The Bye Bye Man — Blue Fairy Film Blog

There’s a major difference between what I consider to be a bad movie and one of the worst movies ever made: intent. Are you intending to make something worthwhile and you’re simply incompetent? Well, that’s just a garden variety bad movie. Are you trying to take my money for what I assume to be a horror film but is instead a sloppy cash grab? Ding ding ding! You’ve won the honor of being one of the worst fucking things I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. This bestowed honor is willed to The Bye Bye Man, a film that is so incompetent and yet so willfully terrible, it’s almost beyond comprehension.

The director of this abomination is Stacy Title, who is the wife of the screenwriter, Jonathan Penner. Penner is a small time actor who is best known as a three time contestant on the reality show Survivor. This film is adapted from a book chapter about urban legends entitled "The Bridge to Body Island" by Robert Damon Schneck. If I had not read the synopsis of this chapter, I would not understand one single moment of this film. Schneck created a mythology and life story for this eponymous ghoul that would have lent to an interesting and creepy film. Instead, the details and reasoning for any of this antagonist’s actions were left to the audience to interpret to ill effect. The villain’s motivations and lore are never truly covered by the film. The only thing we know is how he can get in your head and how his evil spreads. I don’t need to know every single thing about a horror movie antagonist, but there’s no mention of what he is, who he is, or why he does what he does. Not only is the film complex with its backstory, it’s also very simple in execution, lending to a mishmash of better films’ mythology.

Every performance in this film is either Tommy Wiseau level dramatic or amateurish. I’m going to blame the direction, which was nonexistent, as well as the ridiculous and overly clichéd script. The three main actors have all been on big projects, including Big Love, Tulip Fever, and Scream Queens, yet in this film they act like they’re in a student film. This movie had an eventual theatrical release after being delayed for two years, and it was probably because all those involved wanted it to disappear from view. This theory holds steam once I let you know that Carrie-Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway also star in this film, two people with actual careers to protect.

As a last point towards my thesis that this movie is a garbage fire inside a larger furnace that’s on the surface of the sun, the creature’s name is “the bye bye man.” Bye bye man. This is a phrase that the characters cannot think or say without having him embroil their lives in misery and murder. Bye bye man. A set of words that children have probably repeated since they grasped language, and yet it triggers the end of the fucking world? Are you kidding me right now? I’m sorry, but if your film makes me reminisce about Barney, you’re doing something thoroughly wrong.