Let me begin by saying that, despite it being chockablock of streak after streak of uninspired features, I maintain my belief on The Found-Footage Horror. There is no experience like one’s first encounter with The Blair Witch Project, considered (rather reflexively) the first found-footage horror film. In the space of sixteen years, the seminal classic has spawned a good number of worthwhile titles that—if somewhat doggedly—follows its mechanics that makes for both a certain appeal and technique, offering to see new horizons for the troubled horror genre. Citing a few prime examples: Josh Trank’s Chronicle documents a troubled teenager’s slow descent to his newly discovered superhuman abilities; Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC] both offer a different eye-view to stories that we already are accustomed to, respectively the alien invasion and zombie outbreak; and Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan, an innocent faux-doc following an infirmed elderly manages to tell a gripping and oftentimes poignant story of a courageous woman who slowly wanes along with the passing years.
All of these films, in ways each to their own, challenge the new-found sub-genre’s “limitations” and ultimately tell engaging stories. The new film The Gallows (from screenwriter-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing) can’t be any further away.
I know. That build-up is laborious, and perhaps unnecessary. But it’s important to note where The Found-Footage Horror is coming from and where thus far it’s headed. It’s not just cost-cutting gimmickry—at least for a few films. But most importantly, it should be noted that I take my rest days very very seriously. I doubt I will ever turn my back on a film and leave the cinema, but the urges I felt while watching the film is reminiscent to my experience watching last year’s Sigaw ng Hatinggabi I’m jolted back to the one time I literally couldn’t even. This film isn’t my ideal rest day. I’d tick it off as what constitutes occupational hazard, but I can’t sue myself, can I?
The Gallows opens to a V.H.S. recording of a freak incident that happened many years ago. While performing to an auditorium-full of high schoolers, a certain Charlie gets killed from a scene in which the character he’s playing hangs himself. Years later, a new batch of students are cast to perform the play. An obnoxious dimwit (Ryan Shoos) who mans the play’s B.T.S. camera urges his friend to screw the play over and trash it one night before the performance. The friend in question (Reese Mishler) proves to be twice as dimwitted as his friend when he for some reason agrees. Strange things happen during their secret op. They get stuck inside the school. A mysterious figure bangs a few doors shut. You know how it goes from here.
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Make no mistake though: the film isn’t a doomed project at all—at least not to begin with. For a higher-level apologist it can be received as a time-passer of a flick, writing to a kind review that notes how a found-footage film finally acknowledges the realism of the dreaded “battery life,” a familiar nightmare shared by anyone who owns an iPhone. Cool, I guess. But at the same time, in defter pairs of hands, The Gallows may be presented in a less obtrusive fashion. One of the major feats of the sub-genre is that it is unusually immersive, and for a while that may be played out well. But it will ultimately be worn out if the world you’re thrust into is an awfully uninteresting one.
A film of similar vein (though not of found-footage style) is Jerome Sable’s Stage Fright, a whimsical revenger set in a summer theater camp. The horror-musical works because it oozes of character it has to sing that it’s “actually gay”, and Cluff and Lofing’s film doesn’t because there is a tremendous lack of it. Perhaps, then, here lies an interesting irony: for a film about the (high school) theater, The Gallows is dreadfully uncharacteristic and uninspired, lacking both the spectacularity of the stage and vérité of the found footage. And while we’re being ironic, let me close by making an unfiltered, in-your-face “found” response: what a shitty film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_8OKImO2pc
