I stumbled across this one while surfing the Tubi streaming catalog yesterday. Dave Made a Maze is about a guy named Dave who, over the course of a three-day weekend, builds a cardboard fort in his apartment. But, much like the Tardis from Doctor Who, it’s “bigger on the inside”, and contains a never-ending maze full of traps and puzzles, and even a minotaur. Dave gets lost inside his creation, and his girlfriend, some friends, and a documentary film crew head inside to rescue him.
The description got my interest, but what really made me watch it was that it was written and directed by Bill Watterson. Bill Watterson was the cartoonist who gave the world the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”, which I grew up reading and loving. I didn’t realize until later that this flick was created by a completely different Bill Watterson. Despite this disappointment, the film is pleasantly silly to watch.
Okay, geek note here. This film uses the words “maze” and “labryinth” interchangeably, while mazes are multicursal and labryinths are unicursal. What Dave has constructed is a maze, with many paths and many dead ends. But Dave’s cardboard contruction somehow becomes sentient and begins building itself upon his initial creation, to the point there are rooms and traps Dave never built, but the entire structure follows and represents his own insecurity about never finishing things. Several people die in the maze, and blood and gore are represented with bits of colored paper. At one point, Dave sticks his hand in a carboard vagina, only to have his flesh turned permanently into cardboard. Good thing he didn’t stick anything else in there.
In the end, Dave is able to overcome his own self-doubt and defeat the maze, saving the lives of at least some of his friends. It’s a weird, fun little watch that moves quickly and keeps you entertained.
