It is the far future and humanity, or at least the Japanese section of humanity, lives underground in a vast complex where all their needs are attended to as long as they buckle down under the strict regime that rules this society. Luchino (Luchino Fujisaki) is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who has recently been released from an experimental mental hospital where she was sent to curb her violent impulses, but now her doctors believe she is cured, so she is free to go back to school, as she is doing today. Her journey there takes her along a huge tunnel which houses some of the population, but more importantly also into the elevator which can travel a hundred floors - or ninety-nine, anyway.
Hellevator started life as a student film before its writer and director Hiroki Yamaguchi secured a proper budget to make it as a theatrical release, or that was his story, as no matter which way you sliced it, this still looked like a shot-on-video student film that had somehow been expanded way past a sensible length to this science fiction/horror hybrid. It picked up a few fans, mainly those who were well-disposed to the Japanese way of fantastical fiction, but largely went neglected by anything so much as close to the mainstream. In truth, while sometimes you could observe that mainstream was missing out, with this it was more accurate to say they were not missing out on a whole lot.
Certainly Yamaguchi picked a style and stuck with it, which was commendable, but you had to wonder if it was effective its combination of George Lucas's debut THX 1138 (which started as a student film, too, let's not forget) and the Canadian Cube series, as that also played out its action in a restricted space (all right, it's supposed to be a series of restricted spaces, but you can tell they used a single set for the most part). Our heroine marks herself out as a rebel by smoking a (tobacco) cigarette, which sets off an explosion somehow, but aside from her unfriendly attitude she wasn't particularly bursting with personality, more emblematic of the director's main interest: medication.
Yes, just as in the Lucas movie not only did he see a future where the population was swallowing pills daily just to get through the day, but he had a big problem with that too. Luchino was presented as laudable for trying to buck the trend of this cycle of tranquilisers and anti-psychotics but considering what she wound up doing in the movie's final act you may be moved to express the concern that maybe she really did need her pills if that's how she behaved when she was off them. Not that she was not provoked, as there were complications, one of those being her time spent in this research facility has given her psychic powers, an ability which she and some others in the cast of characters share. Far from improving her life, they appear to have become a burden that she struggles to manage.
The bulk of the plot took place in the elevator, where Luchino is travelling up to her school, though this takes an extremely long time in comparison to the average trip in a lift as there were so many floors and so many passengers getting on and off. Some of those passengers seem normal enough, like the granny and her granddaughter or the businessman, but others are more eccentric, such as the brain in a jar with eyes on stalks that chatters in a strangely musical manner, or more dangerous, like the two prisoners brought on by a guard who predictably break loose and start to terrorise the others. Luchino has a solution for that, though this makes her the dangerous one, as further revelations about each passenger arise which served the make the plot denser, but not less easy to get along with. In truth, it came across as if Hellevator did not care if you were on board with it at all, it was going to barge its way onto the screen then barge its way off again regardless. Not to be confused with the Soska Sisters' horror-themed TV gameshow.
