OUT OF ORDER and the Up and Down World of Elevator Thrillers

I am a sucker for the elevator thriller genre.  I realize this sounds like an incredibly tiny field – it may seem like the cinematic equivalent of saying “I’m a sucker for the ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ sequel genre” – but it’s turned into a surprisingly robust grouping over the years.   Starting with the 1974 made-for-television film THE ELEVATOR, there have been more than a half-dozen feature-length films in which a group of disparate characters are confined to a single location whose vertical traction seems to have come to a complete halt.  In the past decade alone, we’ve seen the release of 2008’s BLACK OUT, 2011’s ELEVATOR, 2008’s DARK FLOORS and 2010’s DEVIL, produced and co-written by M. Night Shyamalan.  This doesn’t even count the Japanese-made 2004 film HELLEVATOR or ski-lift thrillers like 2010’s FROZEN that rely on similar aesthetics, or films that contain elevators as a cause for terror among many other factors, like 1993’s NIGHTMARE ON THE 13^TH FLOOR or 1994’s SPEED.   

Prior to DEVIL’s major theatrical release, the best-known elevator thriller was most likely Dick Maas’s 1983 film DE LIFT, a Netherlands-lensed tale of an evil elevator that received plenty of attention when it hit video stores in the United States in a dubbed form under the English title THE LIFT.  THE LIFT, it’s fair to say, isn’t a great film.  Most of the reviews of the film from both genre and mainstream critics are tepid, with Classic Horror’s Brandt Sponseller mentioning that “long segments… are veryboring” and the New York Times’ Janet Maslin commenting that “the execution is too tepid and controversial to amount to much.”

No, THE LIFT didn’t become a video hit because it was good.  It’s a strange, muddled film pitched halfway between horror and satire and unable to commit to either.  This, however, didn’t matter to the horror fan of the mid-1980s, who was desperate to rent anything that was eye-catching enough to stand out from the pack of similar-looking slasher films lining the shelves.  This is where THE LIFT shined, because whoever was designing the cover art for Media Home Entertainment, the company that distributed the film in the U.S., was certainly on point that day.

(Cover art courtesy scifi-movies.com)

THE LIFT’s gimmicky cover art and ridiculously alarmist tag line (“Take the stairs, take the stairs, for god’s sake, take the stairs!!”) made the film into something of a cult favorite, with horror fans over the next decade renting it under the idea that if it’s a killer elevator movie, it has to at least be interesting.  The film was successful enough that Maas even remade it in English in 2001, casting Naomi Watts and a number of well-known character actors.  Sadly, with more generic cover art, the film didn’t make as much of an impact – despite the well-known names, the remake still hasfewer votes on the IMDb than the original. 

THE LIFT, however, wasn’t the only European-lensed elevator thriller of the mid-‘80s.  ABWARTS, released in the United States under the title OUT OF ORDER, was a German-made thriller released the following year directed by Carl Schenkel, an up and coming filmmaker now best known as the director of crime thrillers KNIGHT MOVES and THE MIGHTY QUINN.  OUT OF ORDER, however, lacked THE LIFT’s supernatural component, campy feel and, most tellingly, lurid cover art, instead ending up promoted to video store customers as a generic thriller in which star Renee Soutendijk’s face peers out from an unidentified blackness.  It’s as though they took everything that made THE LIFT a commercial success and ignored it completely.

(Cover art courtesy Monsterland Movies)

I’ve yet to locate a trailer for the English-language version, but the film did get a brief theatrical run, as evidenced by Walter Goodman’s New York Times review.  The film was soon quickly released to video, where it vanished into obscurity.  The original German-language trailer is below.

It’s a shame, as OUT OF ORDER isn’t a bad little film, and it’s certainly more tonally coherent than its Dutch cohort.  Unlike THE LIFT’s reluctance to settle on one genre and wavering awkwardly between horror and satire, OUT OF ORDER is a very straightforward thriller, setting up a simple premise (four characters are trapped in an elevator) and letting the results play out as the characters bounce off of each other naturally.

The four characters in the scenario are two co-workers (Soutendijk and Götz George), a young delivery man with an anarchist streak (Hannes Jaenicke) and a quiet bookkeeper with a suitcase full of stolen cash (Wolfgang Kieling).  After the elevator breaks down, the quartet starts bickering amongst themselves as to what to do, as tensions, both cultural and sexual, begin to rise.

OUT OF ORDER doesn’t really have a heck of a lot to say, though there is some half-hearted attempt at social commentary with one employee’s Lenin pin, the anarchist’s disregard for business culture and the bookkeeper’s tale of woe.  When the film is stuck in the elevator itself, it’s a bit stagnant, suffering from mediocre dubbing and conversations that go on for a few minutes longer than they need to be.

When the characters start trying to escape, however, OUT OF ORDER shines.  Schenkel does a fine job with the actual thriller aspects, instilling every moment where the characters leave the elevator itself and get into the shaft with tension.  Sure, you could argue that watching tension wires slowly come apart and break may get old after the fifth or sixth cutaway, but the film is edited well, meaning that the actual thriller portions of the thriller are well-made.

Granted, even at 83 minutes, OUT OF ORDER’s limited premise and character set wears a bit thin.  (You could easily shave ten minutes off of the running time without losing anything of value.)  It’s still a solid, relatively captivating thriller that satisfies the “elevator thriller” niche in a much more solid way than THE LIFT.  

Was there ever a subtitled version of this film released in the U.S.?  What are your favorite elevator suspense scenes?