The Hangman

This is a truly terrible film. The acting is bad the story is bad, the audio is sometime out of sync with characters speech.

The main character is useless all in all a bad film. Do not waste your time with this.

The story does not make sense, I found myself losing track initially then being incredibly bored and the mind wondering, the film does not capture you/ keep you hooked. It is all in all a really terrible film.

The acting is ridiculous, I would strongly advise people to watch a different film.

I cannot understand how such a bad film has 4/5 stars on amazon reviews. It should be noted i don't often leave reviews for films, but this was just so terribly I had to worn others!

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.

Every decision made by the writers, director, camera operators, actors and their characters was the worst possible decision. It was so bad in every way possible. It's like they asked an improv audience to suggest a genre, sub genre, tone, and a new character to introduce for 3 acts and they just put all of it together to make a mashup of all the ideas.

Or maybe two interns carrying two separate scripts were rushing down a hall and ran into each other, dropping the stacks of papers and when they picked all of the pages up, they had mixed both scripts together and this was the one that got produced.

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.

Besides a few dead bodies and some screaming, there is nothing about this that resembles a horror movie. The overt racial undertones really destroy the story, and there's nothing subtle about it. All white people bad - got it.

The acting is awful, the dialogue is laughable - a son asks his widower father if he's gay because he's not dating(?)The accents are inconsistent and nonsensical. And by the way, I can't remember one scene or sequence in the movie that actually made me feel scared, suspenseful, or care about any of the characters at all.

Honestly the whole insane racism ala Appalachia theme in movies is really tired. Horrible movie. Do not watch.