As far as entertainment goes, The Gallows is about as fun as getting French-kissed by the backside of a porcupine. It’s about as scary as an episode of My Little Pony and about as beneficial to your day as a diagnosis of a rectal cancer.
But before I tell you how I really feel, let’s talk about what this movie is about.
The Gallows follows three supremely horrible high school kids who try to wreck the set of a school play one night so that one of them can get out of starring in the play the next day. However, the ghost of a kid who was killed performing the same play they’re trying to sabotage is going to have none of that nonsense and decides to kill them all in the most fond footagey manner possible.
Oh my God…
I have nothing against the realm of found footage movies, but this one is just dreadful. It’s as fun as a pet dying on the anniversary of your grandmother’s death. Every single character is awful… I mean it, not a one of them has a single redeeming quality that would even come anywhere in the same ball park, county, state, or country to making you give a flying piece of frog poo about them or what happens to them. Heck, when Charlie, the ghost of the movie, claims his first victim, I wanted to send him flowers and a congratulatory card because I was so grateful.
The Gallows is just a mess… It’s a mess from beginning to end and never once tries to get itself together long enough to entertain nor scare. It looks cheap, it’s insultingly stupid with terrible characters doing ridiculously idiotic things to further this frayed string it calls a plot. It was made with no love, no care, no finesse, and without a sliver of respect for the audience. The scares, gags, and kills are telegraphed with the annoying “hey, something paranormal is happening” bass rumble so that you know well in advance something is going to happen.
Not once… Not once in its entire runtime does The Gallows show any originality, heart, or humor. It literally fails at everything. Everything!
But its most vile failure is that The Gallows is just unpleasant. Every frame of this movie is a chore to watch, boring and predictable – a slap-dashed paint by number bore-fest that borrows from better movies and comes up with nothing that it can call its own.
There’s no scares, no tension… there aren’t even production values to this mistake of a movie.
I’m going to call it here… I think I’ve just found the worst movie of 2015. If I haven’t, I’ll be shocked, but at least it’ll be more emotional reaction than I got sitting through The Gallows.
Jason Gaston 