THE GALLOWS

Starring: Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown, Ryan Shoos

Writers: Travis Cluff, Chris Lofing

Directors: Travis Cluff, Chris Lofing

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS QUITE A LOT OF SPOILERS, INCLUDING ONE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END OF SCARFACE ***

In 1993, a small-town school play is the scene of a horrific accident which leaves one student dead. Twenty years later, the school is to restage the play in memory of the original tragedy. Hmm, how well do you think that's going to go?

The Gallows takes us back to the found footage well once more and, on this evidence, it turns out that its source of water has long since dried up. And that someone has dumped a load of toxic waste in there. And topped it off with a cartload of horse manure. Don't get me wrong, this subgenre isn't a guaranteed dead loss - Brian Netto's smart, shocking Delivery and Elliot Goldner's creepy The Borderlands come to mind as shining examples of how to take an increasingly tired formula and give it a fresh, interesting spin.

Cluff and Lofing's movie, however, resorts to the usual seemingly endless shots of people videoing long walks down dark corridors and jumping at sudden loud noises. Fans of motion sickness will be delighted to know that there are several sequences of gorge-rising shaky-cam as characters run away from - or towards - something nasty that may or may not be there.

Sticking to the well worn, yawn-inducingly predictable path of any number of films of this ilk is, unfortunately, just the tip of the movie's gargantuan iceberg of problems. For starters, the characters are the least sympathetic I've seen in a while. This wouldn't be so bad if they had some substance but they're just self-centred, boring, vacuous people and although being self-centred, boring and vacuous isn't the sort of thing for which someone should be murdered horribly it's hard to be swept along with them as they attempt to deal with the increasingly deadly situation in which they find themselves.

Reese (Mishler) comes across as...well, a bit of a dick. Ryan (Shoos), the guy with the camera for most of this flick, comes across as....well, a bit of a dick. Actually, no, he's a monumental dick, the sort of life-affirming presence who likes to bully the more academically-minded students and who appears out of nowhere to shout "BOO!" just because he thinks it's funny.

Hold on, he does appear out of nowhere to shout "BOO!" just because he thinks it's funny. And this is the level where the "scares" in The Gallows generally reside. In the absence of any genuine, innovative chills it soon becomes an exercise in predicting just when the long silences will be punctuated by the next bang or crash. The film is on a mission to startle rather than create a lingering sense of unease.

As for the plot, it has more holes in it than Al Pacino at the climax of Scarface. Now, I'm not one to demand forensically-detailed credibility in a movie unless it's absolutely warranted. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief in the name of entertainment but there's so much stuff in here that made "WTF?" flash across my mind in large, pulsing, neon characters that there was little chance of me becoming even the slightest bit engaged with this absolute mess.

If a school play had previously resulted in a tragic accidental death by hanging, would that school really want to commemorate it two decades later by putting on the same play? Yes, let's just rake all of that up again when most people are probably trying their best to forget it. "Hey! Remember that kid who got hanged? Let's build another set of fully-working gallows in his memory! After all, it's what he would have wanted". Oh yes, that would be a set of fully-working gallows. Because a set of non-operational gallows that just look the part don't actually fit the bill. Let's go full method by dishing out an actual execution!

Next, there's the reason that Reese, Ryan and Ryan's cheerleader girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) sneak into the school the night before the play. You see, Reese is a superb athlete but a sucky actor so Ryan - genius that he is - comes up with a fiendishly cunning plan which involves the wrecking of the stage so that the play can't go ahead and therefore Reese's questionable thesping skills will not lead to his embarrassment in front of the rest of the school. Yeah, as if anyone at that school will be trashing the reputation of anyone on the football team. Also, I don't believe that Reese's psyche would be forever fragmented by him not being able to steal the show at a crummy school play. It's established early on that he doesn't really care about the play, he's taking part because he's got the hots for Pfeifer (Brown).

Okay, let's just try to get past that. On to the wrecking of the set. Oh, the carnage. The devastation. The wanton destruction. If, of course, your definition of "wanton destruction" is pushing over a few fake pot plants and carefully unscrewing the wooden structure of the gallows. They even used the correct tools to do the job right. It's the most civilised act of vandalisation ever. Look guys, take an axe, take a sledgehammer. Destroy the whole thing in a few minutes. But no, Reese treats it like a DIY project and just about the only thing he doesn't do is go on about how it's important to use the correct drill bit. Come to think of it, why are they filming themselves damaging the set? Maybe Reese was going to use the video to get his own series on Discovery Home and Leisure. The movie isn't clear about that.

So, on to the killer. I have to mention the killer who, if he showed up in a different horror movie, would have the potential to be quite a cool character with his hulking presence, hangman's hood and noose in his hand. The problem here is that, if he's the spirit of the guy who died (which I'm pretty sure it is) then the original victim of the hanging looks like Peeta Mellark after a bout of crash dieting and the guy who shows up as the vengeful spirit could be on WWE trying to bodyslam The Undertaker.

One thing I will say is that it does have a rather neat twist towards the end. Another thing I will say is that I just lied about there being a rather neat twist towards the end. One character accepts their fate so readily that it makes a nonsense of all their previous behaviour and another character is revealed to be, when you think about it, too old to be at that school unless they've had a few educational challenges.

After all of that, just when I thought the film had gone to DEFCON-1 in terms of planet-threatening idiocy there was another scene, in another location, when the cops arrived to arrest the guilty party....and proceeded to be bumped off by the ghost. So the ghost could have killed any of the cast, in any location, at any time it wanted which makes the whole thing with the original location and the reconstructed gallows a tad over-elaborate as a revenge plot.

Even at just 81 minutes, The Gallows stretches its threadbare story to breaking point, the first twenty minutes checking in with various characters you don't see again once the proceedings switch to the evening. That wouldn't matter if they mattered somehow to the development of the plot but in almost all cases they're there as filler to pad out the opening act. Once the film finally kicks into gear there's the odd effective moment but most of the action is robbed of any suspense by the tick-box approach to its shocks, characters it's virtually impossible to care for and the utterly inane dialogue. As found footage goes, whoever found it really should have taken it to the recycling plant so it could have become something useful.

Having said all of the above, The Gallows made a very tidy sum of money at the US box office from a budget of just $100,000 and has probably put plenty of bums on seats here in the UK too, so what do I know?