Aspiring teenage actress and youtuber, Auna Rue(Ema Horvath), moves in with her adult sister Lisa (Brittany Falardeau ) to attend Fellbrook High School which is known for its prestigious drama program that has yielded notable successful Broadway actors. Auna struggles with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority due to being very much the "other" sister, and Auna struggles to fit in with her new school and Drama class, but she does find a seemingly charming boy, Cade Parker (Chris Milligan), who shows some romantic interests in her. When Auna is messaged by a fan of her YouTube page named "AlmostFamous99" he directs her attention to the "Charlie Challenge" and internet phenomenon where teenagers record themselves reading excerpts from the play The Gallows recording the supernatural occurrences, when Auna sees the hits these videos generate she finds a copy of The Gallows and finds herself instantly drawn to it, using it to produce a "Charlie Challenge" video that goes viral and reading a monologue for her Drama class that gets her a standing ovation. But with the success, Auna becomes plagued by grotesque "Hangman" inspired visions and inexplicable occurrences that may be tied to a curse associated with The Gallows.
In Summer 2015, Warner Bros. Released Blumhouse's found footage film , The Gallows, which served as the writing/directing debut of Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff. The film was released during a period of blowback for the found footage genre that had been gradually been building thanks to overindulgence spurred by the success of Paranormal Activity. While The Gallows was a commercial success thanks to its mere $100 thousand budget, against a worldwide gross of $40 million, the movie was probably something of a "meh" note in Warner Bros. Books given the wide release and Summer release slot that indicated the company had blockbuster ambitions for that film. A sequel was greenlit with Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff returning to writing/directing duties and was filmed in secret in 2017. While supposedly Warner Bros. Did have a screening for the sequel, the actual distribution was done by Lionsgate who dumped the film on a day and date VOD/limited theatrical release in October 2019. While The Gallows Act II improves itself by ditching the found footage aspect and less grating characters, it's still unfortunately not enough to save the film from very burdensome baggage left over from the first film.
While the movie introduces us to its setup of the "Charlie Challenge" via a YouTube video that misdirects us into thinking this will be a found footage film, it isn't long before the format is abandoned (kind of) and goes instead for a traditional narrative approach. The found footage gimmick was pretty poorly integrated in the first film with Ryan being both an annoyingly jerkish character as well as photographing himself engaging in bullying and petty crime so it made no sense, so I was actually glad the movie abandons that from the outset. The movie this time around has a much more likable lead in Ema Horvath's Auna Rue, and trust me this one decision makes a WORLD of difference. Horvath's performance as Auna is very nice with a certainly level of awkward charm that makes her endearing. Horvath does well showing Auna going through emotional and psychological torment and her transition for her awkward optimism in the opening to the psychological hell she endures in the later section is well portrayed and shows Horvath as an actress to keep an eye on.
The rest of the movie is pretty standard, but parts of it are done better here than they were in the original. Since the movie is played more psychological the "Hangman" iconography is put to slightly better usage here with some reasonably haunting scenes that are well sold by Horvath's performance. The movie like it's predecessor is still too reliant on jump scares, but not to the extent the first one was. The biggest sticking point against the movie is that it is a sequel to The Gallows and it's stuck in an unenviable position of serving as continuation on that film, while also distancing itself from it. The fact the ghost got its revenge (seemingly) in the last movie leaves you wondering "why is this even happening then?". The events of the last movie are tenuously connected at best with the instigating events from 1993 with the fully functioning Gallow set still making no sense whatsoever, and the "revenge plan" also making no sense since Reese's father was the reason Charlie died (kind of but we'll let that go for ghost story logic) and Reese didn't even know about it. While the movie tries to carry this baggage as best it can it finds itself stumbling with it at the third act, only to find itself overshadowed by an absolutely howler of an ending that leaves you thinking "what? How? Why?" because of how convoluted and nonsensical it is.
The Gallows Act II is anchored by a strong performance from Ema Horvath in the lead and directors Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff have refined their craft since the initial release, but the film just has too much going against it. With an overuse of jump scares and a convoluted narrative that has to somersault and backflip over itself to try and build upon the shaky ground established by its predecessor that didn't exactly leave the most fertile ground for a sequel in the first place. I honestly hope Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff make a movie I can recommend, but for the foreseeable future they should stay away from gallows.
