Unclean & Unseen! – THE LIFT (1983)

Like Prince once sang: “If de-elevator tries 2 bring u down…go crazy – punch a higher floor!”

Some films defy classification. You can’t really say THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is just a musical or that RUBBER is merely a horror-comedy. This is where THE LIFT comes in. What was promoted as a straight up horror film, sporting a banger of a tagline begging “Take the stairs, take the stairs…for God’s sake, TAKE THE STAIRS!”, quickly melts into a squishy, malleable sludge of black comedy and snarky commentary on the encroaching computer age, including an early example of 21st-century machine learning.  

When a high-rise elevator starts to maim and kill innocent and not-so-innocent businessmen alike, blue-collar technician and family man, Felix, is hired to poke around to find the reason for it. The answer is not what anyone is expecting: the elevator is actually alive, driven by an organic brain center that is slowly allowing it to become a sentient being.

After directing some music videos by rock outfit Golden Earring, including a famous clip for the band’s 1982 classic, “Twilight Zone”, filmmaker Dick Maas offered up THE LIFT as his feature debut. The film walks a tightrope of straight-faced parody, and given its rather famous reception on video when it hit U.S. shores in 1985, I’m surprised we were never given a sequel to THE LIFT’s techno nuttiness. Both audiences and critics seemed baffled but intrigued by Maas’ unique, low-key approach, allowing him to continue to blur genre lines with his well-received action/slasher/crime drama AMSTERDAMNED (1988). 

Ultimately, THE LIFT joined the ranks of such low-budget offerings such as THE PREY (1980), THE FOREST (1982), and THE FINAL TERROR (1983) as an oddball, VHS-era standalone that proved a memorable video campaign was worth way more in nostalgia dollars than a memorable movie. Nevertheless, it certainly deserves some credit for daring to be different in the face of an overstuffed horror marketplace. 

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