Writer(s): Cluff and Lofing
Starring: Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown, Ryan Shoos and Cassidy Gifford
You know what? I’m
going to be completely honest here: I
did not hate The Gallows. I heard the
reviews, saw all the hate for it online, pretty much went into it expecting to
despise it, and yet I didn’t. At first.
It begins with an accidental death of one Charlie Grimille,
who dies during a performance of a high school play called “The Gallows” back
in 1993. I easily could have started to
hate it here; what play, high school or otherwise, is going to put a noose
around an actor’s neck, and build a working trap door underneath where he
stands? If that’s not inviting disaster,
I don’t know what is. But you know
what? I was in a forgiving mood, and
decided to give it a pass.
Then we go to the present day, where I could have, and
should have, hated it even more: There
is absolutely no reason for this to be a “found footage” movie. None.
It was a nice touch during the intro, where Charlie’s parents are
filming the play (that’s natural), but once we are introduced to Ryan, a high
school kid who takes a camera with him wherever he goes, and makes annoying
comments about everything, it normally would have been enough to send me off
the deep end. What can I say? It got me on a rare good night.
But there’s only so much I can take, and The Gallows does
nothing with its already-weak premise, but squander it over and over
again.
If you’ve read even the briefest of plot summaries for this,
or watched the trailer, you know all you need to know going in: The modern-day
high school class wants to put on another performance of “The Gallows”, which
is a very logical choice; after all, a student only died, on camera and in front
of dozens, performing this piece twenty years ago, so why not give it another
go? Somehow, I’m still not hating it.
Then Ryan talks his girlfriend, Cassidy, and his friend,
Reese (who is reluctantly playing the lead in the play) into sneaking in to the
school at night. The reasoning? To destroy the set, so the performance will
be canceled and Reese won’t have to worry about messing up his lines. They get in easily, courtesy of a broken
door. But getting out is another matter,
and before you know it, Charlie Grimille starts hunting them down.
By this point, dialogue is thrown out the window and
replaced almost exclusively with screams; high-pitched, annoying screams. I have to admit that the frights, for the
most part anyway, try to avoid relying on jump scares, but in territory this
familiar, we are well prepared for whatever lazy attempt it throws at us;
anything that can help the students escape are just written out of the script
(literally, they disappear as the characters go to use them), while we should
also know that a wide-open door leading outside is too good to be true. Then there’s the little matter of the camera,
which becomes more and more irritating as the film wears on; even though these
characters are panicking and in distress, one of them always has the presence
of mind to make sure at least one camera is perfectly framed and still
filming.
That brings us to the ending, where the filmmakers finally
reveal their intent to sabotage their own movie, at any costs, by throwing in a
terrible finale. (SPOILER WARNING) Gee,
who would have thunk that the random, strange older girl that showed up at the
beginning of the movie and was never seen since might have some kind of tie-in
to the original play? (END SPOILER) But
then it takes it even one step farther than that, with a godawful final reveal that
is simply implausible, even for a stupid, generic horror movie. As if that wasn’t enough, it still has one
more (less?) trick up its sleeve, adding in an unnecessary final scene that
simply hammers home its embarrassing revelation, as if we didn’t already
understand.
Really, about the only critique I’ve seen that I disagreed
with were the performances. Maybe it’s
because I’ve seen far worse, but I thought the acting was uniformly above-average
all the way throughout, especially taking into consideration that this wasn’t
initially a big studio movie; it was distributed by a major studio, but was
actually shot, on a low-budget, as an independent feature. That reason alone had me fearing the worst,
but I was pleasantly surprised. I
shouldn’t have to specify that we’re not talking Oscar-worthy renditions here,
but they were more than passable, particularly given the material.
In other words, as hard as I tried to give it a chance, believe everything you heard about this one,
because The Gallows is awful.
RECAP: It got me on a good night, and I initially forgave a
lot of its flaws. But my reward was only
to get overwhelmed with so many of them that I simply could not ignore the
film’s gaping imperfections any longer. The Gallows, which is needlessly forced into being a “found footage”
movie for no other reason than to capitalize on the trend, seems to be intent
on annoying the viewer when it’s not shoving obvious scares in our faces; pair
that up with an awful finale and you’ve got enough reasons to stay far away
from this one.
RATING: 2.5/10
TRAILER
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