Dave Made a Maze thinks inside the box

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      Starring Nick Thune. Rating unavailable

      An inspired half-hour’s worth of visual invention is spread out over a forced 80 minutes in Dave Made a Maze, a tribute to ’80s horror-fantasy flicks that never quite decides what tone it wants to take.

      Working from a script he wrote with Steven Sears, first-time director Bill Watterson takes too long to set up his simple plot, which hinges on 30-ish businesswoman Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) coming home from a work trip to discover that her partner, struggling artist Dave (Nick Thune), has forgone his chores. Instead, he’s built an elaborate-looking fort out of refrigerator boxes. It takes up much of their small apartment’s living room, but “It’s much bigger inside,” as he insists from somewhere in its bowels.

      Apparently, Dave got carried away, and now can’t get out. He warns of “obstacles and booby traps” and asks that she call bearded best bud Gordon (Adam Busch) for some bro-sultation. Gordon in turn calls a lot of random people seemingly chosen for their wacky (if entirely white) variety. Some, like a documentary filmmaker (indie veteran James Urbaniak) and crew, are chosen to provide a little meta self-mockery, even if the device of showing his TV-format footage is dropped early on. The others, we soon learn, are there to be picked off, in old-school fashion, after they enter his corrugated labyrinth.

      This gives us a reason to explore production designers Trisha Gum and John Sumner’s resourceful use of 30,000 square feet of cardboard, variously painted, moulded, and shaved into myriad shapes and colours, in increasingly adventurous ways. They also offer clever uses of puppetry, animation, and charmingly basic special effects. The best of these, odd to say, come when the wanderers get killed and out spring oodles of red yarn instead of blood. This supports the idea that the maze is a projection of Dave’s inner demons. But this philosophical spin doesn’t really find its way through a pedestrian script that consists mostly of wan sitcom punch lines, woodenly delivered by a cast of pros who seem committed but dazed.

      In short, this Maze cries out a little too eagerly for midnight-cult status. In fact, this DIY effort would be most inspiring for younger children, but they won’t be able to see it, due to the F-bombs that blow up every exchange. Still, it does deserve a place in film schools, as a study in what to do on a tight budget, and how to avoid getting lost.

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