Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with 
it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety-million dollars, 
before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest 
publicist, knows.
  	It is, in the words of Corliss's review in Time, 'an old fashioned, action-horror 
picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the savvy, John 
Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is 
camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes 
as though he's Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark. From beginning to end, 
Gallows is bad noose.'
  	Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is 
going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very plain in a piece about 
the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to 
predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of 
vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next 
forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last 
twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull 
out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a 
lackluster quality to the picture that betrays the cast's indifference to the entire 
project. Performances aren't simply uneven, they seemed designed for entirely different 
movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no 
question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance 
comes from its star, Todd Pickett.
  	People writes that: "Mr. Pickett is plenty old enough to know better. 
Thirty-something-year-olds don't act the way Mr. Pickett acts here: his trademark 'young 
man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,' which was looking stale the 
second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly out-of-place here. 
Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since America first swooned to 
the charms of Mr. Pickett-he's now simply too old to play the twenty-something Vincent. 
Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent's Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any 
credibility. She has an elegant, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line 
with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katherine Hepburn. She's wasted here. Or, 
more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she not in the movie."
  
  	The premiere audience didn't seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible 
gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a little fake) for the 
jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act, when the movie seemed to 
lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting 
space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very little real 
enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the villain's 
planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and Washington DC is 
fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new Gallows, proceeded 
to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless again.
  	About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled a member of the audience got 
up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a look at the 
man's face as he looked back at the screen. It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his 
own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.
  	Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on it and 
trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn't go to the restroom. Instead he asked one of 
the ushers if he could be allowed out of the back of the building. The usher explained 
that the area around the back had no security.
  	"I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me," Todd explained.
  	The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that ran behind the 
screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image on the screen. All he could remember about 
the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable his costume had been.
  	"Here you go," the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the corridor, 
and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient light from the Boulevard.
  	"Thanks," Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. "I'll be back out front by 
the time the credits roll."
  	The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself. Todd took out 
a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of nausea overtook him, so powerful and 
so sudden that it was all he could do not to puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the 
scotches he'd had in the limo as he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni 
pizza, with three cheeses and extra anchovies, he'd had to add ballast. With the first 
heave over (something told him there were more to come) he had the presence of mind to 
look around, and confirm that this nasty little scene was not being spied on, or worse, 
photographed. Luckily, he was alone. All he had for company back here was the detritus of 
premieres past; piles of standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies 
gone by: Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla's eye; the bottom half 
of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of 
his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest 
place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open 
door, he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own voice:
  	"Come on out, you sonofabitch," he was yelling to somebody. By now, if the movie 
had been working, the audience would have been yelling and screaming, wild with 
blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack, nobody was yelling, because nobody 
gave a damn. The movie was dying on its feet.
  	Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of something 
so that he didn't fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of 
Tom Cruise, which toppled backwards and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed 
against a cardboard Mighty Joe Young, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-colored 
dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all toppling back into a 
darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable heap.
  	Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own movie. He 
puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give up. Then he turned his 
back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and stepped away to find a lungful of dean air 
to inhale. The worst was over. He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and 
rather than returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he walked 
along side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess 
himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered. There was a spot of vomit on his shoes, 
but he cleaned it off with his handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his 
tongue and throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short (that was 
the way it was in the movie, and he'd kept the style for public appearances), so he had 
no fear that it was out of place. He probably looked a little pale, but what the hell? 
Pale was in.
  	There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a security 
officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the gate.
  	"Getting out before it gets too crazy?" she said to him. He smiled and nodded. 
"You want an escort to your car?"