L'ascenseur

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.

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.

A superb Dutch film, with truly suspenseful moments! Nothing is quite so sinister as stretches of silence in movies, especially when they accompany Hitchcockian (which is to say here, predictable) suspense sequences. From the moment you read the synopsis, and figure that a film about bewitched microchips cannot expect to be taken seriously, you'd be forgiven for laughing at yourself for even contemplating seeing the film. However, If you're like me, and you consider that music, background noise, post-production, lipsynching, subliminal messaging goes too far in films, rendering terrible scenes risibly hyperactive, then you'll get off on the real-time sparsity of effects used here. Each delay to the denouement, agonisingly adds to the deathtoll. Is this going to change the world? Would a suspiciously murderous lift, in the real world? Tell the director, I'd like to see more.

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.

In a high rise office building in the Netherlands, an elevator repairman named Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel) is busy trying to solve a mystery. The elevators in this place are now functioning improperly, incapacitating passengers if not killing them outright. Could the cause be some sort of human error, or is something supernatural going on? Felix works the clues in the company of an aggressive, sassy reporter, Mieke de Beer (Willeke van Ammelrooy).

Writer & director Dick Maas ("Amsterdamned") deserves some credit for treating his premise with some measure of restraint. Therefore, it won't be to all tastes. It admittedly comes up a little short in the thrills department, with a slow pace and a talky script. Yet, there are fun moments, such as when an unfortunate security guard is decapitated by an elevator. Also, Stapel is an appealing working-class, Everyman sort of hero, and he has some chemistry with the striking van Ammelrooy. They receive able support from players such as Josine van Dalsum (as Felix's wife), Siem Vroom (as a police inspector), and Hans Veerman (as the boss at "Rising Sun", the electronics company working in tandem with Felix's employers).

The script does possess some passing interest for the way that it touches upon the subject of technological evolution (with computers that used to fill up entire rooms now becoming much more compact, and the advent of computer chips).

"The Lift" is a little light on gore and other exploitable elements, but overall it's fairly entertaining to watch. Maas does pretty well working with the limited budget, and IS expert at crafting suspense, especially the eerie and atmospheric finale with Felix in an elevator shaft. The electronic score (composed by Maas) is likewise a highlight.

One of the set decorators is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., who 28 years later, directed the prequel to John Carpenters' "The Thing".

Seven out of 10.