Charlie Says....Build My Gallows High.

Another week another found footage movie.

The good news is that 'The Gallows' delivers plenty of effective jump scares, has a strong sense of atmosphere and enough technical competence to hold your attention for its running time.

The bad news is that it's dumb as a bag of spanners, has terrible dialogue, a plot no more developed than your average 'Scooby Doo' episode and we're asked to identify with a bunch of arsehole jocks and bullies for much longer than is necessary.

In other words it delivers exactly what you'd expect from this sort of film, no more and no less. It's not going to scare you if you've seen a lot horror films, and won't convert you if you haven't,  but it will make you jump in a satisfactorily prescribed manner.

The simple set up is as follows: A small time high school theatre production of 'The Gallows' (which seems to be a Poundland hybrid of 'The Crucible' and 'The Scarlet Letter') goes horribly awry when lead actor Charlie actually gets hung during a freak accident (or basic lack of a risk assessment).
Cut to twenty years later and how has the school and the local community moved on from this tragic event? By staging another performance of the same play. Of course they have. What a sensitive thing to do. It's a production still lacking basic health and safety precautions, basic security, basic respect for the dead and basic moral responsibility. Add in a mysterious woman who sits through all the rehearsals, a football jock with a crush on the lead actress, his prick of a best mate who films everything and a cheerleader girlfriend. Mix it all up with a plan to sabotage the set before opening night and you can pretty much join the dots yourself.

Logic is not the film's strong point. Nothing makes much sense when you scrutinise it in the light of day. There's a twist ending that confirms you've been wasting your time if expecting some intelligence behind this shambles.  A key motif of the slasher film is that the sins of the past return to wreak vengeance on the present, but even this is fudged here. The hooded Charlie figure seems a particularly spiteful entity considering that it was an accident and anyway, surely he shares some responsibility for sticking his head through a noose without checking for a safety harness first. Charlie is no Freddy or Jason. Charlie is just some dickhead ghost, whinging about how he wasn't even supposed to be there on that day. Let it go mate, let it go.

Where the film does play an ace card is in its exploration of the backstage area and school corridors after dark. This is a really creepy environment of rickety catwalks, dank basements, pipes, cables and spiralling corridors rendered in green (night-vision) and red (theatre safety lights). There didn't seem to be much logic to the geography of the place but this actually strengthens the horror logic of the piece and makes the whole setting quite disorientating.

A problem the film does have, and one that will probably become more apparent should there be any sequels, is that there are only so many times a noose dropping into frame can be scary and only so much damage a man with a rope can do. Which is basically me saying that it isn't gory enough. But it does have big jump scares and plenty of them. In that respect the film gives you more thrills for your money than highly trumpeted bigger productions such as 'Annabelle'.