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Customer Reviews of The Shaft

Hmmmm...
This movie does for elevators what The Legend of Boggy Creek 2 did for Mad Dog attacks. It's all about elevators with human brains that force women into premature labor, teach skaters not to smoke pot, pose as terrorists and kill men, women, children, the blind and their seeing eye dogs. James Marshall stars as an ex-marine elevator repairman that plays air guitar. He's really come a long way since his Twin Peaks days-this is the male equivalent of being spit out of the bottom of the porn industry. Naomi Watts' portrayal of the smut journalist rivals that of James Earl Jones in The Ambulance. I must warn you that she is much, much less naked than she is in Mulholand Dr. It boggles the mind that she made Lynch's Oscar nominated tribute to ambiguity, The Ring and The Shaft all in the same year. The rest of the cast is a duck gallery of B-movie actors: Ron Perlman (the brilliantly played retarded/perverted monk Salvatore in The Name of the Rose as well as Konstantine Konali in Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow), Dan Hedaya (Karla's ex-husband on Cheers, Richard Nixon in Dick and Alicia Silverstone's father in Clueless), Edward Herrmann (the head, middle-age single mother chasing vampire in The Lost Boys), Michael Ironside (from Starship Troopers, and Seaquest fame) and many more that I'm tired of looking up. Martin McDougall and John Cariani star as a pair of porn-obsessed night watchman that are salute to the bumbling law enforcers in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Well...maybe they are. The movie works on many levels, e.g., most of the people who rent or buy this movie end up feeling like they got The Shaft. I really can't figure out if it's good or bad. It's either very, very clever or one of the worst I've ever seen. Nonetheless, I'm buying the DVD.

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Or one star, depending on how you look at it
If you take this film as a "serious horror film," you will be probably be angry at the end (or before) of this movie. But if you are looking for a movie to point and laugh at Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, then this one is quite good.

Let's start with the title: The Shaft. This movie already knows its bad. They wanted people to pick this thing up either looking for the classic blaxploitation film or a porno. Either way, they will be terribly disappointed. Fortunately, for the rest of us, the title alone (combined with the requisite picture of the glowing elevator) shows how very cheesy this movie is.

Then there are the characters. There's little to no characterization here, not surprisingly. The two main characters - an elevator repairman ex-Marine and a nosy reporter - are equally obnoxious. And the reporter's clothes are truly horrendous. I thought she deserved to die by the hand (or would it be cord?) of the elevator because of her fashion sense alone. (I can't describe a full outfit, as it's level of ugliness is just so high I've blocked it out of my mind. Either way, hot pink snakeskin jackets should not be legal). There are a bunch of random character actors in here as well, but they just add their name to the credits, if anything. I can't imagine why they chose to make this movie - they must have needed cash, quick.

Now, moving right along to the plot. For movies like this one, you would be likely to say, "What plot?" However, like the best of this genre, this film (ahem - I hesitate to call this a film, but nonetheless), attempts to have a plot, but falls miserably on its face instead. After all, this is a movie about a haunted elevator. As one of my friends commented while in the video store, "How does the elevator kill people? Wouldn't you just take the stairs?" But despite this obvious issue, this movie actually manages to have too much plot. The group of people I was with was very tempted to just fast-forward, but we just chose to talk over those bits instead. As a result of this excess of plot, the movie is just a bit too long for a really quality flick to make fun of. Thankfully, as we discovered, the parts with the most plot build up to the most spectacular and ridiculous deaths.

And spectacular and ridiculous those are. I won't describe the best for fear of ruining the surprise, but let's just say it ends with an obnoxious rollerblader very, very much squashed. Unfortunately, most of the deaths are not as good as that one (and could possibly be the result of a mechanical failure and not the elevator being haunted), but The Shaft is worth watching just for that one scene. Combined with possibly the worst transition in movie history (we had to go back and watch it twice, it was so horrifically, disturbingly bad), this movie is a minor classic in terms of laughability. But for a real horror movie, go rent Silence of the Lambs.

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A potentially good premise shot to hell
A number of years ago there was a film "The Lift" which was also about a demonic elevator.It was much better than this one.This, I think, could have been a decent film but it fails completely.