The Gallows (2015), R, ★

Don't be scared. It's just a play. 

Found-footage movies...wait a minute, let me be specific, found-footage horror movies...it's like novocaine for the mind. The movie experience will make you numb when the whole experience is over because after going through all the contrivances and cliches we had to suffer through. We get a painful headache in the end because of the screaming, visual effects, camera-shaking and jump scares that ultimately sell it as a product. The reason I am giving this a worthy rating is that have an idea in the horror genre but they did not execute it well and the whole movie goes down the drains with some blood.

In 1993, a high school play called "The Gallows" is premiering and a kid named Charlie gives a worthy performance but near the end of the play, a door is lifted beneath him as he is about to be "hung" at the gallows and he is actually killed in front of the parents and the audience. Well, that's a foreshadowed tragedy.

The suspense is gone since we are at the present as Ryan (Ryan Shoos) is filming his friend Reese Housier (Reese Mishler) as he is participating in the same play that Charlie was in during the past 90s' year. Reese has a crush of Pfeiffer (Pfeifer Brown) with whom he rehearses with her as they are rehearsing a kissing scene but they do not get to kiss. And, then we go into this teenage drama about crushes and life and it becomes so unseemly to this genre that I thought that was more suspenseful than the horrific occurrences in the movie.

The movie wants us to have fun and I get it but we hear the same cliches and see the same cliched dialogue like jump scares and cellphone coverage and foreshadowed events. You know what is going to happen to all these characters and plus, I did not like hanging out with them because they were boring for the most part as we have to follow them throughout the whole movie. The characters are underwritten, the footage is sickening and the story is a straight-to-the-finish-line picture that for a second, we cannot resist to look at our cellphones and to see when it is over. Skip this movie. Go see It Follows instead, a much better teen horror movie.

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