Don't Turn Out the Lights

A group of obnoxious absolute idiots set out on a road trip in which nothing interesting happens for the first hour. A gaggle of bad actors pretending to be college students screech inauthentic pablum at each other, run afoul of some cartoon hillbillies, and generally make the stupidest possible decisions in any given situation. The characters are college students as college students would be envisaged and written by a 50-year-virgin who had gone to college but who never once interacted socially with anyone. Anyway, some ridiculous and not-at-all-scary shenanigans happen and yada, yada, yada I just kept hoping every character would die already so this steaming puddle of loose donkey excrement would finally end.

This could have been so much better. It's your typical group of friends on a trip storyline but the premise and what happens to them, had it been handled properly, could have created a genuinely creepy story.

Unfortunately the cast of characters are such a loud, brash, dumb and unlikeable bunch of stereotypes that you just don't care what happens to them.

As for the amount of screaming and shouting, it was incessant. 80% of the film sounded like white noise because of it. Someone dragging their nails down a blackboard would have been more pleasant. As each person was, predictably, picked off it was a relief because there was one less unlikeable person screaming.

I wasn't expecting much when I decided to watch this movie: just wanted a watchable standard horror. The movie starts off typical for a horror movie. A group of friends get together to attend some festival, they get lost, and then strange events occur when they're unexplainably stranded in the middle of nowhere . The concept seemed fine at first, so I figured I'd be in for at least a decent 90 mins

The movie is unwatchable though. The acting from everyone is awful and cringy. And the characters are not likable. Their jokes (eg the "Screw Marry Kill" game) and behavior (eg drugs) make them appear more annoying than charming. The only likable character is the ex-Marine, who unfortunately doesn't stay long. Instead, we get stuck with the girls who keep screaming and arguing like divas to the point where I, as a viewer, couldn't get behind them and root for them. When strange events start happening, the ladies go on and on about "hey, maybe this is all a prank" to the point where I wondered why they would make our protagonists so dumb.

School friends reunite for a birthday outing to a music festival. One of them brings his new roommate who is a Marine. They are driving an RV. They get harassed by a couple of trucker creeps who push them onto a side road. They get lost and then stopped in the middle of nowhere.

I like the start. I like adding a newcomer to this annoying group. That has potential to stir things up. The two trucker creeps are standard. It's a nice way to strand the group in the middle of nowhere and the countdown to festival forces them to keep going. For a low-budget horror, it's fine.

When the RV stops, the movie starts on a long descent. The story just throws a lot of non-sense horror tropes at this thing. Some of it is at cross-purposes. None of this is particularly interesting. It is just one victim after another. The movie is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at this plot. It gets tiresome.

How can cliche be so cliche?

Don't Turn Out The Lights is a masterclass in inept writing, directing and acting.

None of the characters get the audiences sympathy. The entire cast is idiotic and do all the cliche wrong moves.

All the wrong aspects from past horror films come out front and center.

Zero payoff for the torture watching this garbage. It has too many jump scares and not enough actual scares.

Do studios actually watch the movie before it's released? Seriously, a movie that does everything absolutely wrong?

The budget didn't go for editing, CGI, practical or acting itself. Audiences deserve their money back for this tripe.