An ill-fated bid for Finnish horror-metal band Lordi (who won the Eurovision Song Contest a couple of years back) to break into big-screen horror with a movie featuring all the band members as monsters and partly conceived by the lead singer, here credited amusingly as “Mr Lordi”. Lordi’s music is engaging in a camp, exuberantly silly kind of way, but this movie is just dispiritingly useless.

   It’s set in an unusually empty hospital during a big Gothic storm. An anguished father desperate to help his sickly, autistic daughter, is making a bid to take her out of the hospital, but his getaway is hampered when everything breaks down. Electronic devices go haywire, the building becomes completely separated from the outside world and a band of demonic creatures show up. The ailing child holds the key to defeating them, as helpfully explained by ranting, Basil Exposition-style old-timer Ronald Pickup.

   DARK FLOORS is killed stone dead early on by unrelentingly corny, clichéd dialogue that fits the mundane nature of the flick as a whole. Characters speak lines seemingly cribbed straight from the pages of The Big Book Of Hackneyed Horror Movie Dialogue. Stand by for such old chestnuts as : “Someone’s tearing people’s eyes out and you want me to calm down?!”, “It’s almost too quiet” and, a personal favorite, “This isn’t happening!”.

   A handful of minor American actors (Noah Huntley, William Hope) have been drafted in to help the movie’s international fate but someone forgot to develop anything resembling a bonafide, sympathetic character. Unless Doomed Black Security Guard serves as legitimate characterization these days.

   Weirdly given Lordi’s consciously over the top stage persona, the movie plays it safe and blandly relies on silly CG ghosts smashing through windows like something out of THE HAUNTED MANSION. Most of the deaths are off-screen, and the film - lacking in gore save for an overly dry heart ripping - takes the form of a routine, unscary ghost train ride, albeit one lacking atmosphere, scares and narrative drive.

   Worse still, it gets weighed down by a most unwelcome dose of sentimentality : the closest the pic gets to a dramatic climax is a moment in which the angelic little girl goes face to face with a Lordi monster…and gives it a good, bratty telling off. Pass the vomit bucket, Eugene!