Getting locked inside an empty school at night is a solidly bone-chilling premise for teens, and a certain subset of that audience won’t mind that nearly every one of Lofing and Cluff’s ostensibly scary setpieces can be seen coming a mile away (mostly because we’ve already seen them in other movies). Loud noises, narrow corridors, locker doors opening and closing on their own, a television set that turns on by itself to provide expositional news footage — “The Gallows” isn’t without a certain amount of atmosphere, it simply feels borrowed wholesale.

-from the Variety.com review by Geoff Berkshire

I should note that this is one of the kinder reviews I’ve read so far of this movie. This movie was already asking for it with the ad campaign, which had the nerve to compare the killer to Leatherface and Jason Vorhees. Read on…