Made for TV Movies: Nightmare on the 13th Floor

This movie terrified me as a kid. For years after seeing this I refused to ride in elevators in buildings with more than 12 floors. Re-watching this as an adult was something...

The plot unfolds something like this: Elaine Kalisher is staying at a high-end luxury hotel in order to write an in-depth review on the accommodations for her travel magazine. Hoping for a good review, the hotel staff gives her the run of the place, but her curiosity combined with boundless access to the hotel quickly lands her in trouble. During a strange power outage while riding a service elevator, Elaine gets stuck between floors. She manages to pry the elevator doors open enough to call for help, but instead of someone coming to her aid, she witnesses a murder. She reports the murder to the authorities but they see a problem with her story: the floor she witnessed the murder on, doesn't exist. She's determined to find the answers to her mounting questions, but the closer she gets to the truth, the closer she gets to death!

The twist: Satanists are trying to conjure Satan (I guess) by allowing an ageless murderer to kill 13 people on the 13th floor of the hotel.

Is that?...: James Brolin and Louise Fletcher.

Stand out moment: There's a long drawn out foot-chase scene where Elaine tries to flee the hotel by taking the stairs (because the elevators are controlled by the Satanists). The chase starts on the 13th floor and ends in the lobby, and as she runs through the hotel, occasionally switching from one stairwell to the next, and runs into the satanic hotel staff on every. single. landing. It starts out as comical but it goes on for so long it borders on absurdity. It's pretty great!

But, is actually scary?: Not even a tiny bit. There is something unnerving about a cabal of satanists obscuring an entire floor of a building from the public eye for more than a century, and then designing a secret mechanism for stopping the elevator on that hidden floor, and somehow also keeping the gaslights on that floor going for a hundred years. Actually, these things are more confusing than unnerving.

Childhood memories were better: Though I'm not totally surprised that 10 year old me was freaked out by this film, it is a wonder that I didn't get bored before anything scary happened. Sadly this is a snooze fest with just a couple fun and laughable moments.

Something about this movie reminds us of Botched...