Although it shares a similar title, “Bagman” is not an adaptation of The best-selling story by Rachel Maddox and Michael Yarvitz of the crimes of Spiro Agnew. Nominally an original screenplay by John Hulme, it instead feels like an adaptation of a short story Stephen King might have once thrown in to kill time during an extended trip. Actually, that’s not fair because even one of his actual outtakes could have contained scarier moments than the ones shown here. The only chance to experience real chills is if you fall asleep and generate your own more interesting nightmare.
Facing financial problems stemming from his frustrated dream of building a state-of-the-art tree trimmer, Patrick McKee (Sam Claflin) is forced to return to his childhood home, along with his wife Karina (Antonia Thomas) and his young son Jake (Carnell Vincent Rhodes), and go to work for his brother Liam (Steven Cree) in the family lumber yard. They barely settle in when Patrick starts hearing strange noises outside late at night and starts having nightmares about Jake being kidnapped. Things start to get more intense: the lights start going on and off, a creepy-looking doll appears, and it looks like something has broken into the house. But there is no real evidence that anything happened. However, Patrick is convinced that something out there is making strange noises (which sound like the Iron Giant has eaten some rotten clams) and that his entire family, especially Jake, is in danger.
Turns out Patrick knows what he’s talking about. As a child, his father told him about Bagman, an ancient evil entity who supposedly lurks in a nearby abandoned copper mine and immobilizes parents before grabbing their children (the good ones, not the bad ones, as you might expect). ) and fill them in. in her bag, never to be seen again. At first he assumed it was just a story. But then he had his own encounter with Bagman, from which he narrowly escaped. Two decades later, Bagman returns (we see him kidnapping another child in the pre-credits sequence) to haunt Patrick’s family, and must face his old fear once again to protect his son.
I suggested before that “Bagman” seemed like a Stephen King knockoff, but that’s not exactly true or entirely fair. More generally, this film seems to have been built almost entirely out of the oldest clichés and tropes that the horror genre has to offer. That’s nothing new in horror, but good filmmakers have taken care to present those ideas with a certain style or energy that allows them to work once again. By comparison, director Colm McCarthy, whose previous credits include episodes of “Doctor Who” and “Peaky Blinders” and the dystopian sci-fi nonsense of “The Girl with All the Gifts,” runs through them in such a dubious manner that it seems he needs a nap even longer than his beleaguered hero. I understand that he and Hulme are trying to do something closer to an old-fashioned horror story, but it seems as if their only exposure to such things has been just a couple of episodes of “Scooby-Doo.” Even those had more satisfying endings than “Bagman.”
Although “Bagman” is ostensibly a horror movie, the closest it ever comes to anything nightmarish is the boy’s constant playing of a tape recorder, mainly because it sends shivers down the spines of those foolish enough to have gifted such instruments to his own children. Other than that, it’s a total failure from start to finish; the only surprising thing is that it somehow managed to get a theatrical release, rather than being treated to the streaming hells of Shudder or, say, Tubi.