An Average Movie-Goer’s Review
Spoilers! If you don’t want spoilers – check out the Spoiler-Free post
I love horror movies and if I’m going to watch them anyway, why not write an entertaining review from the POV of an average movie-goer and not a professional critic.
Today we’re looking at 2017’s The Bye Bye Man
After a trio of college friends move into a house near campus they accidentally stumble upon a curse caused by The Bye Bye Man, a supernatural figure with the ability to cause its victims to hallucinate and become violent.
Is it Scary?
Nah, you’ll be more annoyed and confused about character decisions.
Detailed Plot:
The movie opens on October 20th, 1969 in Wisconsin, a man, Larry Redmon, knocks on the front door of his friend, Jane’s, door. He asks if she told anyone about “the name” and she replies she told Rick, who thought it was funny.
Larry walks back to his car while apologizing and takes out a shotgun. Confused and shocked, Jane shuts her door and presumably shits her pants as Larry shoots a hole in her door.
Larry breaks in, kills her, and also kills Rick; who was in a wheelchair. Before Rick is killed, he revealed he also told Giselle across the street. Larry walks across the street while repeating “Don’t think it. Don’t say it.” and kills Giselle.
The title card then pops up in front of a train for some reason.
We cut to modern times to couple Elliot and Sasha (played by Douglas Smith and Cressida Bonas respectively) meeting with John (played by Lucien Laviscount) to go view a fully furnished house they plan to rent near their school.
We fast forward a bit to when they’re all moved in, Sasha is alone in their room and hears a coin drop in the distance followed by seeing the door slam on it’s own.
Elliot and Sasha throw a party with other college students, John, and Elliot’s brother, Virgil, and his family. It’s a bit weird since they bring their 5? year old daughter Alice with them. While the students and adults play beer pong, Alice wanders around the house and opens a door to a small room. Across from her some kind of beast opens another door, hiding when she closes her door.
She then hears a coin drop on the ground and picks it up, leaving it on the nightstand near the bed. When Elliot heads up stairs he finds the coin back on the floor and places it in the drawer of the nightstand but it somehow falls again.
He opens the drawer finding it has a crack in it but also sees something written on the liner “don’t think it, don’t say it”. He rips it out and sees “The Bye Bye Man” etched into it.
After the party Sasha, having felt the house is creepy, asks a friend, Kim, to burn sage in an attempt to cleanse the house. Since Elliot doesn’t believe in the supernatural Kim offers to perform a séance to show him she can talk to the dead.
Although she is able to tell Elliot his parents died in a car accident, tell Sasha her grandmother used to make special biscuits, she then wants to stop because she feels an evil presence.
Elliot antagonizes her calling her a fake and assuming she learned about his parents from his brother but she starts repeating something telling him “don’t think it, don’t say it.” She collapses on the table holding her head when John asks what she was talking about. Recalling what he saw in the drawer, Elliot says “The Bye Bye Man” and the lights go out.
Kim falls on the ground in pain as John turns the lights on.
That night Elliot is awoken by a sound coming from the radiator and looks over to see someone standing next to it. When he turns on the lights it’s just a hanging robe.
Sasha, barely awake from the light, tells him to turn it off while also coughing. She then says “love you John.” which clearly isn’t a nickname she calls Elliot by. He asks if she was kidding but she has fallen asleep. He then hears the sounds of a woman screaming and goes to investigate.
It turns out to be John and Kim having sex but before he goes upstairs, Elliot hears the sounds of something scraping outside. Looking out the window he doesn’t see anything and doesn’t notice a hooded figure behind him. Sasha comes downstairs and they both look outside but don’t see the source of the sounds.
The next morning John drives Kim to her place and it’s revealed John had a little bit of erectile dysfunction the night before. Kim tries to get him to come inside to try again but when John looks at her he sees maggots coming out of her eye and in her hair.
John tells her he has to leave and he drives off. Arriving at the house he continues to freak out about the maggots and looks at Sasha, who is still coughing, and calls her clean and perfect which Elliot overhears. John then jumps into the shower.
While Sasha waits for Elliot to make her tea, she hallucinates a naked John in the other room calling out to her but snaps out of it.
Later that night while Sasha and John are in their respective rooms, Elliot is in the living room on the phone with Virgil and it’s clear he is starting to get jealous, suspecting something between Sasha and John. He then hears the metal scraping again and heads outside but doesn’t see anything.
Back inside he hears the scraping coming from the basement and heads down to search, finding claw marks on the cement walls. He then hears a coin drop and finds it a few feet away. As he picks it up some kind of beast walks past in the distance. Terrified he runs out of the basement while calling out to Sasha and John who rush to open the door.
At the table the three argue; Elliot flat out accuses them of cheating, John tells him to relax, and Sasha tells him she told him something weird is in the house. John consoles her by putting his hand on her arm and Elliot flips out telling him not to touch her.
Later Elliot and Sasha are in their room with Sasha now running a fever. Elliot accepts John and Sasha weren’t together but wonders what is going on. Sasha reiterates there is something going on in the house and tells him he hallucinated and “went away”. She says when she was studying, she also “went away” and shows Elliot her book which has sketches of The Bye Bye Man and his dog.
She has no recollection of drawing it and says ever since she heard the name, she feels like it’s coming for her.
That night Elliot has a dream of him, Sasha, and John all naked facing away from an oncoming train. Before it hits them he wakes up and hears a coin drop. He then sees the eyes of the beast and the Bye Bye Man in the corner of the room causing him to freak out.
The next day Elliot and Sasha formulate a plan to find out more, Elliot will research the Bye Bye Man and Sasha will talk to the landlord to get info on the house and furniture.
At the library, in the most ridiculous scene of the movie, Elliot searches for “bye bye man” and gets no results. Not even a “did you mean…” even Yahoo would give some sort of results. This implies no one has ever put the words “bye bye man” together, ever, in the history of the internet. This movie is from 2017!
He then searches the library archive for the term “don’t think it, don’t say it” and finds one file.
We cut to Sasha, who is still coughing and NOT covering her mouth for some reason, as she enters a store and speaks to the owner who is also the owner of the house. Though he doesn’t know what she’s talking about when she mentions the weird house, his face drops when she mentions the nightstand.
We then, I think prematurely, cut away from that scene to see John in class freaking out after pulling out his phone and seeing the Bye Bye Man in some pictures.
We cut from that insightful scene to Elliot with a librarian, Mrs. Watkins, finding out the one file linked to “don’t think it, don’t say it” was written by Larry Redmon, the killer from the beginning of the movie. It turns out he was originally working on an article about a teen who killed 4 members of his family and claimed “the bye bye man made me do it.”
While writing the article Larry snapped and killed 8 people. I’d also like to point out that as they’re reading about a man who killed 8 and a teen who killed 4 for saying “the bye bye man” they both say “the bye bye man” like twice each.
We also find out after Larry killed the 8 people, he drank drain cleaner and killed himself. While Mrs. Watkins steps away, Elliot gets the idea to scribble out all the references to the bye bye man in Larry’s last article which angers the Bye Bye Man. He appears, getting closer and closer to Elliot but disappears as Mrs. Watkins comes back and yells at Elliot for damaging the files.
Elliot looks at the time and realizes he’s late to meet Sasha. He rushes out and runs to his car seeing Sasha and John in the distance hugging and then getting in John’s car. Elliot goes to see Kim, apologizes for not believing, and asks her to perform another séance.
We then see Kim washing off her bloody hands before heading down to meet with Elliot. In the car, she tells him she told her friend Katie about the Bye Bye Man and Elliot notices a bloody hammer sticking out of her purse.
The weird thing is the hammer could easily fit in the purse but it’s sticking out just so Elliot could notice it. It’s a contrived revelation for tension. I guess, the writer couldn’t figure out a better way to have Elliot find out she’s a killer?
Kim tells him the Bye Bye Man makes you see things that aren’t there and not see things that are there. Even after she says that, Kim sees a family crashed by the train tracks and tells Elliot to pull over.
He pulls over but it’s clear the family isn’t really there and only Kim can see it. Instead of listening when Elliot says there’s no one there and even knowing that the Bye Bye Man makes her sees things, she continues to run towards them not noticing the oncoming train.
Elliot does something else stupid and grabs the hammer from Kim’s purse for some reason. Instead of tossing it or hiding it in the car, he runs after Kim with the hammer in hand. To anyone looking at them, like I don’t know, the train conductor, it looks like Elliot is trying to kill Kim with a bloody hammer causing her to run directly into an oncoming train.
A little while later the police have arrived and, as Sasha and John arrive, Detective Shaw (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) tells Elliot that the train conductor saw Kim running from Elliot with the hammer. Elliot tells the group that’s not what happened and tells John to promise not to say “the Bye Bye Man”. This leads to the two fighting since John is being influenced by the Bye Bye Man to feel anger.
Sasha throws up as she continues to get sicker and John takes her home while Detective Shaw takes Elliot in for questioning. At the station Detective Shaw tells Elliot they found a suicide note Kim wrote admitting to killing her roommate Katie and killing Elliot, Sasha, and John.
Instead of letting him go Shaw tries to accuse Elliot of finding out and chasing Kim with the hammer for revenge. Meanwhile all Elliot keeps repeating is “don’t think it, don’t say it.”
Virgil arrives and picks up Elliot from the station but Elliot refuses to tell him what’s going on and rushes home. There, he hallucinates John and Sasha having sex and hits John over the head with a baseball bat, knocking him out. He snaps out of it, sees they weren’t haven’t sex, and apologizes to John.
He then gets a phone call from Mrs. Watkins who tells him she’s been having weird thoughts since they spoke about the Bye Bye Man. Elliot tells her not to repeat it to anyone and she says she can’t stop thinking about it, asking to visit later to discuss it.
While talking to her, he finds the information Sasha got from the landlord from back when the movie cut prematurely. The note tells him the nightstand belonged to Larry Redmon and lists the address to his widow.
He then thinks he has a solution and tells Mrs. Watkins she can visit later as he thinks he has a fix for this. She hangs up and we see that she’s been on a bit of a killing spree since hearing of the Bye Bye Man.
Elliot takes the nightstand and throws it into the forest which I’m pretty sure solves nothing and he goes to visit Mrs. Redmon who, he believes, has figured out how to avoid the Bye Bye man. When he gets there, she tells him the story of the day Larry killed the people, it adds nothing to the story so I’m not recapping it.
Elliot asks her how she survived and she tells him she never knew the name and the best thing for him to do is kill everyone who he’s told. She hands him a gun but Elliot refuses and realizes if you’re not afraid of the Bye Bye Man then he loses his power. Which was a wild jump to a conclusion supported by no evidence whatsoever.
Elliot leaves, rushing to go save Sasha from some vague danger. Not sure why he would think she is in any danger since he doesn’t know Mrs. Watkins killed people and there’s no other new threat.
As he’s driving, Elliot sees a mannequin on the road but drives through it as he believes it’s a hallucination. When it disappears he looks back and taunts the Bye Bye man but doesn’t see Mrs. Watkins in the middle of the road.
Crashing into her, the car rolls over and Elliot approaches the dead Mrs. Watkins thinking it’s just another hallucination.
Back at the house Sasha and John have both woken up but John hallucinates Sasha is a bloodied Kim while Sasha hallucinates that John is Elliot who is running away from her. John runs to the door finding the doorknob missing and then runs to the room grabbing a pair of scissors. Sasha runs in asking him what is wrong.
Elliot finally gets to the house and hears Sasha screaming, running to the room he sees John stabbing Sasha with the scissors.
Elliot tackles John and in the struggle shoots him in the chest, killing him. It’s then revealed he actually shot Sasha and John was the one getting stabbed. Which makes no sense since Sasha was hallucinating that John was Elliot so why would she be stabbing him? The answers seems to be “because why not?”.
The Bye Bye Man and his dog show up and Elliot tells him to just kill him. But, the Bye Bye Man shakes his head and shows Elliot a vision of Virgil and his family dead. Elliot demands he leave them alone but the doorbell rings and we see Virgil and his daughter, Alice, outside.
Elliot runs downstairs and tells Virgil to leave but he refuses. Alice then says she needs to go to the bathroom. The Bye Bye Man forces the door open but Elliot is able to close it and sit in front of it before they can get inside. Alice once again complains about needing the bathroom and Virgil tells her to do it somewhere outside where he can see her.
She leaves and Virgil bangs on the door trying to get Elliot to let him in. The Bye Bye Man appears in front of Elliot who is fighting the urge to say “Bye Bye Man”.
Elliot shoots himself in the head to save his brother. Virgil realizes Alice is nowhere near him and he goes running looking for her, finding her safe in the car. The film ends with police and Detective Shaw at the scene when John is carted out, barely alive. Shaw rushes to him and asks him to say anything and he begins to say “bye bye…” as the film cuts to black.
Review
Skip The Bye Bye Man. It’s just not good, the acting is pretty bad by most of the cast, dialogue feels extremely forced, character actions don’t make sense, and parts of the story don’t make sense. The movie has some weird cuts away from characters and twists that don’t make sense for the characters or the story.
Why set up Mrs. Watkins as a threat but then kill her off so quickly? Her death scene seemed straight out of a horror comedy film, which is huge tonal shift for just one scene.
How did Sasha get the scissors from John and why would she be stabbing him? The movie showed us she thought John was Elliot, why would she attack him? Plus John thought she was a zombified Kim he would have attacked immediately.
Overall it’s not a good movie, it’s not worth spending the hour and a half watching it, which is a shame since the monster design is actually well done.
Cast IMBD