Even though it shares a similar title, “Bagman,” is not a retelling of the book by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz that focuses on the crimes committed by Spiro Agnew. Costing an estimated two million dollars, it is nominally an original screenplay from John Hulme, although it feels more like an attempt at adapting a work that Stephen King might have written as a yarn during an uneventful car ride. Okay, perhaps such a start isn’t accurate as an actual depiction of his empty coffee cups is probably scarier than what happens in this work. The only possible way of catching a swift chill is by falling asleep and dreaming of something more interesting than what has been delivered.
As a result of not being able to achieve his dream of constructing a high-tech tree-trimming machine, Patrick McKee (Sam Claflin) has incurred several financial problems. Because of these issues, he and his wife Karina (Antonia Thomas) along with their young child Jake (Carnell Vincent Rhodes) are moving back into his parent’s house, and to add onto this his brother Liam (Steven Cree) is employing him at the family lumber yard. While at first, it did not seem so bad, things quickly began taking a turn for the worse. Patrick starts hearing unexplained noises outside his house at night and has nightmares about his child Jake being abducted. To make matters worse, the lights in the house have also begun flickering, a doll with a frightening appearance has appeared out of nowhere, and there are other bizarre happenings that make him believe something sinister has infiltrated the house. He however has no way to prove any of this. Patrick is certain that the noises are exceptionally strange, claiming it to be the sounds of The Iron Giant eating rotten clams, which he believes places him and his family above all, in a perilous scenario.
Well, it turns out Patrick has quite a bit of knowledge. As a kid, his father taught him about Bagman, an ancient demonic figure who supposedly resides in an abandoned copper mine and who paralyzes parents in order to capture their children the creatures that they truly cherish. Initially, he took it all as fiction. Only to reveal revelations in the later part of his life. In his younger days, he had a run-in with the Bagman which he barely survived. So, it has been two decades after the run-in and Patrick seems to be still haunted by these horrific memories. He tries to track the trauma and ends up suppressing it until he sees the Bagman cowering little children in the pre-credits of his story. This time, he seems to have come for Patrick Campbell‘s family and as he puts it, its’s PTR protects the family time.
In earlier comments, I said ‘Bagman’ is like a Stephen King wannabe. But that is not entirely true and somewhat unfair. More simply, this movie seems to have been assembled from the most hackneyed cliches and tropes of the worst parts of horror. There’s nothing new in horror, but competent filmmakers have always made an effort to dress those ideas in a certain style or energy which allows them to work once more. By contrast, the director Colm McCarthy, who has are on Peaky Blinders and Doctor Who, as well as worked on the dreadful sci-fi The Girl With All the Gifts, seems to slog through all of these so badly that it appears he requires a great deal more sleep than his overworked protagonist. I understand that he and Hulmes are aiming to come closer to the old-fashioned creepy telling tale, but it appears that the only place they could have come across that might be a few episodes of the Scooby Show. And even those episodes are resolved in a way that is more satisfying than Bagman.
Even though ‘Bagman’ is publicly a horror genre, the closest it seems to approach being truly scary is with the cringe-worthy incidents that come with a child incessantly playing the recorder. This is mainly because it has the ability to instill the fear of God into those unsuspecting parents crazy enough to buy such instruments for their children.
Other than that, it is quite disappointing. The only reason it is surprising it was actually able to get a release was because it wasn’t immediately treated to a streaming service which you are very fortunate if you got rid of a long time ago to get some peace.
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