The Gallows: Act II (2019)

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

GENRE: GHOST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (HULU)

Everything about the mere existence of The Gallows: Act II just confounds me. The first one was not loved by anyone I ever met and didn't exactly make a ton of money (profitable, yes, but you'd have to be pulling some Producers-level shenanigans to lose money on a found footage film), and this is an era where horror sequels tend to flop far more often than not. Even when the film is quite liked and more successful, like Happy Death Day, or simply more memorable (The Boy comes to mind), the sequels are met with indifference. So there's almost no incentive to make a sequel, and yet they made one anyway. And sure enough, no one cared - test audience reactions were so poor that it sat on the shelf for a bit before being quietly dumped to VOD from Lionsgate (not sure if/when original distributor Warner Bros was ever involved with this one).

But that's not the only thing that makes me sit and wonder what exactly these people are thinking. The first one, if nothing else, actually utilized the found footage gimmick far more successfully than most of its brethren; there was a natural quality to the presentation (including scenes where they forget they're filming and lower the camera) that allowed me to give it credit for that much. And yet, the returning filmmakers (and one cast member, treated as a surprise but I guarantee unless you watch the films back to back you won't be able to remember who it was) opt to drop the POV aspect this time around, using it only for an opening sequence and a few video logs that the protagonist films for her Youtube channel. At first I thought perhaps they were attempting Book of Shadows style meta "the original was just a movie in this real world" approach, but nah, it's a direct sequel otherwise. Just lacks the only thing that the original did correctly.

Hilariously, the main drawback of found footage is that the films tend to be a bit slow paced in order to keep the "why are they filming" type stuff to a minimum, so you'd think by dropping it the new film would be more exciting, right? Wrong! If anything it's even more lethargic, not to mention repetitive. The plot concerns Auna (Ema Horvath), a high school student with dreams of being an actress and also expanding her Youtube channel, which currently has about 200 followers (so, about 1/10000th that the average guy silently playing video games might have). In one of her slice of life videos we can see that she can't get through a single sentence without another edit, but that and the low follower count hasn't deterred her from her dream!

Anyway she transfers to some famous acting high school and prepares a monologue from some shitty Never Ending Story wannabe movie, but it goes poorly. So she seeks another one to do, and finds The Gallows - the play that was being performed by Charlie (the series' villain) when he died. She does the monologue, knocks it out of the park (somehow her fellow acting students instantly love her now - no rivalries here!), and even gets a boyfriend... but she's also haunted by Charlie, as is her sister for reasons I could never discern. Charlie doesn't seem to ever bother anyone unless she's around, but somehow her sister (who looks nothing like her; I don't know why casting people insist on finding folks who couldn't look less alike) is menaced by him just as often. Will they escape the curse, or become his latest victims?

Well, I guarantee you won't care by the time the movie is finally over, 96 minutes later. Once Auna is first targeted, the following hour of the movie is just a cycle of the same scenes: Charlie spooks her, she tries to change her monologue, her teacher talks her out of it, the sister is spooked, the two of them bicker about something, then the whole thing repeats again. Happy Death Day had more variety to its scenes and that was in an actual time loop. The attempt to turn Charlie into some kind of Slender Man/viral video challenge boogeyman isn't terrible, but nothing is done with it - everything focuses entirely on Auna and her sister. At one point two girls come up to Auna and ask to get a pic with her because of her newfound internet fame from her "Charlie Challenge" video, and that's pretty much the extent of this thing's impact.

Worse, it's one of those movies where half of the scares come from hallucinations, which are worse than fake scares (loud phone rings and the like) because it seems like they only exist to spruce up the trailer. She'll be talking to her boyfriend or an acting scout or whoever, and the person will suddenly have their neck snapped or something (because hangman), prompting her to scream and then snap out of it. I guess I can give them credit for not making the entire movie a dream/hallucination, but instead it has a twist ending that would probably anger me if I had any reason to care about anything to lead up to it. It did result in me having more questions, but unless I go downstairs later today and find the directors sitting in my kitchen, I can't conceive of a scenario where I'd ever bother to ask them.

Funnily enough I actually own this movie on Amazon Prime from when it was (accidentally?) available to own for $1.99, but never bothered to watch it until now, where I watched it on Hulu instead. If you're reading this and thinking "that is a remarkably uninteresting anecdote", guess what? I agree. But also: it's more interesting than this movie, I assure you. Indeed, I see pretty much all of the Blumhouse movies (except the "Into the Dark" ones, which is what I planned to look for on Hulu when I stumbled on this and shrugged) and I am hardpressed to think of one that was worse.

What say you?

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