Don't Turn Out the Lights

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.

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.

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.

Don't Turn Out the Lights, directed by Andy Fickman, takes what could have been a decently creepy premise-a group of friends trapped in a RV stuck in some haunted woods where the ghosts only appear in darkness-and somehow manages to make you root for the ghosts to win. Why? Because the characters are so insufferable, you're practically begging for them to get picked off.

Let's start with the ensemble cast of what can only be described as the most obnoxious caricatures of human beings imaginable. There are so many scenes where their behavior doesn't make any sense, filled with long, boring, and tone def conversations when they should be fighting for their lives. Seriously, you've just lost a bunch of your friends to an unseen malevolent and violent force, time for some giggles and sharing your thoughts? Why are you suddenly so calm and relaxed immediately after being terrorized? It makes no sense.

It's as if the writers have forgotten what makes a character likable. The whole crew is soooo dumb, and generally being unbearable that any emotional connection to them is impossible. Remember when horror movies used to have characters you actually cared about? Now, it's like the scriptwriters actively want us to hate everyone. At least that way, we don't feel bad when they inevitably meet their gory demise.

And let's talk about how nobody in this movie has any self-preservation instinct whatsoever. They spend a solid 30 minutes of screen time making the worst decisions imaginable. Don't go into the basement? Guess where they're going. Don't split up? Of course they split up. The ghosts don't even need to try-they're practically begging to be haunted.

Would I recommend this; No, Don't Turn Out the Lights is a masterclass in how to make your audience want to flip the switch off on the entire cast. It's like Hollywood forgot how to write characters you can root for, and instead gave us a group of people we'd rather see disappear into the dark.

Much like everybody else bashing this movie, I will too. All for the same reason. Horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE acting.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if I never see any of these actors in any other movies.

The most annoying characters I've ever seen in a movie.

And overly long sections of nonstop screaming. That got old really fast, and kept on going and going throughout the movie. Yes, it's a horror, but still. They were all screaming from the beginning of the movie before anything happened.

I spent the whole movie hoping they'd all get killed off just so they'd shut up.

The movie should have been titled "Please Turn Off the Screaming".