The Gallows Movie Review

It's weird, even though you can tell a movie is going to suck some extreme ass just from the trailer I'm still willing to give it a try because it's horror and I'm always holding out for some really good horror movies.  However, The Gallows does not deliver and just generally speaking isn't very good.

The story follows 4 high school students which all fit a common American high school stereotype.  You have the asshole and his girlfriend, the jock-come-actor who sucks at what he does but carries on because of his crippling crush on a girl in the theatre group and the annoying, up her own arse theatre girl.  The asshole and his girlfriend decide to try and bail out the jock-come-actor from a stage play he is about to perform by sneaking into the school and night and wrecking the set.  After sneaking in, the theatre girl follows and catches them but they get locked in the school and then shit starts to get real.  The stage play that was being performed called "The Gallows" was performed previously by the school but a freak accident involving the gallows prop meant that one of the actors end up hung, so his evil ghost is roaming the school and is out to kill the 4 characters.

The story itself makes sense in the context of a ghost movie but the fact that it's one of those "found footage" type films throws some stupid questions.  At the start of the movie it tells you that it's video evidence being held by the police but at multiple points the perspective switches from a camera to a phone to a booth camera to a police mans shoulder cam (?).  Am I supposed to be believe that some cop sat in a room and edited these videos together so that we would know what was happening to each of the characters during all the chaos?  Found footage movies are pretty stupid

The movie also fails to deliver on any actual horror and instead just jump scares you for the entire film.  Lots of first person wandering around in the darkness followed by loud bangs, insane screaming and things suddenly jumping into the camera.  I could recreate the entire experience by standing in a pitch black room holding 2 frying pans.  I'd stand near you, wait 30 seconds then have someone turn on the lights, slam the pans together and scream "BOO!" and then flick the switch again.  Do that for an hour and you have the same horror experience as The Gallows.

It's not good as a horror movie but it suffers from the problem of not quite being bad enough to laugh at or be angry about.  That means it falls squarely into the realm of just plain old boring so I would easily recommend staying well away from this one