Macabre…ish Horror Review: The Lift

The Lift, 1983/ 1 hr 35 min

After the end of a date two couples are trapped on a lift when the building is struck by lightning. The power is out and the few building employees there are, try to get it going again, meanwhile the people trapped inside go from celebratory and sexy to medical emergencies.

An air conditioning repairman, Felix (Huub Stapel), is called in to look at the elevator, for some reason, because 4 people almost suffocated in it the night before. So he has a look and sees nothing, not even evidence of damage from a lightning strike.

Still, the lift is problematic, it drops people off on the wrong floors and other times, the doors opens and closes on people and items and opens to nothing but shaft, once claiming a blind man (Onno Molencamp). Then decapitated a security guard while the other one ran away.

No one can seem to find a malfunction anywhere so even after all of the issues, they eventually announce that the problem has been solved. But the one maintenance worker, Felix, disagrees and he’s put on leave for his troubles. Another lift repairman, lost it and ended up in an asylum with a new fear of walls.

Then Felix got in contact with a computer scientist with the help of a journalist, Mieke (Willeke van Ammelrooy) who speaks of a program that could reprogram themselves, evolve, reproduce and learn. The result is the program and a faulty bio-program, like it were abandoned and buried but that may not have stopped it.

Now someone has to look for the lift’s panel but in the mean time, a janitor was sucked into the shaft and now people think he was the one sabotaging the elevator.

This is a 1980s psychological Dutch horror and it is pretty graphic and there is a pretty graphic sexual scene. The moments of horror are spread out well and the story is good. It’s a little slow but it’s the 80s!