What’s It About
To mend their troubled relationship, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman, Leon, takes his teenage son on a camping trip into deep rural Appalachia. Little do they know of the mountainous region’s sinister secrets. A local cult has summoned an evil demon born of hate and pain, known to them as The Hangman, and now the bodies have begun to pile up. Leon wakes up in the morning to discover that his son is missing. To find him, Leon must face the murderous cult and the bloodthirsty monster that is The Hangman.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Other than a few dead bodies and a bit of shrieking, nothing about this feels like a horror movie. The obvious racial overtones ultimately do in the story as there’s nothing even close to the subtlety of it. All white people are evil – check. Opening scene – a title card fills us in on the fact that Hell has seven known gateways. The one we’re messing around with here isn’t under a hotel in New Orleans, however. It’s somewhere in a nameless part of the mountains of West Virginia. That’s followed by some cultists pulling something out of that portal, a creature we then see transform a couple of crackheads from strung out to strung up. Meet The Hangman. Oblivious to all of this, Leon and his son Jesse are going on a father-and-son weekend in the mountains. Unfortunately, the first night does not go so well, ending in recriminations about the death of the boy’s mother, whose murder Leon failed to prevent. When Leon wakes up the following day, Jesse is gone, and his car won’t start. In an attempt to get help, he stumbles upon a couple of meth-heads, Billy and Scott, who are rather unkind about the concept of “jungle bunnies shouldn’t be comin’ round this way.” Shaking loose from them, he finds one of the crackheads from the prologue sprawled dead. The acting is bad, the dialogue laughable – a son asks his widower father if he is gay because he’s not dating(?)The accents are entirely mismatched and silly. Oh, and I don’t remember a scene or sequence in the film that frightened me, was suspenseful, or made me care about any of the characters. The Hangman opens with some pretty moody cinematography and a promising enough plot if it is familiar. Had it just concentrated on the cult and the demon they have raised from the pit, with an electric winch, no less, then this would have had plenty of bona fide opportunities for storied scares and action. Instead, for half an hour, The Hangman and his cult go into the background as Leon deals with boring racists until finally rescuing party girl Tara from human trafficker Kaine Jefferson Cox. In turn, she introduces him to the local priest, Jedidiah, who is also aware of The Hangman and the Cult of Baal. You can probably put the pieces together about how he knows. This is also, thankfully, where the film gets back on course as the cult returns as the central theme. It has a couple of twists to the story that somewhat provides a mild uniqueness from similar films and give it some depth. Unfortunately, while the subplot concerning Leon and Jesse’s problems works pretty well, the efforts at tossing in a bit of racism subtext never really amount to much. Hillbillies with Confederate flags emblazoned on their trucks don’t like black folk? I never would have guessed. It might have gone a little better if they’d played up the now-obvious connection between a demon with a fondness for hanging its victims, Leon and Jesse’s skin color, and the history of lynchings. Only The Hangman doesn’t do much hanging. He has telepathic control over ropes but mainly uses it to bind people. Or, in one of the better scenes in the film, to drag Leon towards a running chainsaw. And it’s more scenes like that and fewer long passages of expository dialogue that The Hangman needed to be truly effective. It just never comes together as a whole, buried under too much talk and feeling to come through with the scares. I like horror movies, but this one is below okay. The intentions are good, but this still misfires.
OUR RATING – AN IDOL HANDS 2.5