Dark Floors

It's been raining here quite a bit (during today's Art o' Whirl, I believe we were within 10 miles of a tornado), so I've been doing my bicycling inside on the trainer.  That means 70-80 minutes of Netflix which, despite the joys of being able to stream, means finding something worth watching.  Sometimes, a difficult proposition.  Netflix recommended a horror movie to me the other day, Dark Floors, so I thought I'd pedal with it.

What I didn't realize, was that Dark Floors is built around a Finnish metal band, Lordi.  When I think of Scandinavia heavy metal, I think death metal (the extreme metal article on Wikipedia is more descriptive).  What I don't think about is glam rock.  And if you draw the lines.  Glam rock.  Finnish.  Movie.  You get an idea about  how bad we're talking.  Sort of like if Kiss made a horror movie.  Wait...they did.  Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. But they were supposed to be the good guys, not the monsters.


I'd like to a share a bit of their music so you can get a feeling for how creepy the movie wasn't. This is the theme song to Dark Floors. Beast Loose in Paradise. If you can get as far as the chorus, and you're like me, you'll wonder why it sounds like something out of Footloose.


So I looked up some of their other videos. Here the scary band member, Mr. Lordi, terrorizes cheerleaders. Hardrock Hallelujah seems to be taking the Michael Jackson Thriller path, but with an Asian, because there are only about 2 neekeri (that's the derogatory term I learned in class at school. We were told we should frown at people who said it and use "tummaihoinen" instead) in all of Finland. Fun fact, there was a mini explosion of dual-raced people in Finland after they hosted the Olympics in '52, at least according to my Finnish teacher.

And here is Lordi in a song about loving a Monsterman. You know it's super scary because they're terrorizing a little girl who turns out to be a monster herself! That's new...


Apparently Lordi had a Renaissance after playing on Eurovision. Their performance must have been spectacular because they had the best scores ever until Alexander Rybak (no relation to Mayor R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis that I can discern) came along with his song Fairytale. So Lordi...as scary as they are supposed to be in their movie...scares Europeans less than Alexander Rybak's eyebrows.