The Hangman

Written and starring the same person? Recipe for failure. It's very rare someone in this field can do more than one function. Here we have the writer also playing the main character. Well he can't act. At least not in this film. And the story was all over the place and garbage, so clearly he can't write either. And that seems to be a common theme when people try to do too much in show business.

But the movie, well it isn't good. A black man and his son going to the Appalachian for camping? Pause. We not doing that. First off, camping is not one of our go to activities. Second, we know better than to go out to racism, the place. The cringy bonding in the beginning should've told me turn this movie off. But then we meet the racist locals. Sigh. This has been done to death. It's played out. Then there's this hangman. It was more like an after thought. If they had focused more on that and the cult, and cut out the racism stuff, which added nothing, then maybe this could've been a 3 star instead of 1.

Right, well the movie's cover and title was enough to make me stop and take notice of this movie. Sure, I had never heard about this movie from director Bruce Wemple, so I didn't know what I was in for. But it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen was more than sufficient to make me sit down and give it a go.

Writers Bruce Wemple and LeJon Woods put together a rather weak storyline that didn't prove neither overly entertaining nor scary. So sitting through 88 minutes of this movie was a bit of a struggle. I must admit that I had hoped for a bit more, given the movie's cover.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but it should be said that while the storyline was rubbish, then the acting performances were actually fair.

Not a particularly great horror movie, nor a movie that will ever grace my screen a second time, because it was boring enough sitting through it the first time.

Visually then "The Hangman" didn't impress either. The movie made use of very little special effects. And as for the creature seen on the movie's cover, well don't get your hopes up, as it is hardly in the movie at all.

The movie's cover was actually the best part about the entire ordeal.

If you enjoy horror movies, I wouldn't recommend you to waste 88 minutes on watching this 2024 movie from director Bruce Wemple.

My rating of "The Hangman" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.

This movie can't decided what it is about. And it throws every kitchen sink into the toilet and flushes the toilet and the kitchen sinks all swirl in the bowl and get jammed and the plumber that comes to fix this cinematic mess of a backed-up sewer movie isn't very good with plumbing or film-making.

The main conceit is that a dad and son go camping in the worst possible place and run into the worst possible people with the worst beliefs, side hustles and folklore imaginable.

The other open premise of the movie is that there is a backwoods cult of lowlifes worshiping a demon that hangs people for their sins. And the rest of the plot points involving said demon make no sense in a fairly tone-deaf manner what with racial makeup of the two leads.

Sometimes the movie is dead serious about itself. Other times it is trying to play for laughs. It unsuccessfully tries to be supernatural horror, an overwrought social drama and a father/son buddy comedy.

But it is mostly annoying. And nothing about it is cohesive or interesting.

The Hangman (2024), directed by Bruce Wemple, is a horror film that collapses under the weight of its own shortcomings, emerging as a masterclass in what not to do in filmmaking. The story follows a father and son on a camping trip in Appalachia that turns deadly when they encounter a cult and a demonic entity, but the execution is a mess. The acting is uniformly dreadful, with the lead actor's performance standing out as the worst, marked by bizarre facial expressions that clash jarringly with the intended emotions of each scene. The camera's relentless zooming in on the lead's face only amplifies this disconnect, making every awkward grimace painfully unavoidable. A secondary villain, stereotyped with a Confederate flag logo on his hat and truck, delivers a performance so wooden it feels like a caricature, while a priest character somehow manages to be even worse, with dialogue and delivery that border on unintentional comedy.

The screenplay is a chaotic jumble, tossing in racial undertones, cult horror, and father-son drama without cohesion or depth, and the direction fails to salvage it, with poor pacing and baffling choices like the overuse of close-ups. Reviews suggest a low-budget production, but no amount of money could fix the fundamentally bad writing, acting, and directing. The Hangman is a cinematic misfire that tries to be a horror but ends up a frustrating, laughably bad ordeal.

When it comes to modest budget VOD horror flicks, Dread knows its audience. Get a few psychotic characters, plug in some red LEDs, build a fire, throw around a little karo-red blood, and everyone has a screaming good time. Dread's latest VOD release, The Hangman, fulfills all these requirements - minimally. What makes The Hangman at all watchable is the clever crime drama centering on a missing teen that easily slips in-between the pseudo-screams.

While the plight of the father and son deepens the A-story, the demonic tale of the Hangman is abruptly forgotten. When the supernatural menace eventually returns, the story of the Hangman's murderous quest becomes not only confusingly circular but almost completely unnecessary. In fact, The Hangman lacks any true genre scares and possesses startling sparse on-screen violence. The eponymous villain barely lives up to his name, settling instead to casting small nooses for binding people down as if he was a not-so-friendly Appalachian neighborhood web-slinger.

Hardcore horror fans might disagree.

The Hangman apologetically fits within the genre and strangles out the minimally-appropriate material with its very last breath while ignoring the true horror of scary Appalachian drug dealers.