"Dark Floors" DVD

Whoever came up with this concept has just filled me with a seething white-hot rage.

Anyway, that aside, the reason I'm seething with rage is a little movie called "Dark Floors", which I later learned was subtitled "The Lordi Motion Picture". Now, at first, when I saw "Lordi" it sounded kind of Italian, like maybe one of Argento or Fulci's lesser-known cronies got back into the game. And the plot synopsis sure read like a possibility. Even watching the movie for the first hour or so looked like a great plan!

But then I saw the last twenty minutes and the whole thing just buckled like someone put a cinderblock on top of a house of cards.

Basically, the plot of "Dark Floors" is "half a dozen people run around a hospital facing down random monsters that do stuff and then people get killed off one at a time until finally parts of the movie you saw earlier run again for no stated reason."

Seriously--I was actually ENJOYING it. I had this great thing all worked out about how cool it was that the movie was mostly brightly lit, and how you don't see that kind of thing much, and how the movie was actually kinda scary because it was so seemingly RANDOM and then...and then the last twenty minutes came up and I was screaming, baffled, at my TV: "I DARE you to make less sense!"

This was bad enough, frankly, to make me shuffle to my computer to write up a review of two whole stars. And I was going to be SAD about it too, because up until the last twenty minutes or so, Dark Floors was actually pretty sweet.

Then I found out what "Lordi" was.

And that's when the whole "rage" thing got started.

Because you see, what these misbegotten sons out of wedlock put together was, basically, a giant vanity piece. See, what I didn't know--and likely what most of you didn't either--was that Lordi is a FINNISH METAL BAND. In costumes that will prove unsettlingly familiar because they SHOW UP IN THE MOVIE.

I couldn't believe it when I finally put all the pieces together. This is a giant vanity piece for some costumed freak show from Finland. Worse, it's not even the first. There was apparently one earlier called "The Kin", which makes this the SECOND colossal disjointed waste of time these Halloween costume party rejects put together.
The ending, like I said, is so badly disjointed that it brings down the rest of the movie.

The special features include Lordi videos, interviews, a live show, a behind the scenes featurette, and trailers for Saw V, Punisher: War Zone, Dance of the Dead, No Man's Land: Rise of the Reeker, The Substitute, Trackman, Room 205, Last House in the Woods, Brotherhood of Blood, and Dark Floors.

All in all, I hate this movie. The only reason it didn't get a zero is because it was actually pretty good for a while. If you're willing to look past a horribly disjointed ending and the fact that the whole thing is just a giant fluff piece for Finnish metal, you might get some fun out of it. I did...for about an hour.

Dark Floors
*
DVD
Directed by Pete Riski
Written by Pekka Lehtosaari
Starring Skye Bennett, Noah Huntley, Dominique McElligott, Ronald Pickup
Produced by Ingvar Thordarson, Julius Kemp
R
86 mins
2008

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