The Lift



AKA: de Lift

When the new elevators at a local high-rise in Amsterdam mysteriously malfunction one night, nearly killing the four occupants within, the building’s owners hire a technician named Felix to inspect the electrical system. After checking it several times, Felix can’t find anything wrong that would have caused such a strange incident and chalks it up to a fluke. But the strange anomalies surrounding the elevators continue, causing several deaths in quick succession. After subsequent inspections Felix still can’t seem to find anything wrong with any of the electrical equipment, and begins to become obsessed with the elevator’s continuing fatal malfunctions. Now highly suspicious of all these incidents and determined to find out the cause, Felix teams up with a local tabloid reporter to get to the bottom of all these deadly “accidents”.


I feel like this one was kinda avoidable.

The Lift is a Dutch sci-fi/horror film from 1983. Truth be told, the only reason I decided to watch it is because Dark Tower turned out to be a dud, and I was hoping for at least a marginally better movie involving a “killer elevator”. Admittedly, that wasn’t a very hard bar to overcome considering how boring and schmaltzy Dark Tower turned out to be, but had I known it was a Dutch film beforehand I would have watched it last month instead. Oh well. At least I was right in hoping it’d be more entertaining.



The pacing at least, is what I expect from a horror movie like this. The elevato– sorry, LIFT – starts off the film by trying to knock off four drunken farmers (I think) who are so out of it that they’re trying (and failing, apparently) to bork in the Lift on their way down to the ground floor after having just finished dinner. The Lift, clearly not wanting anything to do with these drunken shenanigans and not appreciating the lewd acts happening within, proceeds to try to suffocate them all to death. Honestly, can’t say that I blame it. And of course things get worse the further along the movie goes. One poor blind man falls to his death (boo, poor form!), a security guard is decapitated, a cleaning guy gets killed, and it even torments a little girl. So, you know, everything out of your standard “evil” playbook. Nothing is particularly impressive, especially the fake decapitated head, but at least between the deaths and the quest to figure out why the Lift seems to be so damn pissed off there aren’t any long stretches where absolutely nothing is happening.


Well now the movie is just being mean.


Come on, you’d want to kill them too. Admit it.

On the downside though, there is at least one silly plotting issue. For some reason the movie seems to think that anyone watching a film about killer elevators– I mean, lifts – cares one single iota about Felix’s love life. There’s this whole pointless subplot revolving around Felix and his wife, and how she’s jealous because she thinks he’s having an affair. And of course the movie makes the plot point extra dumb because the whole thing is caused by the wife’s busy-body friend who’s convinced Felix is having an affair just because she saw him sitting in a diner with someone. So wifey immediately believes her friend, throws around some accusations, involves the kids, then absconds with the kids one day while Felix is off at work, all without having even a hint of a conversation. And of course, none of this gets resolved by the end of the movie, meaning the film threw in a story-line revolving around high school levels of pointless melodrama for no other reason (that I can see) than to fill up some runtime. Because it sure wasn’t used to add anything to Felix’s character in any way. He barely even seemed to react to her accusations or her absence, beyond a sigh, and eye-roll  and brief scene of pouting. He just goes right back to worrying about the damn lift. So thanks for making me sit through all that, movie. Now go sit in a corner and think about what you’ve done.




He’s annoyed by the sassy reporter more than anything, really. And she didn’t seem interested either. So I don’t know where the movie thought it was going with this…

My only other qualm is that I watched a dubbed version of the film, which was decidedly “meh”. Some of the dubbing was fine, but other parts seemed flat, or just downright uninterested. But the movie’s also got some weird spots where it’s trying to be funny (“These damn machines will be the death of us all someday!”), so I can’t quite tell if some “meh” parts were wholly intentional or not. Maybe they were. Maybe the original actors were “meh” too. I don’t know. I just know that I wasn’t all that impressed with it, but that may just be because the acting wasn’t really all that impressive to begin with.


This is what passes for humor here though. So, enjoy!

Other than that though, The Lift is a perfectly fine B-movie. It’s got some fun deaths, and some kooky characters, and a silly plot, and even some moments where it looks good. So beyond having to watch a pointless misunderstanding subplot (which isn’t even that long), there’s not much to complain about. Though, I do kind of wish they’d spent just a little more time focusing on the whole “corporate greed/ evil scientific shenanigans” angle, since that was kind of a significant plot point they seemed to be building up to, and they just… glazed right over it by the end. But I have a feeling they weren’t really trying to go that deep to begin with, so *shrugs*. Oh well. Point is, the film is fine for some light horror fare, as long as you don’t go in expecting too much in the way of quality.

The Lift is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Lift is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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