Two couples are out for an evening meal and the last ones left in the restaurant as the staff are eager to see them and their raucous behaviour off - perhaps they've partaken too enthusiastically of the wine available. Eventually, as the night draws on, they get up to leave, but as they head to the lobby of this brand new building a bolt of lightning strikes it, and when the couples are in the lift it malfunctions. The staff are at a loss of what to do now most of the power is out, but they do manage to get it running after a fashion, and open the lift doors to find four people near-suffocated by the machine...
That was because this was the world's first serial killer elevator movie, the brainchild of writer and director Dick Maas, here at the outset of a career which ploughed its own rather eccentric furrow, often with his own style of genre movies such as horrors or comedies. This was one of the horrors, although it did come across as if Maas was uncertain of how seriously to take his admittedly ridiculous plot, so some scenes were verging on outright comedy, even if the overall mood was pointing to the viewer being actively scared of the title mode of transport and what it could possibly get up to by way of creating new victims for itself. Which if you thought about it, was very easily avoided.
And you did get a lot of time to think about it, as this was a very low budget movie which like a lot of its ilk found talk and plenty of it the best way of filling up those scenes between the setpieces. Therefore The Lift could have been a lot more exciting, instead of a bit draggy and relying too heavily on a gimmick which needed more fleshing out, or at least offered an explanation which nobody watching would swallow for a second. Maas had obviously thought up his central idea and built the story around it, which meant our hero was a lift maintenance man, Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel, who became the Robert De Niro to Maas's Martin Scorsese), with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.
So we spent a lot of time with old Felix, probably too much as we were privy to the ins and outs of his private life with his wife (Josine van Dalsum) and young family which added nothing but a generous degree of minutes to the movie's duration. This family is placed in jeopardy eventually, but not because of the lift, it was due to a reporter, Mieke de Beer (Willeke van Ammelrooy) making his wife think Felix is having an affair when all he's really doing is helping her with her story, as she suspects, as does he, that there's more to these incidents than meets the eye. But what were these incidents? What could a lift do to you that wasn't incredibly contrived and leaning on a hefty dose of complicity on the part of the victim, no matter how silly that was?
The answer to that was "not very much", as the deaths and near-misses started with the almost suffocated couples, which fair enough you could see how they were threatened, but after that a simple sign on the doors saying "Out of Order" would surely have put paid to any further suspense. The lift doesn't work, don't go into the lift. Simple. This resulted in Maas inventing a selection of daft incidents where, for example, a blind man walks into the shaft when the lift itself has moved floors, or in the film's most memorable bit, a nightwatchman gets his head stuck in the automatic doors and winds up having his head cut off when the cunning contraption descends onto him. Set-ups such as that were amusing enough, but there was a hell of a lot of meandering before we got to them, with Felix and Mieke doing their investigation at a snail's pace, hampered by bureaucracy and when the explanation arrived it was some hokey sci-fi "computers are evil" nonsense. The music was by Maas as well.
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