Movie Review: The Gallows

Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love going to the movies. I will see anything in the theater because there is something about watching a movie in the dark with strangers that strikes me as fundamentally sound. Like listening to a vinyl record through a McIntosh tube amp, you know? Just the way it is supposed to be. There are two kinds of movie going experiences, however, that generally stand out from the lot and are my favorite: any movie showing in an old school theater (without stadium seating, and maybe--like the Redford in Detroit--with nifty architectural and design features), and horror movies. So because my best friend is in town, and because my wife was having some of her co-workers over for some kind of box social, I went to see The Gallows.

What makes horror movies a special kind of experience is that there is an unwritten compact amongst those who choose to attend. This is true, in my experience, of the whole spectrum of horror movies from the very very bad to the very very good. The compact consists of a repeal of the traditional theater prohibition against speech. You can talk to one another, you can talk to the screen, you can talk to strangers if you want to. This is allowed because it helps to relieve (in the case of good horror movies) the mounting sense of tension and dread that runs like a current through the audience, it is allowed in the case of awful movies, like The Gallows, because sometimes what you are seeing is so hilariously ill constructed, and its aims and ambitions so poorly executed that it simply requires comment.

The Gallows is a lazy film. Every creative choice seems to have been designed to produce an easy to make film. The plot proceeds with an improv comedy set's feverish devotion to "yes, and..." that leaves you wondering if each escalation in the film's action had been planned in advance, or if the cameras had just been turned on and the four actors had been forced to brainstorm on the fly what it was that was going to happen. While horror is not, generally, a genre known for tight narrative construction, The Gallows is flabby and weak, with holes so substantial that they are impossible not to notice. Perhaps the filmmakers were aiming at some level of ambiguity, what they ended up with was something closer to ambivalence.

Even the found footage style seems less the natural consequence of the kind of story being told (as it did in The Blair Witch Project an excellent film whose positive contribution to the world has to be nearly outweighed at this point by the imitations that it has spawned), than it did to the idea that in a found footage movie you don't need to bother lighting, framing, or casting very well (because after all these are "real" kids, not actors!).

That being said, The Gallows did elicit a couple of actual screams from the audience in my theater (produced by aggressively telegraphed jump scares--another piece of evidence supporting my laziness hypothesis), and if you like to have you evolutionary fight or flight responses played on by charlatan filmmakers, maybe this is the film for you.

Rating: 1.5/4