De Lift (A.K.A. The Lift) (1983)

The Lift is seen as a pearle in the Dutch horror genre. That doesn't say much though as Holland barely produces horror films. Director Dick Maas (yeah laugh your ass off) does create a good little horror flick though.

First some ''horror-genre-in-Holland'' inside news. As I said, barely any horror films are made in Holland. You can count them on two hands I guess. Let's see.... We have got ''Dood Eind'' which premiered on the ScreamFest Horror Fiml Festival in the US as ''Dead End''. There is the Human Centipede films which will be more known to foreign readers. And the last more famous one is probably ''Sl8n8'' which premiered as ''Slaughter Night'' on the Toronto After Dark Film Festival but didn't even get a US release. Dick Maas probably is Holland's most well known horror director. He made good films like Amsterdamned (1988), The Lift, Sint (2010) the English title being ''Saint'' or ''Saint Nick'' and he's currently working on a movie called Prooi which means Prey in English where an escaped lion roams the streets of Amsterdam. But this review we're talking about De Lift.

A lift begins displaying some erratic behavior, like trapping some party goers and nearly suffocating them, and decapitating a security guard. Felix, the technician from the lift company, can't find anything wrong with the circuitry. When he and a nosy reporter begin asking questions of the lift company's electronics partner (Rising Sun Electronics) his boss puts him on a leave of absence. A subsequent visit to a professor leads them to believe that some evil experiments are being conducted with MICROCHIPS.

The story is pretty cool and as far as I know no one had come up with it before Dick Maas did. Though a concept where an elevator goes on a killingspree does seem like it could get boring quickly. Fortunately that isn't the case with De Lift. The film has enough excitement and has its tensive moments. It also features some great camerawork. There are some scene's that really stood out. The scene where a blind guy thinks he walks in the lift but falls into the elevator shaft and the scene where a guy's head gets stuck between the doors of the elevator as the elevator is comming down are great (although the beheading afterwards does look extremely cheesy). It has a great ending set in the elevator shaft too. 

The cast is typically Dutch. Huub Stapel, one of the more known and better Dutch actors, does a decent job. He isn't a great actor but he is pleasant to look at. There is also Willeke van Ammelrooy who is pretty annoying as the pushy journalist. The absolute worst thing about the cast is Paul Gieske though. The man is a parody of an actor and with plain disbelieve and a huge facepalm I was starring at his painfully bad scenes. 

Nearing the middle the film does get a bit more quiet and than you'll notice that without the elevator scene's there isn't a whole lot of great thing left about this movie (I can exept it tough as the budget was very low). And fortunately, as I said, the ending is great. There is also a simple but effective score by Dick Maas himself.

De Lift isn't an amazing movie, especially if you compare it to foreign movies. It is all a bit dated but still is great fun and does feature some very cool death scene's (including one that will make my ''Movie Kill of the Week'' videos on youtube). Definitely a cool tip if you are looking to get into more unknown foreign horror films.