Movie Review: Lights (Bored) Out (Of My Mind)

So, I had to sit on this one for a few days to really understand how I wanted to talk about it.  Last Sunday, I took my nephew Kris to see Lights Out. He was in visiting from Tennessee so what better way to enjoy out time together than with a good scary movie, right? That was the plan anyway. 

So basically, the plot is, a shadow person lady comes to haunt some folks for reasons initially unknown.  What followed was about an hour and 20 minutes of cinema.  One of the only positives I can give it is that it was technically cinema. So let's go down a legit positives and negatives list and see what did and didn't work.

Positives is going to be pretty short, because this movie was, for lack of a better word or words, hot garbage. With that being said, there's always some good with the bad right?  Nothing is all bad.  Not so much in this case. To me, the best part about the movie was the run time. At an hour and 21 minutes, the director had to have known that to bore us and not scare us for any longer would be criminal, so he was nice enough to keep it short.

Now we can move on to the fun part.  The negatives.  First off, it wasn't scary AT ALL.  Jump scare movies are not scary. Being startled briefly and being scared are completely different animals. Imagine going to see a movie where there was no sound except for the slow cranking of a jack in the box.  Every 10-15 minutes it pops out, and then is placed back into the box for the process to repeat.  This is, in a nutshell, how Lights Out and many other newer scary movies play out. If I wanted to be mildly startled every 10-15 minutes, I'd tell that weird guy down the hall who breaks into my apartment every night to watch me sleep to shake me and go booga booga every now and then.

Next, It was boring. 80-90% of the scary moments occur in the trailer, which wasn't that great either, so you sit through the boring parts just to get to the scares, and you already saw them for free on YouTube in 2 minutes. The story was bland and tired. As a self proclaimed horror aficionado, I took this entire experience as a paint by the numbers, slap in the face.

Finally, the acting was just not good.  The little boy that played Martin suffers from the same ailment as most child actors in scary movies, he can't act.  He just wasn't inspired at all. What a shocker that he was also in Annabelle, another steaming pile. The sister, Rebecca, was as wooden as a new deck addition to an old house.  It's as if they cast Kristen Stewart to play a caricature of Kristen Stewart playing a character in a bad scary movie. I've started to put the word scary in italics because using that as a descriptive in this case is a little skewed and hard to comprehend, just like text in italics.

I don't know who watched this movie and rated it so high on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Meta Critic, because it was awful. I would question what made it so special?  It isn't a triumph to make a short, boring, not-scary scary movie. There is nothing revolutionary about it, other than it was a revolutionary waste of $9. My initial thoughts were that the movie was about as scary as watching that YouTube video of the panda scaring itself by sneezing, but I think that takes away the true terror of that video.

This gets a pretty low rating because nothing is redeemable.  Lights Out is a pretty accurate title though, because I did almost fall asleep a few times while viewing. I am so sorry Mr. Movie, but you get a 0.5 shoe boxes from me.  Hang your head in shame and promise to never do it again. Longest hour and 21 minutes of my life.