“Don’t say it. Don’t think it”
I have this picture in my head, that when a studio discovers a character that might mean a franchise, it is a lot like a prospector discovering gold. This seems truer when it comes to the horror genre, as you could be in for an endless amount of films. I know what you are thinking, come on, its not endless, no but it sure feels that way.
What do you need to make a good horror story; you know one that can spawn sequel after sequel. Well you need an old house; one that looks like it had a questionable past. Once you find that house you need what all good houses need, you need someone to live inside it. For our horror movie, the perfect tenants would be college kids, maybe ones who want to get out of the dorm life, and find a place of their own. So now we have something working here. With an old house you can have strange doors that lead nowhere, and have of course, strange noises to go along with those doors. Now you got the basics covered and your victims in place, you need someone to give them some serious bad nightmares, and make sure he has a cool name, like “The Bye Bye Man.” Like all boogie men you have to give him a calling card, like not saying his name, while the ones that have go a little bat shit crazy, now don’t that all sound like a winner?
While someone thought “The Bye Bye Man” sounded like a good idea, it really didn’t turn out to be. Maybe that thought started when Robert Damon Schneck wrote his book “The Bridge to Body Island”, and he came up with this character. With an original character in hand, screenwriter Jonathan Penner gave that character a very non-original story. Every cliché is thrown in for good measure here, which goes along with the bad writing and less than impressive visual effects. All of these things do not make for an enjoyable ninety six minutes. While the writer is robbing you of your hard earned ten dollars, director Stacy Title acts as the get away driver, and is no way innocent of this crime.
As I was watching, I kept thinking that a joke was being played on me, and someone was going to come up to me after and pay me money for sitting through that. Sadly no one came up to me, and then I just started to believe the joke was on me, for actually watching it. “The Bye Bye Man” might be a lot of things, but a thing that it is not is scary or any good. Instead the only thing you will be saying bye bye to, is your money and your time, because you can’t get either back.
