The Bye Bye Man (2017)

I’m not going to pretend that this is a good movie. 
In fact, it’s garbage. It’s derivative, predictable, poorly performed, ill thought out and bland. It lacks self-awareness and creativity and instead draws entirely from the canon of better movies that came before. 
Our evil entity is called the Bye Bye Man, for fuck’s sake, but if you think about him or speak his name, the concept gains strength and takes over your mind. Our three sprightly college students learn this after moving to a new house and discovering the legend hidden on a nightstand. Scary things happen, but they’re just in people’s heads! Time passes strangely - almost as strangely as the accents that characters slip in and out of! The Bye Bye guy appears in shadows and reflections with scare chords, accompanied by some weird spectral hound! No one has any character development or backstory whatsoever! The lighting is truly atrocious and I spent half the movie wondering what was actually happening on screen! The Bye Bye Man is only salvaged from void of horror forgettability by way of sheer ridiculousness. 
Rating: 2/10 - The memes that initially spawned from this were exponentially better than the movie itself, and it is so utterly terrible at times that it can only be taken as comedic (I don’t say that lightly). If I were drinking and with friends, this could be a good time. As a horror movie though? It’s not a success.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger Snaps  is cheesy and unsubtle and a bit overlong and often silly and  excellent .  It shouldn’t surprise you to read that - I am on record as loving and being a passionate advocate for female centric horror, so this tale of two sisters - with lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty - was perfect for me.  It was also a fun adventure in who’s-that-guy searching, so get ready to go on a ride that won't be interesting to anyone who doesn't consume the pop culture that I do. Katharine Isabelle is wonderful as the titular Ginger, and went on to be one of many facets in my realisation of my bisexuality with her turn in American Mary  years later, but there’s also some real laughs going through the cast list. The two main male stars, whose voices both sounded super familiar, both went on to be in my favourite Final Destination movie together (the third one, with the roller coaster and my celebrity crush Mary Elizabeth Winstead) - the drug dealer as the goth guy, who was also
Read more

The Love Witch (2016)

There is absolutely no doubt that Anna Biller, who wrote and directed  The Love Witch  (and edited, and composed, and costumed, and did the set work and art direction and some of the makeup and produced and made this thing from top to bottom), did something visually breathtaking and completely singular with her labour of love. Beyond that, it becomes hard to sit on objectives: fans of film as a whole will appreciate it for its composition as a love letter to the exploitation films of the 70s, but beyond the novelty factor, I suspect that this movie will quickly wear thin on a lot of viewers. It follows the story of a new-in-town witch whose desperation to find her ideal man sees weaker men getting twisted up in her web of sex and love and spell-casting, and a trail of bodies starts to build up. The slightly stilted delivery and just parallel to reality action feels straight out of those 70s films - I draw a lot of Argento comparisons, mostly due to the use of colour, and stand by my
Read more