The latest mish-mosh of films from my streaming watchlists had its moments, but only one truly satisfied me.
DON’T TURN OUT THE LIGHTS (2024)
This is a pretty good if familiar setup that suffers from a few issues. First, the 110-minute runtime kills the pacing. 20 minutes less would have made all the difference. But even worse, the seemingly supernatural threat is never revealed.
A group of young people heads for a music festival in an RV. They get into a fight with rednecks during a pit stop, and considering about half of the kids are Black, I wasn’t buying that they would ever be dumb enough to drive through redneck territory. They even repeat the same damn mistake by going into a redneck bar to ask for directions. Sigh.
Eventually, their RV gets stuck in the middle of nowhere at night, and the horror begins. And by that I mean an endless cycle of one character leaving the RV, getting dragged away by some unseen force, and then the survivors in the RV sitting around trying to hash out what could possibly be going on.
Whatever it is, it’s causing them to have delusions, which leads to them seeing one another as a threat. You’ve seen it all before, only done quicker. And with a better title that makes more sense with the film. Don’t Turn Out the Lights feels like some very lazy creativity in this case.
BEYOND THE CHAMBER OF TERROR (2021)
I should have taken it as a warning sign when one of the first words spoken in this movie was macabre…and the actor pronounced it as mu-kah-bruh. Yet, I forged ahead.
The general plot—I think—is about a mob family that has a secret location where they dispose of bodies. Another sign…the hubby and I both thought their mu-kah-bruh hideout was supposed to be a haunted attraction at first.
They abduct one of their vigilante workers because he went rogue. Beyond that, I had no idea what was going on. I’m getting exhausted from watching all these indie horror movies lately that have nonsensical scripts.
What positives are there? It’s a horror comedy and there are some very minor funny lines. There’s a load of ooey gooey, practical effect head explosions. And there are some creepy creatures. I just don’t know if they’re zombies, possessed humans, or a mix of both.
I also don’t know why there are monsters, because the movie does little to explain it all. And I don’t know why the filmmakers didn’t focus more on monster chaos rather than loads of unnecessary conversation between characters.
THE EXORCISTS (2023)
The Exorcist meets Night of the Demons, and it makes for simple, silly, midnight movie possession fun. Doug Bradley of Pinhead fame as one of the priests is purely stunt casting—it could have been anyone in the role, and his presence adds nothing special to the plot of people running around a mortuary possessing each other with the touch of a hand.
So this small “exorcism” team comes to a mortuary to deal with a stubbornly possessed girl that is being held there. We get plenty of the usual girl with demon eyes strapped down to a bed, and the exorcism team sitting around talking about whether or not it’s really a possession case, but the real fun begins when a group of kids sneaks into the mortuary because one of them wants to prove that the dead can be brought back to life. The two plots barely collide, which is odd…and interesting.
Cue the infection spreading, with Deadite types creeping through the mortuary possessing everyone. Totally my kind of demonic thrills, with some unintentionally funny moments and even some plot twists. The only gripe I have is that the production is a little too “clean”, so it lacks the gritty atmosphere and hardcore horror elements of movies like Evil Dead and Demons. Even so, this one is available on DVD, and I’m totally going to add it to my collection.
