Director/Screenplay – Dick Maas, Based on His 1983 Film The Lift, Producers – Laurens Geels & Dick Maas, Photography – Marc Felperlaan, Music – Paul M. Van Brugge, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tim McGovern, Visual Effects – Digital Renaissance, Special Effects Supervisor – Harry Wiessenhaan, Makeup Effects – Sjoerd Didden, Production Design – John Graysmark. Production Company – First Floor Features/Cine CV Productions.
Cast
James Marshall (Mark Newman), Naomi Watts (Jennifer Evans), Eric Thal (Jeffrey), Edward Herrmann (Milligan), Michael Ironside (Gunther Steinberg), Dan Hedaya (Lieutenant McBain), Ron Perlman (Mitchell), Martin McDougall (Andy), John Cariani (Gary), Greg Shore (Chip), Peter Banks (Maintenance Chief), Kathryn Meisle (Mildred), Will Vanderpuye (Murphy), David Gwillim (Blind Man), Wilke Durand (Kowalski’s Wife), Todd Boyce (EU Captain), Hanneke Riemer (Ilsa), Merel Den Hengst (Mary Jane)
Plot
There is a spate of strange deaths at New York City’s 102-floor Millennium Building – a group of blind women are cooked inside an elevator, a blind man falls down the elevator shaft, and a security guard is beheaded by the descending elevator cage after getting his head caught in the doors. Mark Newman, a technician with Meteor Elevators, is called in to examine the problem, although can find nothing wrong. Mark is unwittingly placed on the front cover of the Daily Mirror by reporter Jennifer Evans where she twists the sarcastic comments he made around. The building management want to get the elevators working as quickly as possible again without a proper service check. As further deaths occur, Mark and Jennifer team up to investigate. After a group of people are killed inside a runaway elevator, The President calls an emergency, suspecting terrorist activity. However, Mark believes something sinister is going on with the experimental elevator control mechanism that ex-military designer Gunther Steinberg has installed.
Dick Maas is a Dutch director with an occasional handful of hits to his name. The one Maas genre film that received the most mileage on film festival and horror festival circuits was The Lift (1983) about a killer elevator. His next film Flodder (1986), a comedy about a crude and rude family that move into a posh neighbourhood, was a domestic hit and produced several sequels. Maas followed this with the standout police thriller Amsterdamned (1988), which is probably his best film. He made several subsequent English language works with episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-3) and the films Do Not Disturb (1999), a thriller set in Amsterdam, and The Shaft, an English-language remake of The Lift. Returning to the Dutch language, he made the comedy Killer Babes (2007), the horror film Saint (2010), the thriller Quiz (2012) and the killer lion film Prey (2016).
Despite being made with a much bigger budget than The Lift and casting several Hollywood names, The Shaft obtained little attention when it first appeared in 2001. It probably would have languished largely forgotten were it not for the presence of the actress that Maas cast as his female lead – Naomi Watts. At the time she made The Shaft, Watts was nobody with about a dozen film roles to her credit with fairly forgettable parts in the likes of Tank Girl (1995) and Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996). However, with the release of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) five months later, Watts suddenly ascended to the Hollywood A-list and became a Serious Actress. The Shaft was re-released in 2004 with advertising that suggested that she was the central character of the show rather than James Marshall.
The Lift wasn’t a particularly great film. In the original, Dick Maas delivered a number of suspenseful novelty deaths but these were dragged out by a slow plot that spent far too much time on the hero’s home life and relationship with the girl reporter. When it comes to The Shaft, Maas keeps fairly much the same plot and follows The Lift on most basic points. He replicates all the novelty killings – the group of women who suffocate, the blind man who falls down the shaft, the guard who is beheaded, the little girl who is drawn into the elevator. There is even the scene at the end where the hero climbs up in the lift shaft here the hand that creeps across his face that anticlimactically turns out to be his own. The one change the remake makes is to dump all the subplots about the hero’s home life – indeed the hero’s girlfriend is written out the first time we meet her when James Marshall walks in on her with someone else. The journalist character, played here by Naomi Watts, is much more intrusive and abrasive this time around.
Naomi Watts and James Marshall investigate the killer elevatorThe little girl Merel den Hengst) and the elevator
The major other amusing change is of course that The Shaft came out four months before 9/11 and has an uncannily predictive new subplot where The President and military perceive the amok elevator as a terrorist threat. The climax has been pumped into much more of a big action piece than the relative low-key suspense there was in the original – the building is now swarming with anti-terrorist squads that James Marshall must avoid at the same time as he gets into the lift shaft. He also confronts the elevator with a rocket launcher amid overblown scenes of a flaming lift going up and down at top speed with Marshall hanging from it upside down. The designer of the elevator, who was never see in the original, appears here and is made into much more of a Frankensteinian mad scientist (played by Michael Ironside) who gets taken down by the elevator at the climax.
While one suspected that The Lift could have worked with a better budget by keeping Maas’s suspense sequences intact and some adherence to Hollywood formula, The Shaft is a disaster. Maas has clearly shot the film for English-language audiences. The film was made in the Netherlands (most of the production crew have Dutch names) with exteriors shot in New York City. As a result of trying to make his film look more ‘American’, Maas has all the minor actors speaking loudly and with overstressed American accents. The dialogue is flat and snub-nosed, not to mention gives the impression the film has been directed for an audience who was hard of hearing.
Where Maas managed to evoke a fair and reasonable degree of suspense in The Lift, most of the scenes here collapse into ludicrousness. There is a completely ridiculous scene where a rollerblader zooms down into a carpark and is sucked into the lift shaft, only to be spat out multiple stories above to go flying through an office, the glass window and then the railing around the balcony to fall and splatter on the pavement. There is another incredibly silly scene where a group of people are caught in an elevator that accelerates upwards at high speed as the floor falls through and they are left hanging onto the sides, dropping one by one, before the elevator crashes through the roof. There is the eminent crudity of a cut from a scene where a group of pregnant women are found cooked in an elevator to a closeup of burgers frying on a grill.
Despite the publicity that tries to convince us that Naomi Watts is the lead, the real hero is James Marshall, a never-went-anywhere actor who came to minor fame during the 1990s. Naomi Watts is cast in fairly much the bubbly, ditzy blonde girl reporter role that used to be a cliché in films of the 1930s and 40s. The result is the sort of performance that Watts would turn her back on out of hand after having become an A-list name and surely one that must be of embarrassment to her now.
