The Lights

I stumbled onto a bunch of indie horror films while at work. We have this tiny shelf on the middle of the floor and they usually contain animated films for toddlers…or Jessica Simpson CDs. So you can imagine my surprise the other day when I noticed a copy of Rob Zombie’s Halloween on the shelf. This drew my attention to that area and upon further investigation, I found two horror DVDs. Each DVD is a deluxe edition and contains four different films on one DVD. One for zombie films, and the other had more slasher or psychological films. The Lights was the first new edition to my movie collection that I watched. Sadly, I was very disappointed. It can only get better from here, right? No wonder all four films only cost me $4.99 plus tax. Uughhh… Here we go…

The Lights follows four friends who head out to a wooded, mountainous area to observe a meteor shower. On the way to their destination, they stop at a convenient store only to be warned by a creepy clerk about a murderer who is rumored to inhabit those parts. Of course they don’t listen and a series of events send them right into the grips of a serial killer. Yeah, The Lights sounds like a million other indie horror films out there. Minus points for unoriginality! I thought maybe the meteor shower would cause some sort of twist at some point in the movie, but alas they’re just random flashes of light that illuminate the whole character despite being tens of thousands of feet away. At least they were pretty colors? (I’m reaching for positive things to say here.)

There was a big, blaring heads up right at the beginning of the movie that should have tipped me off that The Lights was substandard. There was a cheerleading team and none of them had large breasts. I don’t want to sound stereotypical, especially because I know women athletes are usually smaller there, but how do you NOT have big breasted cheerleaders in a horror film? Another point that should have tipped me off was the below average acting. I don’t know if I should call it “acting” so much as it was “reading.” I’ve seen staplers with more acting ability than half of the cast in The Lights. If your plot is unoriginal, you have no special effects, and nothing else of interest to your film – then it helps to rely on the ability of the actors to sell the story. Remember that, filmmakers, for the future.

The whole film is pretty much just not set in reality. Like how someone wants an autographed baseball from one of the pitchers on a HIGH SCHOOL team. Really? On their way to the meteor shower the teenagers stop to run through a field filled with ponies. Really? Yes, really. One of the characters is even genuinely afraid of The Birds. Really? All of the scores during these scenes don’t fit either. They’re almost a strange mix of elevator music and scores you would hear in Lifetime Movies when “Becky” is telling you about her day at school. And the sound effects are just as bad. At one point someone gets kicked in the nuts and it sounds like someone breaking a 2×4. Gives a new meaning to the slang “wood.”

I could really just go on and on about how bad this film was. I even have several more notes about The Lights, but none of them are positive. Listen, it was a good try at the genre… just a TRY. Because nothing worked. Great use of different camera angles and lighting, though, but that just makes The Lights seem like a student film gone terribly wrong. Avoid, avoid, avoid…