Five friends out in a rural town decide to play a game of tag one night in a local farm maze. The maze is closed and they shouldn’t be there… For more reasons than one. It turns out a red hooded serial killer is stalking them through the maze with the intent of killing them. The young group have a hard time finding each other but they know something isn’t right. They need to hurdle together to get out of the maze before all of them are picked off for good. That won’t be easy though.
What we have in The Maze is a fairly run of the mill slasher/who done it movie. The storyline is pretty simplistic, though the way in which it’s told is quite clever in some ways. Right from the opening scene we know these kids are in for a tough time. There’s a dead body in a morgue (which is burned to buggery) with a piece of jewelry on it and it turns out that piece of jewelry belongs to one of the kids. Though their game of tag involves passing over the piece to whoever’s ‘it’ so you don’t know who the body belongs to. This sets up the intrigue right from the beginning, which is good.
Sadly I wouldn’t say The Maze is that riveting a movie, it’s not really scary and it sure isn’t that gory. In fact in parts it’s downright boring. Most of the movie is set in the corn crop (which makes up the maze) and it starts to look very same after a while. The general pacing of the movie is quite stilted actually, it really needs to be more fast paced.
The acting quality is decent enough, though I wouldn’t say there are any performances that’re startling. Most (if not all) of the actors are unknowns but I’m sure we’ll see at least some of them again.
The Maze is an OK movie, nothing amazing by any means but OK. The red hooded killer isn’t the most remarkable ‘bad guy’ to grace the silver screen but I suppose he does the job. There’s a nice twist at the end though. I’d only recommend The Maze for lovers of slasher movies really, everybody else is better off watching something else.
Movie Details
Director: Stephen Shimek
Writers: Timothy Gutierrez, Katy Baldwin
Actors: Shalaina Castle, Richard Dutcher, Adam Johnson, Clare Niederpruem
Release Year: 2010