There are certain films that have scenes that make you laugh even though you really shouldn’t. When I finally got around to watching 2017’s The Bye Bye Man earlier this year, there was one scene that almost caused me to fall off my couch from excessive giggling.
It really shouldn’t have made me laugh, but I couldn’t help it. It’s hard for me to explain what was so funny about it, but I’ll try. One of the film’s characters is standing in the middle of some train tracks. A train is rapidly approaching. Yikes! Nothing funny about that. The character does not move. She fully intends to get struck by the train. We get a close-up of the character on the tracks, and then we get a close-up of the train’s engineer suddenly realizing that she’s standing in front of his train.
“NO!” he says.
It’s the “No!” that gets me. He doesn’t yell, “Get out of the way!” He doesn’t yell, “STOP THE TRAIN!” In fact, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t even try to stop the train, and seeing as how he’s the engineer, one would think that would be something he would know how to do. Instead, he sees her and he goes, “NO!” When he says it, he uses the same tone of voice that I use when I’m telling a cat not to sharpen its claws on the furniture. He’s not saying, “No, this can’t be happening!” He’s not saying, “Oh God, NO!” Instead, he’s saying, “No, don’t you stand on those tracks!” It’s such a fake and awkward moment that I couldn’t help but laugh. Later, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one was willing to say, “Well, let’s just leave that NO! on the cutting room floor. It’s not like it really adds anything to the film.”
That’s the type of film that The Bye Bye Man is. It’s inept in almost every way, from the acting to the script to the editing to …. well, everything. It’s a film that was obviously meant to launch a franchise. The Bye Bye Man was meant to be the type of evil presence who would haunt the nightmares of a generation of filmgoers. If you don’t want The Bye Bye Man to come after you, all you have to do is not say or think his name. But as soon as you see that name, that’s all you can think about. He’s kind of like Candyman, just without any sort of subtext. One has to wonder how he ended up with a name like Bye Bye Man. Maybe it’s explained in the film and I was too busy laughing at that awkward “NO!” to notice. It’s entirely possible.
I may have also been busy wondering what Faye Dunaway was doing in this film. She only has a small role. It’s really more of a glorified cameo than anything else. She plays the widow of a reporter who, years earlier, discovered the existence of The Bye Bye Man. This film came out a month or so before Dunaway and Warren Beatty accidentally gave the Best Picture Oscar to the wrong film at the 89th Annual Academy Awards. I’d like to think that was her getting revenge on Hollywood for not giving her better roles.
The Bye Bye Man did not lead to a franchise, which is a shame. I would pay money to see the future adventures of that engineer.
