Don’t Turn Out the Lights

by Christie Robb

When childhood friends reunite for a birthday weekend, they didn’t sign up for this RV road trip of a lifetime—that 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.

He shows up to the party with a potentially fun cast of characters, 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 difficult to muster up the empathy for any one of them to really 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? It seems to be made up of a mish-mash of horror tropes that have absolutely nothing to do with each other all kind of deployed on random timers.

The friends theorize about what’s going on in between convenient “waves” of paranormal attack.  

In the end, there’s just…no payoff.  It’s giving early draft of Cabin in the Woods energy, but on a much lower budget, and with the ending still largely undetermined.

Set up was kinda promising though.