New Line Cinema, Blumhouse Productions, Management 360,
Ryan Shoos, Pfeifer Brown, Cassidy Gifford, Reese Mishler
A high school twenty years ago performed a play called “The Gallows”. But something went wrong, and a student was killed during the performance. In honor of the 20th anniversary of this horrible accident, the school drama director decides to re-perform “The Gallows” in honor of the student who was killed. A group of students decide to break into the school before the play to destroy the sets to stop the play, but once they are in the school, they find there is no way out, and something evil in the school is anxious to make them pay.
I personally think that there should be a law whereby a warning must be posted in ads, in the trailer, and at the theater when it’s a cheap ass handheld camera “found footage” piece of crap. I am done with these idiotic found footage movies. Damn you Blair Witch Project. If you had not made a bundle, everybody and his brother would not be trying to make a fortune duplicating what Blair Witch did. The cost of production on this thing must have been about 100 dollars. That being said, the story starts out really, really slow, but for the last hour, it’s really frightening. The horror aspect is pretty good, and that part was entertaining. The suspense is killing, and it really does have some great scares, and as a horror film it wasn’t bad. If it wasn’t for the shaky gut spinning camera shots of floors, walls, people’s feet, the camera being dropped, and other crappy gimmicks as opposed to good cinematography, it would be a decent film. But no. They had to go the cheap handheld camera route for the entire film, and I was sick of shaky video after the first 15 minutes. This is how to ruin a decent film. And did I say, I am sick of it? Anyway, if you are not bothered by motion sickness and don’t mind that you can’t see 90% of what is going on because the camera is pointing in the wrong direction, go for it, but I can’t recommend this for normal people with spatial awareness. If they had used a real camera and a tripod and some decent lighting effects, they would have had a winner, but this was just plain bad the way it was “filmed”. No, no, no.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
