I watched the Gallows yesterday. I somehow got the impression over the past year that this would be an interesting movie, but I don't recall where. It certainly didn’t come from Rotten Tomatoes, which lists it at 16%. In general, I'll avoid movies that fall under 30% unless it's a premise I really want to see.
I found nothing great about the movie. It had a few good things about it, but I do not protest the 16% it received. Thankfully, the movie is only 80 minutes long, so it's really just a super-long Tales from the Crypt episode.
Overall, the story was pretty good. In 1993, an actor in a school play is killed by a set mishap. Twenty years later, the school decides to put on the same play that killed one of their students. This struck me as incredibly bad taste, but a review I read stated that the intent was to honor the memory of the killed student. Either they did a crappy job of conveying that to the audience or I got distracted. Neither of those are glowing reviews. But despite that horrible idea on behalf of the drama department, the show goes on with a jock getting the lead in order to impress a theatre nerd and his jock buddy heckling him all the while in a manner that makes you root for the murderous ghost. The awkward relationship between the jock and the theatre nerd was actually kind of endearing, and I found myself hoping for their success.
The bad taste in presenting the same play that took a student's life was a highly questionable decision. So was requiring jocks to be in the school production. Both of these can easily have an explanation, and I do not know if the film's creators were sloppy in giving that explanation or figured that the audience should be smart enough to piece it together. Another issue I had was knowing that Reese would be in the theatre that night, but this could also be explained away as them planning on killing him during the show and taking advantage of this newfound opportunity. Again, this could benefit from an explanation that may or may not be implied.
While the overall story was kind of neat, the execution needed a lot of work. For one, this is yet another found-footage film. This format is difficult to pull off well, and this movie isn't one of them. It's a little different in that the movie pieces together scenes from multiple cameras where appropriate. It starts off with the douche jock recording everything at school, which I guess teens do nowadays? Certainly, I could see someone filming everything in school. When the kids break into the school that night (to trash the set and save the lead jock's reputation by canceling the play), the use of the camera is really contrived. Sure, I can appreciate that they're using the built-in light to pierce the darkness, but would the camera be recording the entire time? This stretches the found-footage trope, and it just shows that a traditional format would have been more effective.
The twist at the end is kind of neat. It raises questions that the audience should be asking, and those questions are answered with police body cams later that evening(?). But while all your questions are answered in that final scene, it was hideously schlocky.
It was entertaining, but it ran too long—even at 80 minutes—for the story it told. The jump scares were all clichéd. Nothing about this movie was original, but if you are looking for revenge porn against the people who bullied you in high school, this may provide a little thrill. There are much better movies for that, though.
