De Lift

Some months back in looking through Wikipedia's obituaries page, I saw a name for some Dutch actor among whose films listed on the obituaries page was something called De Lift. I had obviously never heard of the movie before, but clicked for the synopsis and found a movie that sounded like it might be a fun low-budget horror movie. After moving and gettnig reliable high-speed internet to watch all those streaming services, I saw that one of them had De Lift, so I searched it out and watched it.

Now, the first thing I need to point out is that the print in question was dubbed, not subtitled, and some of the voices sounded a bit off in terms of not displaying the right emotional timbre. So if that's an issue for you, I apologize. Anyhow, as for the movie itself, it opens up in a high-rise building, presumably in Amsterdam, where a party of four is finishing up a late-evening dinner in the swanky penthouse restaurant. They take the titular elevator down to the ground floor to go home, and.... a bolt of lightning hits the building while they're in the elevator. This presumably causes the elevator to go haywire, as it stops and the lights go off. The four people can't get the emergency phone to work, and worse, the ventilation system fails, leving the cabin stiflingly hot. Eventually building staff is able to get the power back and get the elevator to the ground floor just in time to save the four passengers.

Understandably, the building management is distressed, and call up Deta Liften, the company that installed the bank of elevators. These are relatively new elevators, and are supposed to be state-of-the-art, with the latest in microchip technology. Deta send their technician who has been responsible for maintenance on this particular set of elevators, Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel). Felix investigates, and can't really find anything wrong at first. But there's obviously something still wrong with the elevator, as is suffers a set of increasingly macabre malfunctions, such as a blind man falling down the shaft, or another man getting decapitated. We being the viewers of the horror movie immediately think that perhaps the elevator might be developing a consciousness or some such, but of course the people actually in the movie wouldn't know this.

Having heard about the strange goings-on is Mieke, a reporter for one of those tabloid-style magazines for which a scandal like this would be a big thing. She pumps Felix for information, and the two begin to investigate together, to the detriment of Felix's wife in a not quite necessary subplot involving her thinking he might be unfaithful. Felix begins to wonder whether there's a cover-up going on when he discovers that the elevator's service record is missing, before being reassigned from maintenance on this particular elevator. Maike, meanwhile, sneaks in on Felix's interview with the head of the company that supplied the chips, since she had a college professor who knows a few things about computer science.

Now, I should point out that De Lift was released in 1983. Although there were already home computers by this time, microprocessor technology was still primitive enough that some of the theorizing that goes on is forgivable. That portion of the movie may seem ridiculous 40 years on, but at the same time it's not that hard to suspend disbelief here.

De Lift isn't the world's greatest movie, but when it comes to low-budget horror, it's entertaining enough. There's a bit of gore albeit not nearly as much as slasher movies, and just enough dark humor to keep things life. It's the sort of movie that is definitely worth watching if you want something you probably haven't seen before and want to be entertained with a bunch of friends. Hollywood would remake the movie in 2001; that remake goes under two different titles, Down and The Shaft. (I haven't seen the remake.)