I love the idea behind THE GALLOWS. Sure, it's another found-footage film (if you're going to say how much you hate found footage movies, move along—plenty of other films opening this week for you to investigate), but the story idea is a fun one, especially if you had any ties to your high school drama “The Gallows,” during which a student named Charlie Grimille was accidentally hung under mysterious circumstances. He was actually the understudy for another student, who called in sick that day, and it's unclear how his stunt-noose suddenly became a real one.
Then the film jumps ahead 20 years, now being shot with digital cameras and cell phones, the drama department has decided to re-stage THE GALLOWS as a tribute to the original production and lost player. Not only is that in good taste, but it seems safe, considering there are grumblings that the ghost of Charlie Grimille has haunted the theater ever since. Fairly soon, after first-time feature filmmakers Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing establish the characters, their motivations for being in the production, and who likes who, the movies drifts into actual plot and the main players rise to the surface. There's our main camera operator Ryan (Ryan Shoos), who's an obnoxious twit jock and friends with Reese (Reese Mishler), a football player who wants to be in this play to get close to Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), the school's diva acting queen. And then there's the resident mean girl/cheerleader Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford, as in Kathy Lee and Frank Gifford's daughter and Disney TV star).
If the characters descriptions haven't clued you in, let me spell it out. The deepest flaw in THE GALLOWS is that it's tough not to hate everybody for different reasons even before the scary stuff starts to happen. There are some tremendous scares in the film, to be sure, but I felt absolutely no grief when a character was threatened or got picked off. This film spent about four years getting worked on, reshot, and fine tuned after getting picked up by producer Jason Blum (the PARANORMAL ACTIVTY, INSIDIOUS, PURGE and SINISTER), and it's tough to imagine that at some point someone didn't say, "Can we make one of these students somewhat likable?" I know it sounds like fun, but it's actually a bad sign when you're rooting for the guy with the leather mask on his head and noose in his hands to murder everyone in the movie.
The film leaves enough questions unanswered and bread crumbs on the ground to pave the way for sequels, prequels and offshoots about the history of this play, Charlie's ghost and just how he ended up being the one to die 20 years ago. And weirdly enough, the mythology of the film is fantastic. Maybe with the next go-round on this storyline, the filmmakers can give us characters we'd actually like to see make it to the end, even if they don't. I'm a supporter of quality independent horror (which this is, even if it got picked up by Blumhouse and is being distributed by Warner Bros.), and I absolutely see potential in these filmmakers. Their use of found footage is solid, and I like the way the narrative sometimes doubles back a few minutes so we can see the same short timeframe from two different cameras, so that what begins as a noise behind a door in one shot becomes another (far more terrifying) shot from behind that door.
THE GALLOWS is almost more frustrating and disappointing because there's a new-ish idea behind it (at least in the context of found footage works), but I suspect this won't be the last time we'll be hearing from these filmmakers or Charlie Grimille. On a sidenote, the film is inexplicably rated R, despite there being no nudity, excessively bad language or gore; seriously, I've seen and heard worse on FX or AMC cable shows. I guess it got that rating from just being terrifying, which it is at times, but still, the MPAA continues to baffle the world.
