“The Hangman” Now Available on Blu-ray!
Turbulent connecting father and teenage son, Leon and Jesse, retreat to the West Virginia wilderness for a little rekindling before Jesse goes off to college. Still reeling after his mother’s death five years ago, Jesse blames his father’s inactivity and his rebuff mismanagement of their family’s pain. The next morning, Jesse has disappeared, the car has been sabotaged, and Leon fears his son might be in the hands of a pair of racist rednecks encountered the day before. However, what Leon finds himself in the middle of is much worse when a demon summoning cult retrieves The Hangman from the depths of one of Earth’s seven gates of hell and needs a fresh, young, and angst-riddled body to continue his unharnessed hell on Earth. Jesse becomes the unfortunate soul at stake and it’s up to his father, and a few local God-fearing allies, to try and stop The Hangman’s noose from gripping tighter.
New York City-based director Bruce Wemple has teamed up again with Dread Production to bring another terrifying tale. The “Monstrous” and “Island Escape” director cowrites the script with frequently collaborator, actor LeJon Woods (“Baby Oopsie: The Series,” “Island Escape,” to deliver “The Hangman,” a demonic horror thriller that catapults a father and son’s dysfunctionality into the throes of Hell. Filmed in the rural regions of upstate New York, doubling as the rural Appalachian wilderness of West Virginia, which makes filming having occurred likely around the Adirondack Mountains instead, “The Hangman” carries with it a longstanding racial infamy attached to a father’s supernatural pickle, being the middle of a demon conjuring cult and the lynching-loving demon itself. Traverse Terror productions, a division of executive producers Cole Payne Traverse Media, in association with Dread Presents sees executive producer Patrick Ewald from the Epic Pictures Group back “The Hangman” feature while Daniel Booker and Vincent Conroy coproduce.
LeJon Woods not only cowrites the script but the actor for Cleveland, Ohio essentially customizes the role of the father, Leon. What starts as a man looking to just escape into the great outdoors quickly closes in around him as he feels the pressures of latent hostility when son Jesse (Mar Cellus, making his feature film debut) accuses him of running from his past after the death of his mother, Leon’s wife. What exactly happens to her is not yet apparent other than an offscreen gunshot but the palpable tension between Woods and Cellus is worth noting in a handwringing moment of enmity around the first night’s campfire; a good tall tale sign that this camping trip is going to be doomed from the start. This tension sets the stage for what’s to come, a missing son, aggressive bigots, murderous cultists, and a Netherworld lyncher, showcased with an awfully underutilized purpose and screentime appeal, especially being the titular villain. “An Angry Boy’s” Scott Callenberg gets his chance to shine as an inhuman character, prosthetically made-up with burn scars, greasy strands of hair, and cladded darkly in country chic, but doesn’t have the room to spread havoc or really build the character who’s mostly reduced to lurking the background and letting the telekinesis-driven rope to asphyxiate those not in the know of cult activity. There’s also a slew of throwaway characters that either are too short-lived to really flesh out their role, such as the eye-gouged, bedridden clairvoyant and the tied-up local Leon saves and becomes a flirtatious love interest/gun-toting assassin (see what I mean by not really understanding the character?) in Lindsay Dresbach (“Pitchfork”). Except for LeJon Woods, the rest of the cast is comprised of mostly short film or background actors and actresses given the opportunity for an expanded principal performance, including Kaitlyn Lunardi, Rob Cardazone, Jefferson Cox, Daniel Martin Berkley, William Shuman, Ameerah Briggs, Jessy Holtermann, and Richard Lounello.
Riding parallel to “The Hangman’s” resurrected demon on Earth, a father and son’s struggle to grow in postmortem of the only woman in their lives, and the fact that there is one of the gates of Hell located in the West Virginia’s Appalachians premise, the story entails a rather barefaced, as well as slightly overtone, racism theme coursing through its veins. The Confederate flag sporting rednecks and the all-white, Southern accent contingent of white people against a black man and his son shout bigotry as louds as possible through your personal media setup. Yet, the Hangman himself is the very representation of lynching, a heinously taboo act that has become a stain on America history, typically executed by racially prejudice Southerners on black people when that simmering, seething hate turns red and vigilante justice rears its ugly head. Though the villain doesn’t don a white hood and gown or perform any gesture of white power, to say Leon, a black man, who must stop the evilly monikered hangman from taking his son’s soul to Hell, is too big a coincidence to not call a spade a spade. Wemple and Woods make it clear that Leon’s calling is to be a savior, the chosen heroic that can destroy the Hangman, but while the first two acts climb the ladder of an naïve hero, all the indicating signs point to arbitrary means met with arbitrary characters for Leon with no concrete reasoning why his being deceived into the gateway to Hell area is more than just serendipitous destiny, turning the last act of “The Hangman” into just a one man wrecking ball of hillbilly hell spawn that loses that fate-driven connotation.
“The Hangman” nooses a high-definition, 1080p Blu-ray from Epic Picture Group, the at-home distribution label of Dread Presents. The AVC encoded, single-layered, BD25 has good curb appeal with negligible compression issues in the feature’s 2.00:1 widescreen aspect ratio, so we get a deeper, broader picture with less resolution flaws. While the certain background or tree-top scenes present a good visual intake of a bird’s eye views, the grading resides to just above a flat overlay, likely within the 10th percentile of grading possibilities, resulting in a more natural tone. Details are generally fine when in focus or out of the shadows, which is where the Hangman lurks most of his screentime. The presented audio options are a lossy English Dolby Digital 5.1 and a Dolby Stereo 2.0. Dialogue has clear and prominent staying power throughout the stock soundtrack that slightly chintzy the ambience audio works of self-acting rope and other mystical milestones whenever the hangman comes calling. There’s not a ton of spatial volume to diffuse the audio with balance, leaving a lot of the milieu and action resonances as lopsided near the foreground. English and Spanish subtitles are optionally available. The Blu-rays special features include a Bruce Wemple commentary track, a making of featurette with interview snippets with LeJon Woods, a lengthier interview with writer-star LeJon Woods, and a deleted scene. Physically, the deep scar recesses of “The Hangman”s” white-eyed face and long, unkempt hair becomes the front cover face of Dread’s conventional Blu-ray with a disc pressed with more fascination of a coiled hangman’s noose working down the center ring. There are no tangible bonus materials included. The region free release comes not rated and has a runtime of 90 minutes.
Last Rites: “The Hangman” won’t snap the neck of novelty and wanders off the path of the tangent, but does instill a strength of cause, a father-son bond that’s being challenged and motivated when threatened, backdropped by systemic racism.
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