This Is How You Feel After Watching A Dissapointing Horror Movie

I was duped. Big time. I thought I did enough homework to refrain myself from falling in such treachery. Lesson number one: Good horror movies are hard to find nowadays. Lesson number two: Just because reviews said that a movie is worth watching doesn’t mean that that movie IS really worth watching.

This applies to Dark Floors.

Unimpressive setup, loose plots, underdeveloped characters, unexplained scenes; you name the thrash, you’ll get them in here. This movie can make you ask yourself WHY or even say WHAT THE HELL again and again as you leave the cinema. This is also the type of movie that forces the audience to be reluctantly creative. We have no choice but to create our own assumptions and conclusions just to make sense of the whole storyline. I have nothing against this trend, honestly. Read Stephen King and you’ll get what I mean. (yes I do read Stephen King in case you're wondering)

However, leaving the plots hanging and not giving enough reasons for the audience to grasp the idea of the story did make the movie weak and bleak. Is the movie that bad? Not entirely. There are some pretty awesome ideas in the movie which could’ve been developed better. I love the idea of parallel worlds, always. I think the idea of people trapped in a mysterious world with distorted time lapse is supercool and original. It's quite dissapointing that these ideas didn't grow in this movie.

[spoiler: If you want to watch the movie (which I suggest: don’t bother), do stop reading NOW]

Anyway, let’s talk about the story. A father took a desperate measure to check his autistic daughter (Sarah) out of a hospital after he’d had enough watching her being treated like a lab rat there. While escaping, he came a across a very cute nurse who revealed him secrets about this new medication prescribed to Sarah which happenned be the type that the father never made known of such usage. She told him that it’s very unwise of him to remove Sarah from the institution at the time being. They talked and walked into the lift along with another three unsuspected to-be-victims.

The lift was moving from seventh floor downwards when the brief power trip occurred. I especially love Tobias’s line in this particular scene – ‘Not six not seven, not hell and not heaven’. By the way, Tobias is a character that seemed to know a lot about what’s happening but sadly being ignored by everybody because he looks stupid. When the door lift opened at 6^th floor, it was as if they were being transported into another dimension of the same world. It was still the same hospital but somehow different. There were no people, no movement, no sound, no mobile reception, no TV, no radio. Even the time stood still.

Oh, did I mention about the Sarah’s fetish? She likes red crayon. I mean, she loves to draw pictures, doodles or anything on paper using red crayons. Unfortunately for her, she has to use black crayons throughout the movie cause the red ones were all already out (useless fact, I know). All the time in the movie, she would wildly sketch something on her drawing papers. Everybody didn’t pay attention to Sarah’s pictures except for Tobias and the audience. Sarah has the gift to see what’s going to happen to them in the hospital then she would draw her premonitions on paper. She’d draw their deaths and the monsters but funny enough, never the escape route.

After stumbling into monsters, fleeing from the unknown fears floor to floor and having endless panics, they accidentally came across a portable micro-cassette voice recorder with a message on how to end up the mess in it. It said ‘Give up the girl, give up the girl’, which obviously the girl means Sarah. Apparently, Sarah is the key to the disaster and the monsters want her (I don’t understand why the monsters prefer an autistic child to an extremely cute nurse). The father was torn for he didn’t want to give up Sarah and didn’t want himself (and the cute nurse) to be dead either. The crew grew smaller and smaller due to series of ill-fated encounters with the monsters.

Talking about monsters, there were five of them in the movie and I name them each as The Sandman (there's sandstorm every time he appears), The Ox (he sounds & looks like one, complete with ox’s nose ring!), The Lift Monster (he hunts his preys in lift pits only), The Scream Queen (she screams, very very loud) and The Leader (not the coolest baddie for me). The monsters attacked and killed them one by one. There were also a bunch of zombies towards the end of the movie. The zombies killed the nurse eventually (shucks). The father was murdered by The Leader. Sarah survived and told The Leader that ‘the light and the dark cannot be together’. The Leader got angry, Sarah was unhappy and suddenly the movie restarted again. Same scenes and same people, all the way back to the second the father chatted with the nurse at the lift lobby. This time however, they showed only few important scenes before the victims got into the lift with the movie’s soundtrack playing at the background. Oh yeah, this time around Sarah likes BLUE crayon instead. End of movie.

[spoiler ends]

So what did I get from the movie?

1. Entertained by a group of young boys which laughed out loud with no reservation every time some weird things appeared on the movie.

2. Watched a bunch of monsters which actually looked like a bunch rock band members wearing latex gory masks that didn’t look scary at all. I know by fact that the monsters were played by Lordi band members (a famous Finnish rock band). But please. I know how bad you guys may want to maintain the same monster concept you have in your band. But do hire a good gory make-up artiste the next time you make another horror movie. Latex masks may work on Halloweens but certainly not in horror movies. It’s pretty horrifying to see bunch of guys pretending to be scary monsters running in and out in the movie. Seriously, drop it. You guys could’ve been scarier if you guys acted as a bunch of psycho killers in latex masks.

3. Cursed those who wrote that some of the scenes and the setup in this movie are comparable to Silent Hill. No. Not even close. Never ever will Dark Floors come close to Silent Hill.

4. Cursed those who wrote about the monsters being original and cool. WHAT THE HELL. Look at the pictures below and see if you get what I mean.


How can The Scream Queen and the Ox (pictures above) ever compared to the distorted bound Colin (yes his name is COLIN) and my all-time favorite villain The Pyramid Head (picture below)?








The zombies in Dark Floors (pictures above) can never match these awfully scary (and err, sexy) zombie-nurses in Silent Hill (picture below).



5. Didn’t get the reason of why the things happened in the movie

6. Didn’t understand why the monsters want to be with Sarah.

7. Didn’t understand why Tobias knows so much about Sarah and the monsters.

8. Felt that the story does have plenty of nice original ideas but somehow was not properly developed and refined.

9. Felt that the characters should've been developed more so at least the audience can relate to them every time each one dies. Example, I like to watch the nurse but I didn’t actually feel sorry when she’s dead. I didn’t feel sad when the daddy’s dead too. There’s this one annoying character however, let me call him Mr. Know-it-all (cause I forgot his name), which was developed pretty well. I couldn’t stand his behavior, his words, his face, his everything. I felt happy when he’s dead. That’s the type of connection a movie supposed to create. It only worked with Mr. Know-it-all, but the others? Nothing.

10. Confused. I wonder if all that happened in the movie ACTUALLY ever happened. Was it all just a premonition? Some imagination of an autistic kid perhaps? Or did those people really trapped in some kind of hell which repeats all its horifying events to eternity? I seriously do not know. Hmmm..