In this day and age, found footage films are a dime a dozen and while they are usually not too bad, the novelty of them has worn off. That is not to say that there will not be another one to wow the socks off the average viewer or have something new to say, but the amount of said films has increased greatly in recent years and there does not seem to be any stopping them. These movies are an easy way to save on budget and when they are great like REC or Paranormal Activity, they are really great and when they are not you get something like The Bay or Diary of the Dead. Seeing the posters or the promos for The Gallows, you kind of wanted it to be fantastic and it ended up falling closer to good than bad, which is better than most tend to do.

The plot finds our lead characters partaking in a school play, the very same play that was produced many years earlier and saw the death of one of the students due to the gallows prop malfunctioning. Events then play out in the present as a few of the students find themselves trapped in the auditorium after hours and being hunted down by the ghost of the dead teen from all those years ago.

The plot is fairly cliché, featuring a different situation than other films but many of the same devices, but even so it manages to generate enough tension, suspense and even a few scares as to make it watchable. The characters are not particularly all that interesting as you learn very little about them; the film is more about the action and getting you from point A to point B than it is about storytelling. That in itself is not a bad thing for those looking for a little bit of an adrenaline rush, but the movie brings very little originality to the table and for those looking for a revelation of some kind or the next great found footage film, it is not this one.

There is a bit of a twist at the end of the film, though when you get to a certain point, you can already guess as to what is coming. The movie is left open for a sequel, though if one should ever appear, there is literally nowhere else to take it as everything was revealed here and anything further would just be a rehash. The film did do excessively well for its budget though that it guarantees studios will keep pumping out films made in this manner for years to come. It is not necessarily a bad film, it is just not a great film and is a victim of the genres success more than anything else. Okay would probably be the best way to describe it, though it is definitely better than some and for those looking to kill some time, they could do worse.

3 out of 5