The Gallows

A generic, laughably incompetent found-footage horror flick, The Gallows follows four bland teenagers (Reese Mishler’s Reese Houser, Pfeifer Brown’s Pfeifer Ross, Ryan Shoos’ Ryan Shoos, and Cassidy Gifford’s Cassidy Spilker) as they break into their high school one fateful night and subsequently find themselves being pursued by a vengeful ghost named Charlie Grimille. (The latter was accidentally killed during a stage production 20 years earlier and has, it seems, been lying in wait until now.) There’s never a point at which The Gallows is able to separate itself from the multitude of similarly-themed endeavors that’ve been flooding multiplexes lately, with the movie’s eye-rollingly predictable atmosphere compounded by an almost total lack of compelling attributes. It doesn’t help, certainly, that the film’s four protagonists are as one-dimensional and bland as one could possibly envision, with, in a far more problematic development, Mishler’s man-behind-the-camera figure’s alpha-male, uber-douchebag persona an intense annoyance virtually from the word go. The Gallows‘ run-of-the-mill vibe takes a steep turn for the worse once the characters realize they’re being hunted, as directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing infuse the latter part of the proceedings with a disastrously incoherent feel – there’s just so much shaky camerawork – that stymie one’s efforts to comfortably discern what’s going on or who’s being killed. It’s ultimately not a stretch to label The Gallows one of the worst films of its type to come around in quite some time, and it’s rather shocking to learn the relatively reliable Blumhouse Productions label is behind its release.

* out of ****