Don’t Turn Out the Lights, A Horror Movie Review by Christie Robb
When childhood friends reunite for a birthday weekend, they don’t sign up for this RV road trip of a lifetime, which ends up cutting several short.
Writer/director Andy Fickman (Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2) has a few decent jump scares up his directorial sleeve with Don’t Turn Out the Lights, an early spooky season horror flick that sets a chilling tone for the upcoming Halloween season.
He shows up to the party with a potentially fun cast of characters, including a diverse group of friends with unique personalities, cool sound effects, and a well-used fog machine. But…that’s about it.
The characters are thin and underwritten. It’s established that these people are all deeply connected (except for one critically underused plus one, a roommate of the core group played by John Bucy). I expected secrets and interesting group dynamics to play into the horror movie set pieces.
Instead, we get stock characters: Instagram Girl, Jock, Stoner, Rich Bitch, Pick Me, Boyfriend, Rapey Racists…
With such thin characters, it’s challenging to muster up empathy for any of them to care much about their fate. Which would have been fine if the Big Bad had been compelling.
But it’s not really clear what’s causing all the carnage. Is it an external force or something driving the friends into crazed self-harm/psychopathy? This mystery seems to be made up of a mish-mash of horror tropes that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And all kinds of deployed on random timers.
The friends theorize about what’s going on in between convenient “waves” of paranormal attacks.
In the end, there’s…no payoff. It’s giving an early draft of Cabin in the Woods energy, a reference to the popular horror-comedy film known for its unique take on the horror genre. But on a much lower budget, and with the ending still largely undetermined.
The setup of Don’t Turn Out the Lights was quite promising though.
