What is there to say about The Gallows that hasn’t been said about every film out of the Blumhouse Productions stable? If you like stupid, despicable one-note characters doing stupid and despicable things then getting stupidly and despicably killed, then this is the film for you.
20 years ago, student Charlie Grimille was killed onstage in front of a packed auditorium during a performance of medieval play The Gallows. Now, the students are restaging the production in an effort to recover from the school’s darkest moment. But when three students break in to the school at night, they discover that Charlie’s not done with Beatrice High…
There’s a tendency for slasher flicks to make us actively dislike many of their central characters, in an effort to make their inevitable deaths more ‘entertaining’ than harrowing. (Or perhaps to make us reflect on the fact that no-one deserves a horrific death?) Without providing either kind of catharsis, The Gallows follows this model like gospel, not even putting in enough effort to give the characters their own names – which they will inevitably excuse as part and parcel of the found footage genre.
Few protagonists have been as utterly despicable as Reese (Reese Mishler), the class clown from the football team who’s been roped in (pun intended) to work on The Gallows. Reese’s jocks-versus-nerds mentality and cheerleader girlfriend are now so clichéd as to be wholly repellent. Best mate Ryan (Ryan Shoos), cheerleader Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) and theatre nerd Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown) are a similar mess of uninventive stock high schoolers with pitifully drawn arcs.
Worst is the grind of the film, which despite its 81-minute runtime feels like a marathon. Every oogeda-boogeda jump scare is so loudly announced by the silence preceding it that you can actually count down to the point where something spooky happens. It also fails to hold up to its own internal logic –Reese uses the zoom on his camera only moments after making a point of switching to his phone.
With its paper-thin plot, uninteresting characters, obvious and tired excuse for a villain, poorly executed found footage style and genuine lack of entertainment, buying a ticket to The Gallows is the cinemagoing equivalent of necking yourself. Please don’t encourage this kind of filmmaking anymore – it’s ruining it for the rest of us.
1/5 stars
