Don’t Turn Out the Lights has a comfortable set up that all but guarantees a fun viewing experience. A group of high school friends decide to take a break from college to attend a music festival. Traveling on an RV, the longtime buddies are ready for a weekend of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. A violent encounter finds them lost on a dark road. They soon are fighting against mysterious forces and each other in order to survive.
There is the heavy drug user, the obscenely rich friend, and the girl who is seemingly reluctant to be there. The jock is replaced by a Marine and there is not that one character who bullies the rest, but Don’t Turn Out the Lights is familiar enough that audiences will be able to slip into its story like a comfortable pair of pajamas.
As the trip unfolds, there is an encounter with sexually aggressive truck drivers in a smart city kids versus uneducated country folk scene straight out of the 1980s. This naturally leads to the trip being thrown off course and yet another encounter with some none too bright hayseeds. And therein lies the biggest problem. Don’t Turn Out the Lights pads fun tropes with repetition.
There are a number of scenes that are just conversation. No plot advancement, no character development, just talk. The movie will often come to a full stop in these moments as the characters just chat about school, money, and who they would sleep with. This leads to the next big issue with film.
You can count on at least one annoying character with this type of set up. Even two would be bearable. Don’t Turn Out the Lights decides to go all in and place every person the audience is going to spend almost the next two hours with in a competition to see who is the most obnoxious. This leads to some of the loudest exchanges this side of Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Just without any of the charm.
It is a symptom of the bad writing. Along with pointless conversation, Don’t Turn Out the Lights is filled with poor decisions and just outright dumb moments. Leaving safety and heading into dangerous woods is to be expected in horror, but multiple times? By far, the worst scene involves a character who has literally been unconscious for around an hour. When he awakens, he suddenly announces he is a student at M.I.T. Plus, he is studying the one thing that can get them out of their predicament! YAY!
(This happy moment takes an abrupt turn when he decides this would also be a great time to announce his father recently passed away.)
Don’t Turn Out the Lights could have been a perfectly acceptable horror movie, but makes some poor choices that turn it into a groan inducing watch. There are no likable characters, little tension, and an ending that is way more confusing than necessary.
Don’t Turn Out the Lights comes to VOD September 6.
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