Lights out

I liked it, but I don’t think it made me even think about keeping the lights on as I sleep.

If you seen the trailer, then you get the tone of the movie. It’s a ghost story about a ghost who can only appear when the lights are off.

The film preys on that fear of the dark too. Very little it’s around the corner, it’s moving objects or it’s making all sorts of noise to frighten you. When the lights are off, the ghost appears, and is there in your face until you find a source of light.

I don’t know if this genre of movie is called a Ghost story, but this movie does have the basic outline of movies such as the Conjuring 2 or Insidious that really focus on what can get human beings jumping out of there seats.

Although, this did not work as well as it should in Lights Out. The ghost was creepy and it’s aggressiveness was disturbing, but they may have showed too much of the ghost this time. It was literally there when ever the lights were off no matter what and after a while, it lost a little bit of it’s haunting and the natural fear it has on it’s prey (Us as the viewers). Plus the visual effect of the ghost was a one trick pony. What you see in the trailer does not evolve from there in the movie.

But where the ghost is weak, the movie makes up for in who it’s haunting. Maria Bello was great in this film as a psychotic mother of two who technically is the one the ghost seems to be bothering the most. I was very convince from out of the park that this woman was driven crazy by this experience. Great acting job.

The two kids in the movie, Rebecca, a rebellious, not easily scared women who moved out cause she got tired of her wacked out mom, and Martian a tween who can’t sleep at night cause of what turned out to be a genuine fear of the dark, made for great satire of the horror genre. When Martian realized that the person his mother would talk to at night was real enough to hurt him, he did not hesitate  to the pack a bag and to go and stay with his sister.

It was bits like that and others where the main characters did not easily fall into the cliche traps of every horror film (especially good and very fresh to portray smart blonde females in a horror movie). In fact the dumb bimbo role actually went to Bret, Rebecca’s plaything desperately trying to get promoted to boyfriend.

So the movie was fresh and amusing and perfect to watch on the big screen or with others ready to be scared, but as it turns out, their attempts to be more smart and less cliche makes for a monster not so good at making you jump out of your seat and spill your popcorn.