"Don't Say It, Don't Think It..."
Of all of the many cinematic genres within the spectrum of movie-making today, horror is perhaps the one arguably hardest to crack successfully, particularly in recent years where the generic formulaic feel of "cattle-prod" cinema has been the default setting for many poor examples of the genre, resulting inevitably in shoddy critical examinations and even worse box office figures, leading many to come to the conclusion that perhaps the genre as a whole is ever-so swiftly running out of steam. In the case of The Bye Bye Man, it comes as no real surprise that not only is this embarrassment of a horror more than happy to settle into such preconceived notions, but it is a film which insults the intelligence of even the most amateur of horror fanatics, with a non-existent sense of threat grinding its' way into submission alongside a clunky, cliche-ridden screenplay, one which is stretched to the limit in order to splutter some sort of reason for existence upon the big screen when it undeniably belongs within the straight-to-DVD bargain bin in your local supermarket. As you might be able to tell, The Bye Bye Man is an utter, utter, utter work of horror from beginning to end. Just not in a good way.
With a premise which blatantly rips off everything from The Babadook to A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Bye Bye Man suffers from a fundamental issue of being mouth-gapingly stupid both in execution and production. A trio of leading characters you really don't care about, a leading bogey-man who isn't scary in the slightest, a cop-out ending which obviously is there for franchising potential and more laughs than scares is a selection of the many issues surrounding the film, one which is directed with no real sense of character by Stacy Title and includes strange, off-kilter cameos from the likes of Carrie-Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway who can only be involved in the project due to the promise of a improved bank balance. Whilst I can enjoy stupid, b-movie silliness as much as the next person, The Bye Bye Man really has nothing at all in its' favour, an overly cheap knock off a horror movie which needs to make the most of its' short stint in the cinema in order to recuperate the cost to create its' sheer awfulness, awfulness which can only result in being a film you simply have to leave by saying bye bye man. Yeah, I know.
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