Don’t hang around
Quick, want to see “The Gallows” for free?
Okay, then get some friends and a smartphone. Go to your local high school and film yourselves running up and down the hallways in the dark. Scream a lot. Now go home and watch what you shot.
There you go. Just saved you $15.
Another one of those “foundfootage” flicks, “The Gallows” starts in 1993 with a gruesome accidental death during a school play. Flash-forward 20 years, as a new group of students decides to restage the same cursed drama. Bad idea!
Cue the grim reaper. Exit the students, one by one. Permanently.
Sorry, but this kind of highschool horror was old when Jamie Lee Curtis was young. All the ugly, shaky, night-vision camerawork in the world will not make it seem fresh. Or remotely scary.
It might help if there were any people worth rooting for. But “The Gallows” gives us four almost equally unsympathetic characters. So, who do you want to see get it first? The big dumb jock or the pretentious theater geek? The bratty cheerleader or the knuckledragging bully? Or how about the whole genre instead?
Cassidy Gifford plays the pretty pom-pom queen and is at least appropriately sexy and snobbish. Reese Mishler is our athletic hero and looks a little befuddled, as he should be. As the geek and the bully, Pfeifer Brown and Ryan Shoos are even more annoying than necessary.
Nothing much happens until finally — thankfully — a hooded hangman appears and starts thinning out the cast. Sometimes he has a rope and drags one of them off. Sometimes he just pops up in the background and sends them running. Once again, I guess, no noose is good noose. And another no-budget horror movie turns out to be just horrible.