Down the Shaft

 

Timing can often make or break a film's success. That would be especially true if your film was about an attack on a New York city skyscraper scheduled for a 2001 release.

Quick Plot: Welcome to the Millennium Building, 102 floors of thriving activity located in the heart of the big apple. After a bolt of lightning strikes while the bottom barrel security team is on guard, the building's 73 elevators begin acting a bit funny

There are minor inconveniences at first: a maternity workout group gets trapped, resulting in a few early deliveries but no injuries. A rogue rollerblader is sucked into the maintenance elevator via the parking lot and exits on the top floor with a bang, shooting straight out and 100 floors to his death. And of course, a blind man with a bad haircut is lured down the shaft after his seeing eye dog. 

The building's management, played with appropriate Mr. Rich stiffness by the late Edward Hermann, is able to cover much of it up, especially since Ron Perlman's elevator repair company is willing to play along. Rogue rookie mechanic Mark (Twin Peaks' James Marshall) however, knows something is amiss, as does plucky reporter Jennifer Evans, played by pre-Mulholland Drive, post-Children of the Corn IV era Naomi Watts with a New York accent that gave me hives. All that and I haven't even mentioned my boyfriend Michael Ironside stopping by as a maybe evil German scientist.

There is a LOT going on here, and most of it is fairly terrible. Writer/director Dick Maas was remaking his own 1983 film, a movie I apparently watched just four years ago and remember next to nothing about it. Down, also titled The Shaft, will probably linger a little longer in my head for two reasons: its extremely bad pre-9/11 timing, and the fact that it employed so many treasured character actors.

A lot of them are (thankfully) having fun. Unfortunately, it's pretty unclear whether that's what they're supposed to be doing. The tone is a mess, which means the prevailing note is what takes over...and that is basically "dumb." This is the kind of movie where Naomi Watts has to scream fake rape accusations and terrorist threats to get ahead, and I honestly can't tell if the movie thinks it's funny or horrible. 

For the film's first half hour or so, I was amused with the same level of chuckles that a better-than-average Asylum Studio flick can pull. But folks, this movie runs close to two hours which ultimately feels like a violation of the Patriot Act. 

High Points

I'll never argue with a concept as glorious as "killer elevator" and thankfully, for as messy as Down is, it does have a fair amount of fun 

Low Points

I once entered an elevator in a women's hospital along with a single (very) pregnant woman. It was just the two of us and as soon as the door closed, the lights went off. For about two seconds, I realized a terrifying, exciting truth: I would have to deliver a baby. Every sitcom and Beverly Hills 90210 episode I ever watched was leading to this very moment. By the third second, the lights were back and we safely reached the ground floor, crisis/hero moment averted.

I bring this up to say, how dare a movie include a scene where a batch of heavily pregnant women are trapped in a corrupt elevator only to not give us an actual birth scene

Lessons Learned

Nobody moves up in the world faster than an elevator operator

In the scheme of things, decapitations really don't happen that often

When your career takes a downturn, your alma mater may downgrade your status from "Harvard alum" to "former Harvard graduate"

Rent/Bury/Buy

It's hard NOT to recommend the star-studded evil fake New York skyscraper elevator movie because unfortunately, we just don't get nearly enough star-studded evil fake New York skyscraper elevator movies. I THINK I enjoyed this one more than Dick Maas's original, but how much of that was its quality and how much was my glee at the very hint of a Michael Ironside appearance. This could probably make a fun drinks-with-friends kind of watch, as its goofiness requires a certain kind of audience energy in order to work for the ridiculously long runtime.   

Seriously: Take the Stairs

In space, no one can hear you scream. -- Alien

There's something wrong with the Davis baby...It's Alive! 

Be afraid. Be very afraid. -- The Fly

Sure, those are GOOD taglines, but do any beat the following:

Take the stairs! Take the stairs! For god's sake, take the stairs! 

I have long been fascinated by1983's The Lift, a Dutch killer elevator flick with a great poster and even better tagline. Now streaming on Shudder, it was finally my chance to see whether it lived up to its hype. 

Um.

Quick Plot: A quartet of obnoxiously drunken diners are the last customers to exit a restaurant, slobbering their way into an elevator that immediately tries to suffocate them. The elevator company dispatches its best technician, Felix Adelaar, who sees nothing out of the ordinary.

The next day, that very same elevator claims two fresh victims: an elderly blind man who strolls right into its empty shaft and a night watchman who gets decapitated in glorious dummy fashion. Felix returns with a repairman's vengeance, teaming up with a nosy reporter named Mieke to investigate Deta Liften, the ominous elevator manufacturer apparently working with an experimental technology company. Mieke takes Felix to discuss their theories with a nerdy technology professor, who proceeds to launch into a very long monologue defining computer chips. 

It's as fascinating as it sounds.

For a movie about a killer elevator, The Lift is shockingly dull. It starts off weird in a good way, but gets so messily lifeless as it goes along that it becomes genuinely hard to even pay attention. There's weird entertainment value to get from the snippets of Felix's suburban home life, from his terrible son's antics to his wife's shockingly fast-growing jealousy. Unfortunately, The Lift rather oddly drops that thread entirely so that Felix can focus all of his energy on saving a few building wanderers from the clutches of a possessed elevator.

The bigger problem is that once Felix removes all distractions, so does the film. The final 15 minutes become a one-man show as Felix battles various parts of a machine, making for one very long service call. 

To say I was let down by The Lift is, well, pretty much the best unintended pun I've stumbled upon in quite some time. Perhaps writer/director Dick Maas was too, since he remade his own movie in 2001 with a so-close-to-Mulholland Drive-fame-Naomi Watts and always-close-to-my-heart Michael Ironside. 

That one's not good either. 

High Points

I will never argue with a dummy decapitation, especially when it happens to a character whose last conversation involved bragging about how he contracted so many STDs in the navy that he was now immune to the effects of penicillin 

Low Points

I think I'd rather walk up the 14 flights of stairs so often referenced here than sit through that microchip monologue again

Lessons Learned

It's not easy to find someone who does the heavy clean

Working for the vice squad will make you numb

Girls don't grow chest hair, but they do get lumps (providing they learn how to stop talking at the breakfast table)

Rent/Bury/Buy

I'm glad I finally got to watch The Lift. I just wish I could have enjoyed it more. Or really, at all. As the poster says, take the stairs, take the stairs, because you're really much better off avoiding The Lift.