The Bye Bye Man – Film Review

People commit unthinkable acts every day. Time and again, we grapple to understand what drives a person to do such terrible things. But what if all of the questions we’re asking are wrong? What if the cause of all evil is not a matter of what, but who? When three college friends stumble upon the horrific origins of the Bye Bye Man, they discover that there is only one way to avoid his curse: don’t think it, don’t say it. But once the Bye Bye Man gets inside your head, he takes control.

It’s honestly kind of hilarious how often the phrase “Don’t say it, don’t think it” is used in Stacy Title‘s supernatural horror flick The Bye Bye Man; a movie that’s so outrageously boring and uneventful to the point where you won’t want to say the title or think of the movie ever again.

The only reason I even had an interest in watching this film is because I’ve heard so many people throughout the years say how utterly awful it is. Sometimes, you just feel like putting on a truly bad movie after watching so many great ones, just to have a bit of a palette cleanser.

The Bye Bye Man is insanely boring. I’ve truthfully seen tons of horror films that are a lot worse than this one, but the fact that this movie has so many talented people involved with it is part of what makes it so shocking. Why in the world is Carrie-Anne Moss a part of this mess? Did she honestly see something in this script that others didn’t?

The marketing for this movie is also hilarious because it seemed as if they were trying to convince the world that this movie was so scary to the point where it would bother us in our everyday lives. The only thing this movie made me want to do was go to bed because of how uneventful it all was.

And what’s up with the insanely bad dialogue? Jonathan Penner‘s script is absolutely loaded with lines that are incredibly strange or just downright funny by accident. He also desperately fails to come up with a creepy or interesting backstory for the film’s title villain which is kind of important.

Throughout this whole movie, we know that The Bye Bye Man is out there. We know that if you say his name, he will come to kill you. But the only problem is that we almost never see him. He appears a couple of times in this movie and whenever he does, he just looks like a strange hooded man that likes to point his finger at people. Is that really supposed to be scary?

And don’t even get me started on the outrageously bad acting in this film. Perhaps Douglas Smith, Michael Trucco, and Lucien Laviscount are truly great actors, but The Bye Bye Man was definitely not the right movie to display their talents. All three of their performances here feel so forced and flat.

The Bye Bye Man is an incredibly uneventful and unintentionally hilarious supernatural horror film with a pace so slow that it feels like it’s never going to end.