The Movie

Most of the time you wind up with the same old pseudo-horror schlockfests that involve ridiculous premises, excessive amounts of gore and violence that provide cheap shock value in lieu of genuine scares, and the never-gets-old trick of having the busty protagonist walking backwards and turning suddenly, only to have the camera pan quickly and orchestral score crescendo wildly as she bumps into an unexpected intruder, only to suddenly reveal said intruder to be her roommate. Or her cat. Or her best friend. Or her boyfriend. Or her best friend's cat's boyfriend. And then they repeat this miracle about eight zillion times just in case you didn't crap yourself the first time they tried this oh-so-original "Oh my God!! It's.... nobody important" trick on you.

I mean, look at last summer's Freddy vs. Jason, an admittedly (although only barely) entertaining if wholly non-scary endeavor. Someone got the genius idea of turning the entire third act into a wrestling match, a move that probably endeared itself to the WWE crowd, but the thrills and chills were nowhere to be found. (Oh, and to make sure you were paying attention, they pulled that lame "OMG! It's... nobody important" trick more than a few times.) A good scary movie gets inside your head and stays there for oh, about three years or so. It insinuates itself inside you so penetratingly, you feel like you need to bathe in Epsom salts for a week. There are brilliantly disturbing elements in Mulholland Drive or Donnie Darko that overblown crap like 28 Days Later or junk like Darkness Falls couldn't even begin to approach.

Which brings us to the subject of today's review... I wouldn't call Hangman's Curse a disturbing horror movie. There's nothing in here which one will find genuinely creepy or overly maniacal. In fact, for what is ostensibly a "horror movie", there's very little to be found in terms of gore, violence, or overly scary material (although admittedly, there are a few jumpy moments, including one unfortunate employment of the "OMG! It's... nobody important" trick.) The low-budget 2003 film directed by Rafal Zielinski and written by Kathy Mackel and Stan Foster (based on a novel by Frank Peretti) is set in your average, everyday American high school. As school legend has it, ten years ago a bullied, constantly harassed student named Abel Frye stabbed to death the cheerleader he loved after she spurned him for a football player. Afterwards, Abel hung himself in the school. Since then, it is believed that his ghost has been haunting various members of the football team. Those who are haunted are prone to collapsing and falling ill, and an inscription of a hanged man is found on their locker.

Sent to determine the cause of the disturbances are members of the Veritas Project, a secret society of paranormal investigators. The investigators are also the Springfield family, including father Nate (David Keith), mother Sarah (Mel Harris), and siblings Elisha (Leighton Meester) and Elijah (Douglas Smith). It's a strange conceit that the family that investigates together stays together, but I'm willing to go along with it. Elisha and Elijah go "undercover" at the school, she as a "popular chick" and he as a "nerd", while Nate takes on the role of a school janitor to keep an eye on proceedings. Sarah works behind the scenes providing operational support for the field agents (her husband and kids) alongside the eccentric scientist Algernon Wheeling (Frank Feretti, the actual author of the novel!) As jock after jock falls, seemingly to the "Able Frye" curse, the team has to race against the clock to keep the curse from striking again. But is all what it seems? Is the Abel Frye legend actually true, or is it a cover for an even more insidious plot? And what happens when not only jocks, but some of the bullied kids as well start dropping from the curse as well?

Hangman's Curse is a lightweight thriller, a "clean" scary movie that can most likely be more enjoyed by families than by your average horror film aficionados. You won't find any gratuitous nudity, gore, violence, or overt sexuality. Although the film was shot with an extremely small budget ($2 million), the filmmakers made the most out of their shekels, making the film look more costly than it actually was. The film has enough in terms of performances, plot twists, and earnest storytelling to make it a worthwhile, if not incredibly memorable, endeavor. I don't think the filmmakers set out to create an extremely scary and utterly disturbing movie, but rather a fairly decent thriller with a couple of noteworthy "jumpy" moments. Hangman's Curse seems to work better if you think of it as a good cable movie or after school special, rather than as a full-fledged feature film.

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