There are film crazy folks who adore watching horror flicks purely to test themselves for the jump scares. And then there are those who don’t care about which film they are shelling out valuable bucks for. For the fist category, a word of advice — skip it, wait for the next horror film—any one would do.  And as for the second category — serves them right.
The Bye Bye Man — the title could have been filched from a modern book of fables (Aesop was too cultured even two-and-a –half millennia ago) — was released in the US, a little too conveniently on Friday the 13th.

The film begins with scenes of journalist Larry Redmon (Leigh Whannell) going berserk and, in the process, shooting down eight neighbours before turning the shotgun on himself. That was back in October 1969. Cut to the present, and we have three college students Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and their friend John (Lucien Laviscount) who decide to go off-campus and occupy a massive house, one which needs renovation and refurbishing. Elliot finds the words ‘Don’t think it, Don’t say it’ written within a drawer, and the words ‘The Bye Bye Man’ engraved into the drawer.

The rest of the film is spent on the Bye Bye Man (Doug Jones) creeping out of the woodwork with a CGI-created hound, dropping coins for victims to discover and generally ensuring that potential victims run around muttering ‘Don’t think it, Don’t say it’, to themselves. TBBM is a clumsy, directionless horror film which fails to stay faithful to its genre.  The editing too suggests an amateurish effort.  As for the acting, apart from Faye Dunaway as widow Redmon and Carrie-Anne Moss as Detective Shaw, even street-play actors would have performed better.