As if catching shrapnel from the cluster bombs "Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension" and "Jem and the Holograms" wasn’t enough to make me despise the subpar film slate of 2015, film industry financial wizard Jason Blum, who has managed to con audiences nationwide out of nearly a billion dollars for 7 years at the cost of what it takes to make a single mediocre star studded rom-com, returns to double tap my sense of peace and patience this week with a double trouble reminder that his laziness didn’t just lie towards the back end of the year but was seeded throughout in preceding seasons.
It really blows my mind that the same man that helped to get passion projects like “Whiplash” and “The Gift” off the ground can turn around and shell out the most cynical, talentless, lazy, and cheap ghost story that may very well have been the final nail in the coffin of the found footage format in wide release were it not for the fact that the sheer gall it has to demand a theater ticket for putting forth almost negative effort stands in a league apart from even the most pandering of its peers.
And shockingly, I’m not talking about any of the “Paranormal Activity” films, which are all James Wan caliber creative masterpieces compared to the insipid noise making and nonsense that compose the barely qualifying feature presentation that is “The Gallows.”
My immediate reaction to exposure of this pathetically desperate cash grab within a mere 5 minutes of startup was “maybe I was a bit too hard on Fifty Shades of Grey.”
To regale the exploits of a High School jock douche bag that can’t act performing in a play to sleep with a hot theater geek and his jock douche bag and alpha bitch cheerleader friends efforts to sabotage a play before its opening night for the logic of “people who like theater are dorks,” would be about as pointless as picking apart the logistics of a High School play requiring a student to put their neck in an actual noose risking an instantaneous death which wouldn’t happen at the distance of a foot long drop.
The High School douche bags in question are honestly about indicative of the audience this mass of shamelessness in film format was designed to appeal to; lacking in any form of subtlety whatsoever and aiming to dangerously out-stupid each other’s actions for the sole purpose of mildly entertaining themselves.
The main character is a selfish and talentless dumbass willing to sabotage the hard work of others just to chase his hormones, his best friend is that one chronically mouth diarrhea suffering bully that you always wished got his arm broken and his enrollment expelled messing with that one person who had a bad day, and the less said about the female portion of their trifecta of future educational washouts, the better, whom the camera continues to convince us has a body to die for within the confines of its PG-13 constraints despite not only being average but having to share the screen with a more attractive modestly dressed costar.
Fittingly, the film’s acting is about on par with that of a group of High Schoolers deciding to make a found footage ghost movie using smart phone cameras. Suffice it to say, this cast may want to think twice about putting any of this material on their highlight reel.
The subsequent effect settling in with the beginning of the haunting portion is that you’re watching about 50 minutes of moronic, unpleasant, and rude future Darwin award winners suffer and die because they couldn’t just muster up the will to be passably decent human beings for one night, which would be gratifying if there was any consistency with the found footage format.
Not once is a reason to film anything actually established but the shifts from shaky and steady cam along with lacking a designated camera person lead to bizarre shits in perception regarding exactly who is filming any of this to begin with and why the camera is worth fighting for when their lives are in danger.
I could go on for days about how nonexistent and half assed the content of this film is, with topics ranging from how the characters share the same given names as their actors to the almost adorably pointlessly convoluted twist that M. Night Shyamalan would blush at but by now I would hope that you get the point.
Just about the only positive I managed to take from Blumhouse Productions living example of being unable to produce cinematic omelets like “The Gift” without breaking a few eggs was the object of jock dumbass’ attraction, played by Pfeifer Ross.
She’s cute, pleasant, the only passable actor of the lot and comes the closest to portraying an actual character across the movie’s mercifully short length and while the twist would have ordinarily ruined her as an element in a better movie, here I’d rather think of it as the best element of a film rebelling against everything dragging it down regardless of the fact that I’m comforted no less due to this film’s $100,000 budget making it less worthy of theatrical release than my “Fromage Friday” features and guaranteeing that it would turn a profit in less than 10 hours.
I hope to see her do more work. Meanwhile, I hope to never have to stumble across “The Gallows” ever again.
Shifting gears from the cynically manufactured with cut corners to the outright laughable, “The Boy Next Door” would have probably been my favorite movie viewing experience of a 2015 film had I been able to watch it with a group and a bottle of whiskey at hand.
The film wastes no time jumping straight into the premise of its taboo relationship like a dog blissfully rolling around in a pile of garbage, reveling in the trashy nature of its narrative so intensely that I wouldn’t be shocked to learn if this script was somehow a years old reject originating from a Lifetime Channel intern with writing ambitions.
Every corny turn that the premise of a High School literature teacher Jennifer Lopez sleeping with one of her students resulting in his development into a full blown psychotic stalker can take happens almost tenfold.
However, where the film becomes almost a riot at a mile a minute is when it sinks in just how capable they were of even executing this basic of a premise. While the double standard of perceptions regarding sex scandals involving female teachers with underage male students will continue to make my skin crawl until the day that I die, the notion of making the “student” in question a 19 year old that she has only recently met while in a marital separation that only becomes her student several days after the deed is done kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the premise.
There’s no way to do something like this “right.” You either commit to it or back out entirely. Not that the movie could even gotten that right were the script not clearly so softened regardless.
“The Boy Next Door” stands out as one of those odd few movies that would appear to have cast actual High School aged teenagers as High School students. So when a 26 year old Ryan Guzman shows up with the face of a 30 year old man to occupy the same space as kids that have clearly not completed their journey through puberty, while claiming to share the same age bracket due to missing a year because of a transfer issue, I was forced to pause for a solid 40 seconds, doubled over at just how far they were willing to blacklist the same statutory rape fetish that they wanted to so pitifully and disturbingly bank on.
While the wacko shifts in tone throughout the second half of the film render far fewer laughs than the embarrassing set up, the movie’s ultimate saving grace is that it managed to give me a few laughs, however unintentional they may have been, and wrap itself up within a forgivably short runtime.
The harmlessness of “The Boy Next Door” does ultimately bite itself in the ass however when the inevitable realization settles in that as uniquely terrible as it is, it isn’t so unique in a world of Lifetime Channel Original Movies, sharing conventions so widely recognized and lampooned that the Lifetime Channel themselves have begun creating a subscription service for their own snark bait to be enjoyed sincerely or ironically in the comfort of your own home.
This brings the nature of the film and the grander question of the day back into the limelight; why does Blumhouse Productions make theatrical features?
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