The Gallows Act II (2019) - Movie Review

In 2015, on a budget of $100,000, The Gallows was made and released to cinemas. It would go on to earn $45 million at the box office worldwide. I would be more aghast at a film that fucking dreadful doing that well, if it weren’t for the fact that the act of me going to see it in cinemas meant ultimately contributing to that final figure. So, yeah, there’s technically a reason why a sequel to that film came out this year, but that still doesn’t make the decision any less baffling. And to the credit of the filmmakers, they switched things up a bit for the follow-up. I still question what good those changes end up doing, though.

For one, this isn’t a found footage movie. There’s elements of the style here and there, mainly in the form of YouTube vlogs, but for the most part, this is filmed like a standard horror film. This was a pretty good move, since not only is the found footage craze well and truly over for now, it also means that this won’t have the same constant logistics errors of the original. However, what that ends up doing is merely upgrading this from ‘awful’ to just ‘boring’. As bad as the original was, at least its setting of a high school after hours had a bit of built-in atmosphere to it, and the mostly-red colour palette, while painful, at least gave it an identity.

This, on the other hand, is painfully dull. It takes the titular haunted play and puts it into the blogosphere, depicting it as part of an Internet challenge that, among other people, budding actress Auna Rue takes part in, reading it on camera and waiting for weird shit to happen. Said weird shit mostly results in tables dragging themselves and lamps flying across the room. About as exciting as the average YouTube challenge, then.

It occasionally flirts with commentary on online content creators chasing viral trends, getting weirdly close to Cam territory at times, but it never amounts to anything. Well, save for the ending, which manages its own incredible feat in how it wound up making me even angrier than the original did. And for those playing the home game, when the original film ended, I literally screamed “What the fuck was that?!” at the screen, so you can imagine how not-intact my bedroom windows are right now. It’s like the ending to Smiley but somehow even dumber; it’s fucking baffling.

As far as being horror, most of the ‘scares’ come from sudden jumps and music video horror shit, where the editing and soundtrack do all the work, and the main character constantly hallucinating that people are in danger and/or dying. Nevermind how the Hangman has never been that good of a villain as far as character design or backstory or even physical presence, this shows that while the style of filmmaking may be different, the reliance on played-out tropes for cheap engagement remains. They might as well have kept it found footage for all the difference it ends up making.

This admittedly isn’t as bad as the original; very few things are, as that film is one of the single worst horror films of the decade, if not its entire genre. Save for the ending, there’s nothing here that generates as severe a negative reaction as the original, and for the most part, it’s just boring. As much as I thoroughly loathe the first film, at least I got some kind of consistent feeling out of it; this one can’t even do that much.