For a good deal of 2017, I kept hearing about today’s film
from colleagues over in the U.S. Specifically, how most of them couldn’t get
past the extremely memetic title. While I can’t exactly disagree with their
assertions, since it is very much a silly as all hell name for any movie, let
alone a horror movie, this year has already proven itself to be one made out of
shattering expectations. How bad could this possibly be?
The plot: College students Elliot (Douglas Smith), Sasha
(Cressida Bonas) and John (Lucien Laviscount) move into a house off-campus. However,
they soon discover strange thing happening to them and the house: Mysterious
illnesses, coins showing up everywhere, and a nightstand containing just the
words “Don’t think it, don’t say it”. Before too long, it becomes clear that
something is seriously wrong going on around them, and unless they can remove a
certain name from their minds, they may not live to tell it.
The film starts out with Leigh Whannell. I mention this
because, for about two-thirds of the film, he is easily the best actor on
display here. Our three leads are insanely wooden in their delivery and their
individual existences in the story are rather questionable. Smith is here
during some down-time between auditions as Dane DeHaan’s stunt double, judging
by how out-of-it he looks, Bonas combines passive and stilted to create a
complete non-entity, and Laviscount is the embodiment of every horror genre
cliché surrounding black characters. Jenna Kanell as the resident seer/goth
chick, and she plays that one note as well as can be expected, Carrie-Anne Moss
does well and even manages to get Booth to actually do some emoting at one
point, and Faye Dunaway appears to give us a massive exposition dump.
Have to admit, having heard horror stories (heh) about this
film all year, I was not expecting to be this in-love with its main concept.
Taking notions of fear and memory and spinning them into a look at what truly
makes psychological horror ‘psychological’. The main gimmick of the killer
appearing at the sound and even thought
of its own name is chilling, and credit to writer Jonathon Penner who manages
to create an aura of its presence throughout the story. Certain theologies, in
particular the ancient Egyptians, saw the name of a person as an intrinsic part
of the person’s soul and identity. So long as the name lived on, even if the
body dies, that person continues to live. Combining that with the power that
names can have in relation to death and carnage, like how ‘Charles Manson’ went
from a rather innocuous name to a moniker of evil when connected to his later
actions. Even considering how kiddified the name “The Bye Bye Man” is, with the
right actions and mystique attached to it, it could still strike fear through
reputation.
Of course, all of that is diminished nearly to nothingness
due to a variety of different factors. For a start, there’s the aforementioned
terrible acting which makes whatever drama or tension they’re trying to impart
hard to swallow. But that lack of engagement ends up carrying over the titular
character himself, played by veteran creature actor Doug Jones. For all the
pre-amble about how terrifying he is and how dangerous even his name is to the
human mind, the effects work leaves him looking nowhere near as creepy as he
should, doubly so for his hideously-CGI hellhound. The setup is there but the
lack of character mythos outside of the Bye Bye Man’s immediate effect ends up
hindering it in the long run. If the original story could flesh him out in the
space of a single chapter, surely this film could do the same in 96 minutes.
Then again, even if they did flesh him out properly, it wouldn’t have changed
the fact that the rest of the film isn’t all that scary to begin with. It’s not
godawful or anything, as it definitely sets an atmosphere for what could be a
horrifying monster, but it is rather basic in terms of psycho-horror. It only
just gives the impression that the filmmakers at least looked up the term
“psychological horror” in the dictionary before they started filming.
But all of that isn’t even the worst part. Even though I
admit to being intrigued about the main concept, concerning the power of names
and ideas and how they take root in people’s minds, it started to feel a bit
familiar upon further reflection. Very
familiar, to the point of realizing that I had already seen at least one other
film with this same concept, only done better. As inconsistent as Freddy Vs.
Jason turned out, it is still a good example of the whole “erase his name and
we erase him” notion with how the
townspeople of Springwood tried to bury that Freddy even existed. With this
realization comes yet another that is far more unfortunate: As much as I wanted
to give this film some credit, the one real thing it has going for it has
already been done justice by other works. So, essentially, this film really doesn’t
have anything going for it after all. All of a sudden, its weak reception makes
a lot more sense.
All in all, this is rather lame stuff. Quite compelling in
concept but next to useless in execution, I’m seriously surprised that this
film got to the point where it became the laughing stock of the Internet for a
while. Frankly, brilliant concept or not, this is way too dull to register
anything more than apathy with a light zest of disappointment; hardly the
makings of a true piece of horror schlock.
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