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.

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.

Leon is taking his son Jesse on a camping trip in West Virginia. He wakes up next morning to find his son missing. He navigates a racist local population and a demonic presence killing his victims with his ropes.

I am fine with a low budget Deliverance style trip in hillbilly country. That part actually works at a low budget level. The lead is a functional average looking dad. The movie struggles when it tries to do high intensity supernatural visuals. They don't have the budget or the camera skills to do it right. It looks cheap and not even in a fun camp way. One understands the limitations.

I've seen many horrors in my lifetime, some ok and most pretty bad, but this is up there with the worst... I have no idea how this has even made it onto Amazon but I think it needs to be taken down. It's all over the place, has no progression, just jumps straight into the "action" and that may sound like a good thing but it really isn't. If you watch the trailer before you waste your time, you'll realise that Bruce wemple can't even understand what a trailer is meant to be, never mind directing a movie, clearly someone with money and no clue how to direct. If you ever see this guys name as the director of the movie your about to watch, just skip and move on because it's clueless direction from start to finish. What a joke, should be under the comedy genre.