring a good horror movie to life. There will always be haters who unreflectively say, "That actress is only in the movie because her husband directed it," and while that may be technically true, if they work well together as a team, I have no problem with the partnership. If anything, I say it's awesome if two loved ones can put their creative minds together and produce something original, creative, and terrifying. Unfortunately, in the case of The Bye Bye Man, Jonathan Penner and Stacy Title are no Rob and Sheri Moon Zombie or Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel.
It brings me no joy to belittle the work of Stacy Title for two reasons: 1) no, this does not represent evidence of why women shouldn't direct horror films. Jennifer Kent is the mastermind behind The Babadook, the greatest psychological creature feature of the 2010s, Rose Glass reinvigorated the religious-psychological-demonic possession story with Saint Maud by refraining from actual demonic possession, and both Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner paved the way for Christian Bale's towering lead performance in American Psycho, a gruesomely funny satire of the cutthroat world of Wall Street. And 2), in December 2017, Title was diagnosed with ALS, losing her ability to walk, talk, or swallow as her disease progressed. On January 11, 2021, at the age of 56, Title passed away. With all due respect to Title's life and the unimaginable loss suffered by her husband, directing a horror film was evidently not her forte, nor was writing one her husband's. A movie should never be judged solely for its title, and there are probably countless horror films with lame ones. Look at Bryan Bertino's The Monster. If one were to come across just that title, they'd automatically assume it refers to some generic monster movie about a generic monster terrorizing some cardboard protagonists. Never would I myself have thought that a movie with such a title would turn out so beautifully layered, focusing on the dysfunctional relationship between an alcoholic, emotionally stunted single mother and her preteen daughter forced to assume the role of the parent, utilizing its titular creature as a metaphor for the soul-crushing, body-destroying effects of addiction and the inherent love between a parent and their child. The Bye Bye Man, on the other hand, is a more distinctive yet far stupider-sounding title, and the resulting product follows through on that juvenile indication.
The eponymous entity, apart from owning such a stupid and forgettable name that just barely makes sense or holds any specificity (he makes you go bye-bye, I guess?), is nothing more than a pale imitation of Freddy Krueger and Daniel Robitaille, AKA the Candyman. Similar to the former invader of nightmares, the Bye Bye Man leaves a series of claw marks etched across walls, infiltrates the minds of his victims, and his ability to terrify and dominate grow stronger the more fear he instills within them. Like the latter hook-handed, righteously enraged victim of racism-fueled torture, the Bye Bye Man only appears to his victims when his name is read and spoken aloud. However, the script commits a cheat: while a victim will not officially become haunted until they come across the dreaded name, the Bye Bye Man still announces his presence beforehand through the repetitive sound of an unexplained gold coin dropping onto the floor and the emergence of his loyal hellhound, realized in generic, visually unremarkable CGI. So even before Elliot discovers the ghoul's name scribbled within his nightstand, the Bye Bye Man and his dog impatiently prod him into discovering it, as though Penner could think of no more organic or imaginative way to revive the long-dormant contagion and wanted to speed up the pace. It's a perfect example of pure screenwriting laziness and indecision.
The one thing Title gets right as a director is casting Doug Jones, one of the most prominent portrayers of modern-day supernatural villains, in the role of her titular ghoul. From the standpoint of his physical appearance, Jones would potentially make an impression in the service of a better script and under the direction of someone with talent in handling monsters, like Jennifer Kent, Mike Flanagan, or Jones' future director in the same year, Guillermo del Toro. His makeup and attire aren't especially awful. In fact, they hearken back to the classic creatures of yesteryear. And his unique, God-given physical characteristics help create an imposing figure of mayhem. Standing at a gargantuan height of 6 feet and 4 inches tall, Jones doesn't suffer from Marfan syndrome like his fellow go-to actor for modern monsters, Javier Botet, as confirmed on his Twitter. "Just plain tall and skinny." Although, there's nothing "plain" about his naturally monstrous appearance. As embodied by Jones, the pitifully named Bye Bye Man is intimidatingly towering, with a skeletal frame concealed within a black, hooded cloak. His head is bald, as befits a skeleton-looking demon from Hell. A series of slashes run across his emaciated face, pale in complexion. His fingers are as thin and long, with nails as sharp, as the blades protruding from Freddy's self-made glove, though he doesn't use them for any purposes more nefarious than tauntingly pressing one against Elliot's forehead to psychically foreshadow his intention to target his brother and niece next.
The abilities bestowed upon the Bye Bye Man by Penner are as embarrassingly unscary as they are needlessly restrictive and woefully uninventive. This is a creature who was never human. While his origin is never divulged, it's safe to assume he sprung from the darkest recesses of Hell. He has no mercy, no compassion for the suffering of human beings, no motive other than to gain access inside innocent people's heads and drive them insane. He's a pure sadist, one who derives joy not just from stripping victims of their security and making them doubt their reality and their relationships with those closest to them, but from manipulating them to commit the most inhumane acts of violence so he himself doesn't have to. The premise posited by the screenplay, spoken aloud by Whannell's tortured reporter, is that, in any real-life crime story where a purportedly normal person snapped one day and went on a seemingly unprovoked killing spree, it wasn't random, nor did the murderer go insane. It was the Bye Bye Man who made them do it. Given that kind of ambitious, albeit utterly ridiculous, lore and simplicity, you would think this ghoul would possess far scarier attributes than... causing one to hallucinate blood spilling from a detective's eyes and mouth, and dripping onto her shoes, or deceiving you into believing said detective just winked at you flirtatiously, or, wait for it... manipulating you into believing your girlfriend and best friend are hooking up when you're not around. Ooh, melodrama! As for the sickness he inflicts on Sasha, at no point does she lean over the toilet vomiting blood, or cough up a wad of long, black hair, or look in the mirror and see a bug crawling out of her eye, or feel one crawling around within her skin, compelling her to cut her skin open to release it. No, he literally just gives her a case of the common cold: a nonstop cough, a cold body temperature, and bouts of sneezing.
Perhaps these mild supernatural symptoms would pack slightly more of a punch if we cared about the characters suffering them, but alas, Penner has conceived some of the most brain-dead nonentities to populate his story, the kind that give teen horror films everywhere a piss-poor reputation. The fundamental rule for any horror film, regardless of subgenre (apart from maybe parodies), is that the filmmakers must endear us emotionally to the characters experiencing the horror firsthand. As stated by Meagan Navarro, chief film critic for Bloody Disgusting, horror is empathy. It's impossible to feel the cold, vicarious sensation of fear if we can't identify and empathize with those caught in its clutches. This is a basic rule Penner clearly didn't absorb before sitting down to pen this screenplay. His protagonists are not realistic human beings who make the kinds of decisions we'd make in similar circumstances. Elliot, Sasha, John, and Kim are pancake-flat stick figures. Not one of them engenders the slightest ounce of sympathy or empathy, including Elliot, our so-called protagonist with whom we're expected to identify the most strongly. He makes decisions that are every bit as lame-brained as everyone else onscreen, by the end to a criminal degree. In terms of background, all we learn about Elliot is that he lost both his parents as a child in a car accident, has been nurtured by his older brother ever since, played Tier 1 baseball with John, and got into college on a scholarship. However, Penner exhibits zero interest in examining the grief that's preoccupied Elliot his entire life, or the field of study for which he's attending college in the first place. What profession is he striving to enter after graduation?
The most frustrating part of this adherence to the most offensive cliche in the genre is that even after characters learn the mythology of the Bye Bye Man and express an understanding of his powers and how to avoid falling for his psychological traps, they still proceed to put themselves in harm's way by making the stupidest, most incoherent choices imaginable to the human brain. Case in point: moronic medium Kim understands that the entity makes his victims see things that aren't there and blinds them to those that are. Immediately after conveying this information to Elliot, she hallucinates an injured family in an overturned car on a railroad crying for help. Now, if Kim were as smart as she initially presented herself, she would recognize this as a potential hallucination created by the Bye Bye Man, turn her gaze away, and close her eyes. Instead, she impulsively rushes out of Elliot's car and runs to the imagined family on the train tracks, ignoring Elliot's warning of an oncoming train until it's too late (and in a case of sloppy editing, Kanell is caught smiling to the side before she turns her head to face the train).
John is probably the dimmest color in the palette, telling us he's Elliot's best friend and would destroy anyone who dared to insult his deceased parents (why anyone would do that is never elaborated on), but then proceeding to commit actions that belie those words. He constantly and brazenly touches Sasha consolingly right in front of Elliot, knowing how jealous and paranoid his alleged best friend is becoming. At their housewarming, he dances suggestively with her, grinding his pelvis against her butt, once again, right in front of Elliot. After returning home from a bizarre encounter with Kim, John grabs Sasha by her arms, looks straight into her eyes, and creepily states, "See, you are clean and beautiful. That's nice." When the three of them are questioned by Detective Shaw (Carrie-Anne Moss), Elliot earnestly begs John not to say the name so as to avoid spreading his curse to anyone else. Despite being victimized himself by this entity, John decides to take offense to being told what to do and threatens to say the name anyway out of spite. If it wasn't for the uniform stupidity of every character in the script, I'd suspect Penner of passive-aggressive racism.
Even Mrs. Watkins (Cleo King), a librarian side character who should be the wise, seen-this-before black lady, gets saddled with the low IQ that plagues everyone around her, recklessly trading the Bye Bye Man's name back and forth with Elliot after both are made aware of the life-threatening danger in doing so. Interestingly enough, the first character to display Penner's contempt for the intellects of his viewers is Virgil, who brings Alice to his brother's housewarming so she can see her uncle. If you had or have a six-year-old daughter, would you take her to a college party full of alcohol, and allow her to wander unattended upstairs? I certainly hope your answer is an emphatic fuck no.
The only thing possibly more cringe-inducing than the decisions these characters make is the dialogue they're saddled with uttering. Rather than unveiling their nonexistent personalities and fleshing out the relationships between them, the single-minded, functional purpose of Penner's dialogue is to explain the abilities of the Bye Bye Man and the potential methods to resist his influence. As a result, we're subjected to endless scenes of Elliot talking about the Bye Bye Man to everyone with whom he comes into contact, sharing and receiving new tidbits along the journey to a hopelessly fatalistic destination. Seriously, the resolution -- conveyed by a washed-up, overqualified Faye Dunaway as the perfunctorily named "Widow Redmon," because she's the widow of Larry Redmon, you see -- is for anyone who knows the name to kill all they've passed it along to before taking their own life. That way, the curse can be contained and no other innocent soul has to die. That's how much Penner cares about his characters. His only way out for them is to die, so the rest of the world can be saved. Taken on its own terms, that's just plain stupid. If you're already guaranteed to die, what's the point of proceeding any further? On a more allegorical level, say, as a metaphor for how to combat mental illness, it's downright offensive. Just kill yourself so you don't infect anyone else with your illness. You'll go down as a selfless hero, at the very least. Yuck.
There's not a single standout performance amongst the cast, but for the most part, they're all weighed down by the absurdity of the plot and dunderheadedness of their characterizations. Douglas Smith, having graduated from a supporting boyfriend role in the similarly atrocious Ouija to the starring one, exhibits strong leading man potential. With his short, dirty blond hair, slightly curled at the top, and winsome smile, he possesses a somewhat nerdy handsomeness, not the typical Hollywood hunk kind, that lends a warm, trustworthy presence. It's a shame he's let down by such a criminally unintelligent character. When he goes into his bedroom to put on a sweater in preparation for baseball, Elliot mutters to himself, "Why do jocks always have to play games, even at a party?" When he discovers the BBM's mantra written in his nightstand, he repeats it aloud while turning it upside down and right side up, as if he can't see that it's the same scribbling again and again. Once he learns about the BBM's ability to distort his victims' reality, he still effortlessly falls victim to the hallucinations of John and Sasha having sex in front of him. Rather than closing his eyes and walking away, he actually responds to the unreal provocation by picking up a baseball bat and hitting John over the head, rendering him unconscious. To make matters worse, he ties John's feet together and drags him into the basement, reasoning that it's to prevent him from uttering the infamous name to the police. At this point, any chance for goodwill to be generated for Elliot is lost. By the (anti)climactic confrontation where he has to save Virgil and Alice from becoming the BBM's next targets, Elliot develops a borderline comical struggle to refrain from saying his name. While Virgil and Alice stand outside the home in the cold, imploring to be let in, Elliot stutters, "B-B-B," holding his hands against his mouth, as if not saying, "The Bye Bye Man," has become as agonizing a challenge as holding your breath. As much as the writing is mainly to blame, Douglas does go a little over the top with his bug-eyed reactions to horrifying images.
As the object of his affection and the source of his mind-snapping insecurity, Cressida Bonas fails to transfer Elliot's devotion to the audience. It's not that she gives an abysmal performance necessarily, but she's definitely on hand more for her beauty than her acting capability. She plays Sasha incredibly one-color, and that color is perpetually exhausted, as though Bonas ingested an antihistamine before filming. On the one hand, her dreary demeanor makes sense because Sasha spends the majority of the movie afflicted with a cold. Maybe the character is actually taking some kind of medication not shown to the viewer. But either way, it limits our ability to engage with Sasha, and her personality prior to her victimization doesn't present much of a contrast. She's a stereotypical damsel in distress. While her coughs are suitably convincing, Bonas' line delivery is wooden, and her facial expressions to the hallucinatory horror around her read more as befuddled and fatigued than terrified out of her (nonexistent) wits. Of course, it's hard to pin the blame entirely on her when the goings-on in question fail to inspire terror in anyone. Despite her blond hair and attractive, innocent face, she lacks charisma, sex appeal, or a moment's worth of energy.
The violence is markedly watered down to achieve the financially more beneficial PG-13 rating. It's pretty clear The Bye Bye Man began life on the page as an R-rated teen slasher, and it could have only turned out better had Title followed through with that direction. The lack of graphic gore isn't just a hindrance, it's an embarrassment. Where there should be a pool of blood, there's not even a drop. This is most evident in the Wisconsin massacre flashbacks, where the neighbors on Larry's block may be humans vulnerable to bullets, but their bodies don't seem to contain an ounce of blood. When one person is shot, their body is blown back against the wall before collapsing onto the floor, leaving an imprint in the wall but no splash of blood. One man, after being shot off-camera, crawls slowly across his floor in feigned agony, crying a most unconvincing cry that almost sounds like a malicious laugh, with no blood on any part of his body. But then, Larry fires one final, fatal blow to his back, and this time... still, no blood is disgorged. One of the few times we are treated to the red stuff occurs in the aftermath of Mrs. Watkins' massacre of her family. After revealing her holding a bloody knife, cinematographer James Kniest lowers his camera and pans to the bodies of her children lying motionlessly on the floor, their faces hidden from the frame while blood puddles around their legs. During certain instances of gun violence, when the trigger is pulled, Title and Kniest cut away from the bullet penetration to random, unexplained shots of an oncoming train and the railroad below, never clarifying the connection between the Bye Bye Man and the perpetually whistling train. Speaking of which, when one is used to remove Kim from the story, no blood or severed body parts are shown, cutting instead to the wide-eyed, mouth-gaping reaction of Elliot. It registers more as tame than artful.
Title and her cinematographer attempt to craft some disgusting, surrealistic images to put viewers on the edge of their seats, but fall flat with every opportunity. Kniest frequently returns to a tracking shot through the protagonists' creepy home, taking us on a tour of every shadowy corner, but rather than build a sense of foreboding, he only visualizes the emptiness at the center of the story. After Elliot experiences a surge of insecurity about Sasha's feelings for John, Kniest zeroes in on a distorted reflection of Smith's face in a teakettle, with one side erased to signify the start of his psychological deterioration. The duration of the shot is too long, and the image is too obvious and more silly-looking than symbolically chilling. While John and Kim sit beside each other in the former's car following an unsatisfying sexual encounter, John imagines tiny maggots emerging from Kim's eye and falling onto her long, black hair. It's effectively gross, but too obviously a hallucination to reflect John's insecurity about being unable to perform. The most random and uncalled-for image is one that's presented only for the audience, unseen by any of the characters and therefore pointless: a drawing of a dog on the wallpaper in Elliot's bedroom momentarily comes alive and turns its head toward the camera. The most frightening thing about that is that, at a screening attended by film critic-turned-filmmaker Chris Stuckmann, someone in the audience was actually galvanized into exclaiming, "Aw, shit!" Really? How sheltered are you that an image like that provoked terrified excitement? In Elliot's bedroom, Kniest cuts to static shots of the blackness within an open secret closet, desperately trying to create suspense and play on our fear of the dark and the unknown that lies behind open doors, but it doesn't lead to anything scary or anywhere original. It's just an empty, repetitive image.
Aside from Smith's competent star turn, the best asset The Bye Bye Man has going for it is its central setting. While it boasts about as much originality as the plot, the large, isolated fixer-upper amid the forest makes for a classic, albeit undeniably overused, playground in which its demon may roam freely. Despite clocking in at a standard 96 minutes, Title's pacing is excruciatingly slow, making The Bye Bye Man feel substantially longer than its mercifully brief runtime would suggest. Much of this is due to the way she repeats and draws out scenes of characters wandering ever so slowly through the cellar to investigate the sounds of scratches. By directing her actors to walk slowly in the dark, Title believes she's conveying their apprehension and, hopefully, transferring it to the audience like a virus. In reality, when the characters doing the walking are so plastic and inhuman, then the slowness registers as simply that, with no suspense or dread resulting from it. It doesn't help, either, when all that leisurely walking leads to nothing in the way of terrifying imagery, heart-pounding jump scares, or meaningful revelations to move the plot forward. By contrast, the editing by Ken Blackwell occasionally cuts jarringly from one shot to the next. An actor will say a line, and the second they're finished, without waiting for them to take a breath, Blackwell transitions to the next scene.
Just as bad as, if not worse than, Title's pacing are her jump scares, which are uniformly predictable and ineffectual. She relies on a repetitive formula of characters staring at a hallucination created by the Bye Bye Man for an extremely long time before some harmless character pops into the frame and scares them out of their reverie. For Elliot, this occurs when he's in the library reading the historical record of Larry Redmon's massacre. (Of course, he looks at his watch and says aloud, "Good, I've got time," so the audience can predict his sense of time will soon be warped.) From across the room, he sees the BBM sitting at a table, his face concealed by his hood, and every time Elliot looks back up, he inches closer. Suddenly, Mrs. Watkins materializes in front of him and screams, "What are you doing, boy?" causing him to realize he's been scribbling mindlessly in the document. For John, the BBM appears to him in a classroom (the only time we see any of the characters actually in school). While looking at his phone for no reason other than to allow the scene to play out, a video manifests of the BBM and his hellhound on a moving train, staring straight at him, the former pointing. Suddenly, the teacher slams his hands on John's desk. The most contrived attempt at a jump takes place in Elliot's bedroom. Across from his bed hangs a black cloak on the wall (again, for no other reason than to enable the scare to transpire). As expected from the moment that wide shot is introduced, the BBM eventually emerges from the cloak in the dark, pointing at Elliot for no purpose other than to jolt him out of bed.
Early in the proceedings, on the first night of the protagonists having moved in to their home, before they find themselves the latest prey of the titular Reaper, Sasha and Elliot are alone in their bedroom, snuggling romantically in each other's arms. "You wanna watch something stupid?" Elliot asks. If Jonathan Penner were a more creative and self-aware writer, I'd celebrate this line as an indication of wry self-deprecation. Instead, it merely begs the viewer to chime in, "Don't bother searching. Just watch yourselves in this movie." Better yet, feel free to just wave a cold, unwelcoming bye-bye to The Bye Bye Man.
2.7/10
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