MicroReview: The Maze (2010)

Five friends break into a closed corn maze in the middle of the night and decide to play a harmless game of tag. Little do they know that a psychopathic killer has decided to play along.

Review

The Maze is certainly a game of two halves. Directed by Stephen Shimek (Nocturne), the film begins with five 'teens' arriving at a corn maze (in the middle of the night for reasons), and deciding to break in (the 'door' was open) and getting hacked to pieces by a stereo-typical hidden face slasher. It is, and is nothing more than, standard, plotless, teens-dying-in-the-woods, horror stuff. And for what it is, it does it pretty well. The acting is not terrible, as some of these films have, and the FX are good. But there is nothing else to it.

However, the end seems to come at the halfway mark, and the final girl has more work to do, when the film switches up to become significantly more Hitcher for the second part - and being significantly more interesting than the first. Writers Katy Baldwin (Nocturne) and Timothy Gutierrez (debut feature) do a spot on job with the second half of the film, sadly making me wish that there was more of it. Sure, the creeps and chills are in the first half, but the second just felt better.

If you don't like the conceit of the second half, then the film would actually work perfectly well, tuning out or turning off at that point, but you would miss by far the better portion of the film. I'm intrigued enough by the second half of the film to want more from the makers, which is always good.

This is a tough one to score, because I liked one half far more than the other. So it's a three for the first half, and a four for the second, but because I do nothing by halves: