Review of Dave Made a Maze (2017) by Reuben M — 05 Nov 2018

DAVE MADE A MAZE is an entertaining, sometimes original, sometimes ridiculous but always WILDLY uneven viewing experience. It's important to be aware that the production values (from acting to costumes to editing, etc.) are all at about the level of a very adept student film. The budget is probably about what THE AVENGERS pay for one day of catering.

It's a short film (80 minutes) and I'm glad I saw it...but I can't really recommend because it was still a slog to get through in parts. It's a 45 minute film hidden within 80. The effort to stretch this to feature length is noticeable (understandable, certainly).

Dave, apparently, is a bit of a looser who never completed any projects. One weekend, while his girlfriend is out of town, he builds himself a cardboard box maze in his living room. Upon her return, his girlfriend discovers this maze and further, she hears the desperate cries of Dave himself, who is trapped in his own maze. The girlfriend sends for help, in the form of Dave's friend, and eventually, the living room is full of people, including a low-budget documentary film crew. Despite Dave's pleas, this group enters the maze to look for Dave...and discover that the INSIDE is much, much bigger than the outside. And there are deadly dangers inside.

Make no mistake....people die in this film. But it's a comedy, through and through. There is nothing here that will raise your "fear factor" even one iota. It's all silly fun. The dangerous booby traps that kill people are made of cardboard and the blood that spurts out is made of colorful confetti. (It's still kills them, though.) The best part of the movie is the visual joke that is this maze. Lots of low-budget creativity here. All the humor is milked out of cardboard, including a delightful scene where everyone is turned into paper bag puppets surrounded by cardboard pipes and machinery. I was certainly charmed by the set design of Dave's maze.

The problem with the film is that the characters are oddly defined. They seem to bounce from anger to disbelief to acceptance to bravery to cowardice to frustration without any real reason. Dave's girlfriend, even though the actress is pretty solid, is a cypher. Does she love Dave? If so, why...he seems like a total loser. We are given NOTHING to hold on to. Why is she irritated with him in some scenes and on his side in others? Yes, in real life, people do bounce from emotion to emotion BUT you can't really tell why. The movie made me appreciate how important character coherence (and cohesion, I guess) is SO important.

And from a plot standpoint, while I have NO problem just accepting that somehow Dave's maze is impossibly big (and no one else seems to have trouble with it either)...I don't remotely understand just what causes them to take the course of action they do to in order to "undo" the maze.

I feel like a grouch only giving this 3 stars. It's got lots of creativity and certainly I've never seen anything like it. I admire what was accomplished with a clearly tiny budget. But in the end, the casualness of the script and character development, coupled with the lack of a truly insightful editor just makes this film miss for me. Certainly, the folks involved can learn and grow from this...and I'd give their work another try. But DAVE just misses the mark.