L'ascensore

What do you get when a new elevator is installed and the evil of Stephen King's Christine? You get...THE LIFT. Dick Maas directed a stylish thriller about an elevator with malicious tones. Try suffocation, a blind man falling down the shaft (nice sound FX for this scene) and the famous decapitation scene. My friend was grossed out after seeing the decapitation scene. Nevertheless, it is up to our hero Felix (Huub Stapel) to find out what is wrong with the lift. After seeing this, I want to check out the 2001 remake DOWN, also directed by Maas with James Marshall in the role of the maintenance man in search of the lift's problems.

An elevator seems to have a mind of its own, and it is deathly. The director builds a solid horror movie on people's fear of elevators. This is clearly a B-horror movie, but as such it is good. There are various truly shocking scenes.

The story line is very simple. The main character is an elevator-repairman and he must repair an elevator that caused an accident. What he finds out is truly bizarre and unbelievable, but scary nonetheless.

One of the best dutch made horror movies (but frankly, I don't know many other dutch horror movies).

A new lift has been installed recently. A few people get stuck in it. A few days later, a blind man falls into the shaft. A guard is beheaded by the same lift. 'What we have here is a killing machine...!'

Director Dick Maas is a big fan of Steven Spielbergs films (same here, but only his earlier movies). 'De Lift', describable as another alternative for the JAWS-formula, makes clear that Dick Maas lacks a lot in comparison to the most successful Hollywood-director.

The movie has a few good scenes which are shocking, but the majority of the movie is surprisingly dull and tedious. As long as the story keeps to the elevator, it's OK. However, there are a lot of scenes about family problems and interminable discussions about elevators. Those do not build up tension, they're just very, very boring and though I am not much of a sadist, I only kept watching because I was anxiously waiting for the next person to be killed by the lift. In a very cruel way of course. One should not watch this movie for the story-line in the first place. The plot doesn't make ANY sense: how would you explain a killer lift? Anyhow, there IS some kind of explanation in the movie, but only kids under 8 years old would believe that nonsense. Under 8, for I watched this movie first when I was 7 years old and I was scared to death. Perhaps I am too old for this movie now..

I agree that the movie does have a lot of flaws, but considering the fact that it is impossible to make high budget movies in Holland (Paul Verhoeve could never have made a movie like Robocop in Holland!) and considering how old the movie is, it's a quite decent movie.

There are enough American movies in English which are far worse.

It seems that Dick Maas' De Lift has become a true horror gem over the years and I even picked up that it's most wanted among cult-collectors. Well, here in the home countries (The Netherlands and Belgium) you can still easily find an old copy in videostores or even on flee-markets, so all you avid fanatics should come pay us a visit! To me, "De Lift" will always remain special because it was one of my very first encounters with the horror genre but even from a more objective viewpoint, I still think it's a very decent film with some genuine scares and an impressively grim atmosphere. The plot is far from brilliant (on the verge of ludicrous, actually) but that's widely made up by some effective shock-sequences and Maas' talent to build up slow suspense. After several people got injured by the newly installed elevator in a fancy building complex, mechanic Felix Adelaar is hired to do a detailed check up. Together with a persistent female reporter, he discovers that the production company has been experimenting with new chips that totally haven't been approved yet. There's a painful use of clichés, the dialogues are poorly written and – granted – there's a little too much talking going on. But, when the characters aren't talking nonsense, there's some pretty unsettling stuff to see! In the scariest sequence of the entire film, the fiendish elevator plays a deadly game with a young girl while the ominous music will make you move to the end of your seat. The footage filmed in the ugly shaft is really chilling and there's some excellent low-budget gore as well, with a nasty decapitation and a vile hanging as the absolute highlights. The biggest criticism I've come about this site is about the awful dubbing but, since I'm Dutch speaking, I luckily didn't suffer from that. "De Lift" was Dick Maas' first long-feature film and he also pleased the Dutch audiences with the happily deranged adventures of the Flodder family before emigrating to Hollywood where he remade his own debut. Even though Maas managed to recruit a great cast for this project (Naomi Watts, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya...), it totally lacks the obscurity and dark cinematography of the original. Give it a look....if you can find it.