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THE
SHAFT
PLOT
After a big thunderstorm, the elevators at the Millennium Building
seem to have gotten a will of their own. While everyone seems to be
trying to keep everything from the press, a female journalist and
an elevator repairman decide to dig deeper into the truth of
what's really happened to the elevators. As more and more incidents
start happening in the Millennium Building, it gets harder and harder
to keep it silent. What is it really that causes all these terrible,
so called accidents?, and will anyone be able to stop the elevators
from hell?
REVIEW
How convenient. Back in 2001, a remake of the Dutch 80's horror thriller
"Der Lift" was released widely all over Europe under the simple title
"Down" but couldn't seem to find distribution in the USA. Now, shortly
after the hit remake of Japanese horror thriller "Ring" was released on
DVD under the title "The Ring" in the states, a movie called "The Shaft"
pops up on the DVD shelves. The movie stars Naomi Watts from "The Ring"
and the cover looks an awful lot like the cover for "The Ring" aswell.
The plot tells the story of a female journalist (Naomi Watts) whom
together with a man investigates a mysterious dark secret. Even this
seems to resemble an awful lot to the plot of "The Ring" so ofcourse
most of you will check it out and since you've never heard of "Down",
you'll probably assume that it's a Ring rip-off. Well, now you know better.
I saw this back in 2001 when it was released here in Sweden and back
then no one had ever heard of Naomi Watts so I wasn't expecting much
from it. What I got was an interesting horror thriller, which I thought
had a lot of originality to it so I was very pleasantly surprised. When
I saw that this was getting a US release finally, I decided to go down
to the local rental place and see if it was still available and lucky
for me, it was. So I sat down in front of my TV screen and as the movie
went along I noticed how many resemblances it actually has to The Ring.
The movie itself is actually pretty stupid and predictable and you
always know what's going to happen next. I must've fallen asleep at
the end when I saw this the first time as I didn't remember it to
have such a terrible ending. Really, it was way too out there and I
think they could've handled it a whole lot better.
Naomi Watts is indeed a terrific actress and I'm happy for her that
she finally made her breakthrough, she really did deserve it. There
are a few other faces to be recognized here aswell, but you can't
seem to remember where you've seen most of them before. The directing
looks really good except for some computer made scenes, though, they
never last for very long so I was happy for that. The special effects
are also quite extraordinary and you can tell that it wasn't made
for video, it actually did make some descent money in European cinemas.
Surely it was easy for Artisan Entertainment to change the title from
Down to The Shaft since the original Down release didn't have an opening
title or opening credits. All in all I still think this is a pretty
good movie, but since the ending was really really terrible I just
can't give it more than three stars. There are some really humorous
scenes in this movie aswell so it's not only for the horror audience.
Actually, it's not really a horrormovie in my opinion, I would
rather call it an action thriller. Lame US release?, yes, bad movie?
nope, rather entertaining actually.
GORE
Nothing major, there are only two or three scenes, which include
blood at all actually. First we have a really cool head dismembering
scene, which looks totally awesome, then we get a less impressive
burnt and bloody corpse and finally we get some guy hung in some
wires while bleeding a bit, nothing very impressive there either.
SOUNDTRACK
The Shaft, or Down as I'd rather call it, has a top-notch soundtrack
in my opinion, the music that is used to create the atmosphere works
perfectly in a dark room. Then we get some 70's rock played from a
jukebox, that's kind of original I guess, we also get some more hip
rock to show us that it was created for the teen generation aswell.
BOTTOM LINE
If you think that this is a "The Ring" rip-off, it's not, it just has
a lot of similarities to it. I think that this is a pretty good movie
but it lacked of suspense, action and gore and I think that they could
have done so much more with this movie than they did. I'm never
very positive for remakes but since I had never seen "Der Lift" and
I thought the story seemed interesting, the fact that this movie was
a remake didn't bother me very much. I think you should definitely
check this out.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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