Don't Turn Out the Lights

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have never encountered a cast of such untalented and quite frankly terrible actors in all my years of film watching. Not one of these actors is even remotely tolerable to watch; they should stick to flipping burgers at the roadside diner they were recruited from.

The camera work and editing are barely a notch up in talent from the horrendous acting. I would guess this whole mess was some high school film project, but high school film students generally have at least an ounce of talent and creativity.

How this abomination made it off the cutting floor is beyond imagination. Don't rot your mind by watching this disaster.