November 26, 2018
Written by: Dick Maas
Starring: Huub Stapel, Willeke van Ammelrooy, Josine van Dalsum
Budget: €350,000
Quote: "These damn machines will be the death of us all some day!"
Trivia: Dick Maas was fired halfway of the production because of continuing arguments with producer Matthijs van Heijningen about casting. However, he kept on working during that day and was rehired the day after, because Van Heijningen couldn't do it without him.
Shudder recently put up two of Dutch director/writer Dick Maas' horror movies, Amsterdamned and The Lift. I chose The Lift. I chose wrong. About 170 movies in and this was one of the worst movies I have watched yet (Demented Death Farm Massacre was by far the worst). The movie's description reminded me of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, a movie that I watched on a goof that ended up being a interesting and fun movie. However, this movie lacked the inventiveness and humor that that movie had. I'm really behind on writing about the movies I have been watching so I'm going to make this one short.
Basic premise is a commercial building's elevator is killing people and its up to an elevator repairman and a tabloid journalist to stop it. The repairman is so engrossed in solving the mystery of the elevator that it ruins his marriage (to be honest, the guy was an asshole and that marriage seemed like it was on thin ice anyways). Eventually, the two dummies track down the elevator's manufacturer and realize that the elevator's processor was made from organic material and has gained sentience. The repairman is finally able to locate the heart and tries bashing it with a wrench and is almost killed but is rescued at the last minute by the tabloid journalist. Finally, the president of the elevator's manufacturing company tries to shoot the elevator's processor (heart?) but the elevator kills him. The end.
I'm not sure if it is a translation thing or a European thing, but dubbed horror movies from the 1980's have some of the worst dialogue I have seen in a movie (I'm specifically thinking of some of the Italian horror flicks). Every single male character in this movie continually spouts out disgusting dialogue. I'm not trying to get on a feminist rant, it's just that the dialogue makes everyone seem like a dirtbag which makes it difficult to relate or sympathize with any one character. A nightwatch guard at the elevator's building is constantly drinking on the job and tries peer pressuring the other younger guard into drinking, eventually making fun of him when he refuses. Then when talking about going on vacation the guard implies that he's going to bang a lot of women, and that he has banged so many women that he's built up an immunity to penicillin. The assumption is that he has gotten and transmitted gonorrhea so many times that the penicillin treatments no longer work. A very weird thing to brag about. Other people at the office talk about screwing the younger girls that work there and one guy comments that if all goes well he'll know if his coworker is "shaved down there." The entire movie is filled with this making the character off putting and making it hard to care if anything happens to them.
The kills are bland. The first scene has four partiers trapped in the elevator so they stuff getting naked and trying to bone until it becomes too hot and they're saved (at least there is some nudity). A blind man is tricked into walking into the elevator shaft. A couple people are crushed. A janitor is burnt up. All of this is fine, but there is so much fluff in between. If the movie were boiled down to necessary scenes it would probably be about twenty minutes because the other seventy minutes are characters talking about stupid shit which is neither interesting nor advances the plot.
The movie was remade for American audiences nearly twenty years later in 2001 by Dick Maas and re-titled Down so there must have been something to the film that I missed. I don't know, maybe I was in a bad mood when I watched it, but this one really didn't jive with me. Interesting concept, but poor execution, bland horror, and unlikable characters.
...what's your thoughts?
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