I truly am one of the biggest fans of the horror genre, and I usually am at least entertained by even the dumbest B movie, low-budget slasher film, with all its gratuitous violence and dismembered corpses, but if ever there was a cheap product marketing ploy, this is it. The product being the ultra hard rock band Lordi, who makes KISS’s makeup look like face painting at a kid’s party. This group is hard-core rock, with the sci-fi / horror image, being that they all look like they stepped out of some demonic nightmare. Apparently someone had the bright idea to turn this band’s image into a full length horror film, but what they actually got was something that resembles a long version of one of their theatrical music videos, but making much less sense. I have seen a few of their music videos, and they are actually pretty good and entertaining and the music, I am surprised to say, is quite good, but I have no idea what they were thinking with this film. It felt like it really wanted to be something good, but it just fell flat because at the end of it all, it just made no sense whatsoever, and I was left in practically the same place as when the movie started, only a lot more frustrated because several times throughout the movie, I thought I understood and was beginning to get it, but then the movie continues and I realized that I didn’t. Then, the movie finally ended and the fist words out of my mouth were, “Huh?” I’ve never been so confused or dissatisfied with a movie, and I kept thinking of the movie for days after, trying to figure it out, but now it dawns on me that this “film” effort was nothing more that a sophisticated, artful way to plug their band and exploit their image to try and make a buck. If anyone did understand this movie, and can tell me what the heck it was all for, please fill me in. My brain would be eternally grateful.
The whole movie centers around this sick little girl, I think they were trying to imply autism, but they are never really specific, but she is very repetitive, withdrawn, and disconnected with reality. She carries around this sketch pad with crayon, and there are contact views of this pad with creepy and scary creatures and events that she supposedly sketched, and the father gets frustrated with his and the hospitals powerlessness to make the child any better. After a particularly frightening reaction in the hospital’s cat scan, the father decides to remove her, and in doing so the become trapped in an elevator with a few other people. When they finally get out, the scene that greats them is both horrific and unexplainable. First they are witness, to the hospital’s complete desertion, but as the film drags along they come in contact with everything from mutilated bodies to zombies, but of course the main evil they meat, the “main monsters” of this film are non other than out features rockers, the band “Lordi” in full makeup and terrifying the surviving group. Pity is that’s where the movie stops making sense. Why the monsters are there, or how they relate to the sick girl is never established or clarified, but the scenes they create inside the hospital are surprisingly creepy and dark, and the cast of unknowns did surprisingly well with what they had. It would have worked, had the film had any kind of sequential and clear cut storyline and/or script. Please save yourself the brain cells and skip this one, but do listen to and watch their music videos, they are actually much better than the film, no comparison.
Movie Review By Helen
Release Date: October 14, 2008