Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'The Bye Bye Man'

​Written by Mike Cervantes

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Once again we’ve hit upon another one of my little biases: I’m not the biggest fan of horror flicks, particularly ones that try to recreate the “traditional” genre, vintage early ‘80s, featuring a modern day movie monster and his small cast of incidental teenage victims. However, I was still very intrigued by the prospect of The Bye Bye Man, and not simply because I needed something to do on Friday the 13th. Rather, my interest in the film had to do with two simple little words.

​Doug. Jones.

If you’re a film buff of any degree, the idea of it should be enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your head: Doug Jones. The last classically trained pantomime in Hollywood, whose subtle silent acting skills brought us The Silver Surfer, the Imps from DOOM, Abe Sapien or…hell about a third of the monsters in any Guillermo del Toro movie. So, I was totally along for the idea of a generic horror movie if the monster at the end turned out to be Doug Jones, gyrating, floor-crawling, and simply frightening us with extreme close-ups of his terror-hardened eye-sockets.

However, I’ll save you kind people out there the torment and let you know right off the bat that in this movie, he’s totally wasted. His screen time amounts to a few still frame jump scares, and a slow advance on the protagonist about as scary as the one you’d see from the Ghost of Christmas Future. Add into that the fact his character looks like a Spirit superstore grim reaper crossed with a melted Yankee Candle, (makeup by Robert Kurtzman, I still believe in you, buddy) and you have the batter in a recipe that’s more cookie cutter than goulash.

Our helpless pre-educated everyman protagonist is Elliot (Douglas Smith), a college scholarship student and baseball jock, happily pre-engaged to his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and he has the brilliant idea of living off-campus in a fix-up house along with his male jock expy John (Lucien Laviscount). There’s a general aura of evil surrounding the house, picked up by Sasha’s clairvoyant not-so-goth friend Kim (Jenna Kanell), but the real haunting doesn’t begin until Elliot finds an end table  in the basement with the words “The Bye Bye Man” scratched into the inside of its drawer. 

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You see, The Bye Bye Man is a mysterious figure who only appears to torment people who are aware of what his name is. It’s a rather silly concept to build audience tension upon. It just so happens I said “One for The Bye Bye Man” when I ordered my movie ticket, and I still seem to be alive. The movie also assumes that if you did a google search for “The Bye Bye Man” it’d turn up literally nothing, and the only way Elliott was able to evoke the spirit was by researching a cold case involving a reporter (Leigh Wannell) who investigated this in the late ‘60s and ended up committing an eight-person murder/suicide.

The movie progresses in the way that you’d expect: Elliot tries…and fails spectacularly to keep the secret while desperately trying to keep his loved ones alive, and simultaneously acting so bonkers that he becomes indirectly responsible for more death than the movie monster ever could. There are jump scares, fleeting phobia effects, and the most heinous deaths are reserved for the minority members of the cast. The saving grace of any horror movie is the ability to take everything it has thrown at you and mold it into a cohesive whole, and this film magnificently fails to do this well. There are motifs surrounding passing trains and silver dollars surrounding The Bye Bye Man. That doesn’t mean anything. At one point Kim’s face oozes maggots. That doesn’t mean anything. The only cast outsider to learn of The Bye Bye Man is Elliot’s teacher Mrs. Watkins (Cleo King) who is assumed to have killed her family, shortly before getting hit by a car. There’s no reason for there even to be a monster in this movie, when all the kills end up being Final Destination-style horrible coincidences. But hey, who needs Death when you got Doug Jones?

Stranger still is the fact that Jones isn’t even the only wasted actor in this film. Michael Trucco is Elliot’s older brother John, whose probing of Elliot’s strange behavior threatens to get him killed. Then there’s skeptical police detective Carrie-Anne Moss, and Faye Dunaway…yes, Faye Dunaway, in a cameo as a widow of Leigh Wannell’s character. Her section of the story is told so thoroughly at that point that there was no purpose in having her or that part of the story, show up in this film AT ALL.

In the end, I suppose they had the right idea in casting Doug Jones. If you’re going to use an actor known for his ominous silence, you may as well use the best guy in the business, but a few surprise castings end up being but tiny goldfish in the Sea World of bad decisions this movie makes. This isn’t even a “watch it as part of a Halloween schlockfest” bad horror flick. It’s just a bad horror flick. Avoid at all costs.

​Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna Google a Doug Jones/Del Toro supercut. 

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