Three Films Make A Post: She's a fabulous, loving, caring mother, who er... ...happens to be a serial killer!

Paper Moon (1973): If you ask me, I’d argue that at the point in time when this was shot, Ryan O’Neal was usually a frightfully wooden actor with a peculiar voidal quality to him. Turns out that Peter Bogdanovich’s choice to cast him alongside his first-time acting little daughter Tatum O’Neal worked absolute wonders on that front, the rapport between the two bringing out Ryan’s personality and easing Tatum into as natural a performance as you could ask of any child actress. Their performances stand at the core of a movie that sometimes seems nostalgic for Depression era America, but never forgets the abject poverty and the other horrors of that time while still somehow managing to still be a comedy. The film carries a deep belief in the ability of people to get through the hardest times with a love it treats without any sentimentality; there’s great sadness at the core of the film, but that sadness is always smaller than the warmth of Alvin Sargent’s script and and that between the O’Neals.

The Spectacular Now (2013): I think I’ve expressed my discomfort with mainstream film critics’ and their love for coming of age films about teenage boys at the cusp of adulthood who learn some lesson or other via an encounter with The Mystery of Femininity™ – or as we here call it “desperately underwritten female characters”. James Ponsoldt’s film belonging to that genre featuring Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley does seem to deserve most of the accolades it gets, though, seeing as it never pretends its female main character Aimee is somehow completely unknowable because she’s a girl, or only interesting to the audience because she teaches the male main character Sutter something. The film does centre around Sutter, mind you, but it never forgets that he’s not the centre of the actual world. Otherwise, the film quite precisely explores the influence parents have on their children, the way love and sex and confusion intersect. It always feels honest about its own convictions and more interested in also being honest about its characters than in making a point about them. It’s also beautifully shot, and well acted, so there’s nothing here even for me to complain about.


Bottom of the World (2017): This is another one of these somewhat Twilight Zone-like small films of a type we get four or five a year of at the moment. There’s your typical for the sub-genre tendency to present mild mind-fuck ideas, a use of Americana that reminds a little of a less interesting David Lynch, and a plot resolution that seems a bit too moralizing to be fully satisfying. Douglas Smith and Jena Malone are certainly convincing enough in the main roles, and from time to time, director Richard Sears (apparently the guy who’ll direct the next Transformers film, because that’s how blockbuster cinema rolls at the moment) hits on an interesting, ambiguous element and doesn’t resolve it too clearly. Just as often, the meaning of metaphors is much too on the nose and things are just too clean and simple to make for a truly satisfying film of this sort. Well, at least I’d argue that this sort of film thrives on the elements that aren’t completely resolved and explained. It’s not a bad film, though, it’s just not a terribly satisfying one either.

The Bye Bye Man (2017)

Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend and total non-entity – but don’t worry, the film will see her spending most of her time sick in bed and all of her time without any agency whatsoever despite it being directed by a woman - Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and their black jock buddy – yes, that’s his whole characterisation in three words but hey, it’s more than Elliot or Sasha have – John (Lucien Laviscount) move into a creepy-ass house in the woods, as students leaving home for the first time are wont to do in the peculiar parallel universe this film takes place in.

As it goes with creepy-ass houses, there’s something bad hidden away inside it. Hidden in a night stand is a spiral of scribbles saying “Don’t think it, don’t say it” over and over again. We can be sure about that too, for Elliot is the kind of guy who will read a whole spiral of crazy scribbling out loud, even when he’s at the fifth repetition. But under the note containing the scribbles, there are more…WORDS! “The Bye Bye Man”, it says, and after reading it, the creepy-ass student paradise in the woods turns very supernatural, for Elliot has inadvertently drawn in the titular entity, something that infects everyone reading or hearing its name with madness, hallucinations and murder, or in the case of the people trying to not become the thing’s victims, madness, hallucinations, murder and suicide. Yeah, I dunno if that’s much better.

Anyway, before we come to the murder (and the film’s only competent bit, special make-up effects by the Kurtzman people), the students are struck with all kinds of stupid shit – there are generic mainstream horror shocks, erectile dysfunction (seriously), a childish love triangle, a CGI monster dog, random and not so random hallucinations of various kinds of crap, and oh so very much bad acting.

Man, if you’re like me going into this afraid of another ultra-generic piece of mainstream horror, the sort of thing many horror fans decry as terrible but that to me are usually prime examples of aggressively boring competence, you are in for a surprise. For there’s nothing at all competent about Stacy Title’s (who also directed Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror, so you know we’re in good hands with her) film. It’s supposedly based on a piece by historian of the weird Robert Damon Schneck that is very close in tone to creepypasta but the film really takes very little of Schneck’s ideas (I mean, his “true story”, of course). There are train noises, coins, and a dog (well, a hilariously designed bad CGI effect that’ll mostly leave you wondering why the poor monster doggy doesn’t have any hair – too difficult to animate?), and the entity's name, of course, but that’s it. Thus are the strange and mysterious ways of the Hollywood licensing business.

What really makes the film the very special kind of train wreck it turns out to be is not just that it wastes the perfectly neat – if not exactly original anymore – idea of a supernatural menace that works as a malignant meme. It also attempts to be a psychologically based horror film without ever establishing anything much about its characters but the most basic clichés or, you know, making any psychological sense -really, any kind of sense – whatsoever. Because that’s not making the whole thing chaotic, tonally confused, and practically impossible to parse already, there are also more than just a couple of scenes that are clearly trying to be the mainstream horror thing I suspected it to be going in, just suffering from the wee problem that most of the things the film thinks are frightening are in fact hilarious, be it the monster dog, three hallucinated maggots (not enough money for more?), or good old Doug Jones dressed up like a Jedi Knight and pointing a finger (seriously). So, not only do three or four films that go off in very different directions collide here, it’s three or four terrible and misguided films.

Does all this mean I didn’t enjoy The Bye Bye Man quite a bit? Quite the opposite. While I was staring with disbelief at its ideas of what I’m supposed to be afraid of, giggling at the “daring” erectile dysfunction shenanigans that don’t actually dare to name that horrifying state of a young man’s penis, or plain failing at expecting the bizarre nonsense the film would come up with next, I had a whale of a time with the film. It’s not every day, after all, that a relatively mainstream horror production reaches the lunatic kind of badness we usually only can hope for from backstreet auteurs and enthusiastic crazy people shooting films in their parents’ gardens. This is one of those films you can’t imagine not coming from some sort of strange parallel world, where things are most probably much brighter than here, if clearly less logical.

I can’t end this happy screed without giving special shout-outs to Douglas Smith for doing all the bug-eyed grimacing the other cast members just can’t bring themselves to perform, and the script by actor (and Snoop Dogg’s Horror in the Hood veteran, what do you know?) Jonathan Penner for gifting us with choice dialogue lines like “Ah, ah, ah, ah, it’s not real!” (yes, the ah’s are just spoken like that), “the day my life went, turn, turn, turn”, or the immortal “Daddy! You know I can’t read in the dark! What do you think I am? A flashlight?”.

It is a very special film indeed.