Robot Revolution: The one that's the killer elevator movie

 

 

Title: De Lift aka The Lift

What Year?: 1983

Classification: Improbable Experiment

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m continuing my survey of robot movies and particularly the unconventional edges of the subgenre. I decided representation was in order for movies that deal with robotics and AI without what could be considered an actual robot. That brought up its own field for consideration, particularly on the “evil computer” vein, including one mentioned in my correspondences. I wasn’t prepared to cover the ones that came up, but it set off a line of thinking that brought me back to a movie I have wanted to do for a very long time, one which is indeed legendary in the select circles I come in contact with. I present De Lift, the actual movie about an actual killer elevator, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the last time I thought about it was for my "bad" movie feature.

Our story begins with a shot of the inside of an elevator shaft that is clearly intended to be ominous, and in fairness succeeds. We then cut to four 1980s Eurotrash specimens who are trapped in an elevator that nearly roasts them before the staff extract them. We then meet our protagonist, a mechanic whose seemingly happy marriage won’t have that much to do with the plot. Naturally, he is sent to investigate what went wrong with the three elevators in an office building. He becomes a witness to a series of close calls, mishaps and finally gruesome deaths, usually though not always involving the center elevator. With help from a possibly flirty lady journalist, he uncovers a contractor involved in developing artificial intelligence that an unhelpful expert declares may become self-aware. When his superiors try to take him off the case and his wife walks out, he forges ahead to uncover the truth: The elevators are under the control of a seemingly half-organic computer ready to defend itself! But will this take a back seat to whether his marriage recovers???

De Lift was a 1983 Dutch horror film written and directed by Dick Maas, a filmmaker previously known for short films and music videos. The film starred Huub Stapel as Felix the repairman, with Willeke Van Amelrooy as the lady reporter. Special effects for the film were credited to Leo Cahn and Rene Stouthamer, the latter of whom had worked with Maas on a 1981 film titled Rigor Mortis. The film was released in 1983 in the Netherlands and the United States. Contemporary and later reviews were mixed to favorable. The film went on to “cult” status for its unusual concepts and cinematography. Maas continued to make both music videos and feature films. In 2001, he directed an English-language remake titled Down. The film was released on home video under the title The Shaft, after a limited US release.

For my experiences, this stands out as a movie that even I was not quite aware of it as such until I finally watched it. I am sure I heard of it a long, long time ago, but there were always things that obscured the trail. One of them was certainly the remake, sufficiently that there are still places I am sure I read about one or the other but not which. But that did not throw me off as much as the simple fact that there are a lot of horror, science fiction and “mainstream” movies that feature deadly elevators (including in promotional materials) without making it a central antagonist. (See, if anything, Dark Star.) In further hindsight, this makes it a puzzle and paradox that easily eclipses the movie itself. Did the movie draw on an existing trope, which certainly existed before? Or was it at least a popularizing influence on other films?  What brought me to it here is that it represents the egregious apex of an unusual variation on a decentralized, non-anthropomorphic AI, and as such is better than might be expected.

Moving forward, the comparison I have never been able to avoid is with Death Bed (see my “worst” list), I suppose the main reason I considered it previously for No Good Very Bad Movies. The counterintuitive part is that there are levels on which comparison does not weigh entirely in the present film’s favor.  Yes, it is comparatively pleasant to watch a film that has both conventional narrative, characters and dialogue and production values consistent with people who knew what they were doing. However, Death Bed’s shear audacity and “does this actually count as a movie???” vibe gave it certain redeeming or at least intriguing qualities that are definitely not replicated here. It doesn’t help that what we get instead is pretty much a cross between a 1970s “haunted house” movie (see, dear Logos, House) and an ‘80s slasher, albeit above average. The most interesting thing is that the melodramatic padding succeeds in making the protagonist sympathetic (which might be even more pronounced if genders were swapped with his partner), without supplying a convenient resolution by the end of the run time.

That leaves the elevator itself. At first, it seems more like a supernaturally possessed machine in the Maximum Overdrive vein than an actual AI. This leads to some especially memorable moments in the beginning and middle of the film. As alluded, almost all of the antics happen with the center elevator in a bank of three. At first, its behavior is merely capricious, perhaps genuinely random. The repairman and other human authority figures, in turn, are frustrated but not suspicious. The fine cinematography builds up the elevator as both a clear threat and a disconcertingly inhuman presence. After all the buildup, the quite limited number of kills really feel oddly anticlimactic both in concept and execution, with only the demise of a blind man giving much further effect. Part of this is surely that these are things a seasoned viewer is likely to have seen before in films that may well have ripped this one off. However, another factor is the self-limiting nature of the concept (also prominent in Death Bed). After all, there are only so many ways a sentient elevator can kill without making a story repetitive. Things finally take a turn into the surreal when we finally get a look at the literally oozing biomechanoid nerve center of the machinery. It all sets up the closest thing to a further explanation from its creator, “It was very sick.”

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with the one that got all the way to the poster. Around the midpoint, an executive and his assistant are actively philandering, which their coworkers already know or guess. This is as good a point as any to mention, get this in Dutch with subtitles at all costs, because I swear to the Logos of the Universe, the dub I watched for the review is literally worse than a Gamera movie (and not a cool ‘90s one…). Meanwhile, we find a girl alone in front of the bank of elevators. It’s the elevator on the left that opens. The girl looks inside, and is surprised when it closes. When the elevator on the right opens, however, she only laughs. Soon, she is darting to one side and then the other as the doors open and shut, except the one in the middle. What stood out when I watched this part is that everything is well-lit and even colorful. There are even pink mood-lighting strips inside the elevators themselves. Yet, this merely proves the effectiveness of the film’s core hyper-functional aesthetic (in many ways akin to Sole Survivor). In all this, the central elevator remains shut, only heightening the sense that it is the seat of the malign intelligence in control. Finally, it does open, and as the girl approaches, the elevator rises enough for her to look underneath. We cut to the pair of adults as they hear a scream. Surely the true horror is that it becomes apparent that she is in fact related to one of these knuckleheads!

In closing, the question I find worth coming back to is whether there can be a fundamentally bad idea for a movie, especially an otherwise “straight” genre film. This film, even more than Death Bed, is as close as you can get to an archetypal example, precisely because it is done quite competently. It acquits itself well enough to present a counterpoint for the horror genre in particular: A killer elevator may be absurdly unthreatening, as long as you aren’t already inside it, but so is a shark if you aren’t in the water. The “point” of a good genre film is to embody and express the anxieties of its own and any other place and time. If anything, the present specimen has only grown more relevant as technology marches on. The real caveat is, some things are worth one treatment, not necessarily a whole niche genre. My final verdict is, it’s earned my respect. With that, I can call it a day.