Monday 8 October 2012

Dark Floors

An Hospital elevator breaks down with 6 people on board (A security guard, a nurse, a self-centred business man, a older male patient, an autistic girl and her father), when it starts working again, the doors open on an abandoned hospital, with no apparent way out. Movements in the shadows and on reflections soon turn out to be more than tricks of the light.

Hospital? Check!
Deteriorating "Alternate" hospital? Check!
Electrical equipment "glitching" before monster attacks? Check!
Monsters of Corporal and Ghostly Nature? Check!
Strange ending that "feels" right, and makes sense of earlier moments but doesn't really explain anything? Check!
Tie-in to existing property? Check

Wait... Did someone make a Silent Hill movie and get it right this time? Sadly not (although Revelation may fix this yet), Nope, the existing property in question is Lordi, the Finnish rock-group who dress like monsters and won Euro-vision back in 2006.

Thankfully, this isn't really "The Lordi Movie" - it's a perfectly good survival horror movie, where the monsters just happen to be played by a band -  They don't even preform, save for the closing theme. (KISS take note, this is the correct way for a gimmick-heavy band to do a movie, "Kiss Meet the Phantom of the Park", is NOT)

The acting is mostly solid enough, and the lighting was pefect; dark enough to obscure when needed, never so dark you felt you were missing anything, and although some of the "monsters" (Particularly lead singer "Mr. Lordi") didn't quite gel, mostly they were handled well enough that they fit the films universe.

The ending will probably be a bit divisive - I didn't mind it (in fact, I quite liked it) but if you like everything to be tied up in a neat little package, you should probably give this a miss; if however you like (otr can at least tolerate  the kind of slightly open to interpretation endings conmen in Japanese films, I can thoroughly recommend this movie!


2 comments:

  1. I like the look of this one. I was sure I had seen it before, even from watching the trailer, but then you mentioned Lordi and completely threw me. I will check this one out at some stage, but the idea of Lordi being the bad guy kind of killed it.

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  2. If you didn't know who Lordi were, you would have no idea that the monsters in the film were anything other than monsters.

    They don't even speak!

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