The Lift (de Lift) / 1983

 Just quickly but as a late night introduction to a film I never even heard of much less seen from a director I'm only slightly familiar with due to a film that I think is an American remake of this original (with a pre-stardom Naomi Watts, called "The Shaft") from the Netherlands: Dick Maas. Good movie about a "bio chip" that seems to have developed this artificial intelligence causing an elevator to act "psychopathic", even killing a few people. A blind man who prepared for a new apartment for his 92 year old mother falls to his death when the shaft opens with no elevator available to step into. Two couples, after a meal at a nearby swanky restaurant, get stuck on the elevator, its air conditioning shutting off, despite no signs of the unit being defective. A little girl's doll is damaged by the elevator (luckily the child is just frightened by the "malfunction"). A member of the sanitation team is pulled into the elevator, later dropped through an escape hatch while someone is waiting to go up to another floor. Elevator mechanic, Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel), cannot figure out why the lift keeps malfunctioning, soon realizing, once he joins forces with a nosy news journalist, Mieke (Willeke van Ammelrooy), that a technological company called Rising Sun could be responsible for a computer chip installed in the apartment complex causing all the problems. Felix will take it upon himself to go inside the shaft and "confront" the bio chip box in order to "fix" the problem once and for all. There is a subplot melodrama involving Felix and his family due to his partnership with Mieke, misconstrued as an affair (wife Saskia's (Josine van Dalsum) friend sees them in a cafe, determining the two are lovers), while Felix's boss and Rising Sun's bio engineer/scientist are nervous he will learn too much and expose them. 

The film suffers from atrocious dubbing and some cringe dialogue, but I liked Stupel's understated performance while van Ammelrooy was nicely charming and stubborn in her pursuit of the truth. Unfortunately, Josine's Saskia seems to overreact and never have a real discussion about what she believes is the affair, while Stupel's inability to communicate what he's actually doing just further causes strife and distance. Ultimately, Felix risks his life to go into the shaft in what I thought was easily the film's most exciting and suspenseful sequence. There is a LOT of dialogue and conversation, and the lift's "bad behavior" doesn't quite reach the potential I think was there, but a head is cleaved off by the elevator and a snapped wire wraps around a victim's neck and hangs him in the empty shaft. I really think the director's use of synthesizer score enhances the mood of the film...without the music, the film might not have worked as much as it does.