The Maize: The Movie
AKA Dark Harvest 2
There’s been a bunch
of movies recently that have been extremely hard to find. Many of these are
because they are foreign language movies that haven’t had wide releases outside
their original country. The Maize: The Movie though was different. It was
proving impossible to find until I found out it had been released under the
title Dark Harvest 2 and I was lucky enough to find a second hand copy on
Amazon. So what made this movie harder to find than the plot to The Barbaric
Beast of Boggy Creek 2? We unfortunately was about too find out…
When trick or treaters
knock on Shy Walker’s (Bill Cowell) door he gets a physic vision for some
reason of two sisters who went missing in a local corn maze the year before.
However the disappearance of two young girls doesn’t seem to have bothered
anybody or harmed business in any way as the maze is open again this year and
Shy’s two daughters (Alyssa Cowell – real life daughter of Bill and another girl, but I couldn't be bothered to learn the characters names) are there at that very moment. Rushing to the maze Shy stumbles around
shouting “girls!” in an attempt to find his missing daughters. Whilst they are also
wandering the maze, filming their own horror movie, they come across the
spirits of the missing girls (who clearly were on their way home from failing
to get the part of the Grady daughters in the local school play when they went
missing). The spirits have trapped his daughters in the maze and now Shy must
find their way out. Will Shy find his daughters? Will he set the spirits of the
dead girls free? Who do the mysterious wellington boots we keep seeing belong
to? Will I be able to think of any corn related jokes before the end of my
review or will I just play it by ear?
Before I mentioned
that The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek 2 (see here) had no plot, but The Maize:
The Movie makes it look like The Usual Suspects in comparison. It’s like a
cross between Children of the Corn and Labyrinth, if you take away the gore,
the Muppets, the acting, the scares, the pure entertainment and David Bowie’s
creepy codpiece. This movie is literally a man walking around a maze for an
hour, with occasional not very creepy girls and other pointless bullshit not managing
to make any impact on his random wandering, until he finally confronts the
murderer. I’ve seen washing powder commercials with a more gripping storyline.
There is something I
haven’t mentioned yet that makes the lack of plot even worse. 20 minutes into
the movie Cowell’s daughters literally run into him, stand there briefly and
then run off, whilst he stands and does nothing. He was in the maze for 6
minutes before he finds them and then just lets them run away for no reason
whatsoever (I even took a screenshot with the timer at the bottom to show how stupid this really is). I had to sit through another 80 minutes of this drivel for no discernible reason, and that just fills me with rage.
For a movie that is
supposed to be a horror movie, there is less tension than in the viral YouTube
video “Charlie Bit My Finger”. At least in that you may worry that Charlie now
has a taste for blood, and will go on a murderous rampage. Or perhaps he’s a
werewolf, and the poor boy he’s just bitten now will suffer the same curse. The
most tense you ever feel whilst watching this movie is when you worry if it’s
going to rain any more between shots and how Bill Cowell will ever be able to
afford the dry cleaning bill.
In a world full of wannabe
independent filmmakers, Bill Cowell is probably the least talented I’ve ever
come across. I admire his determination; he not only directed and acted in this
mess, but also was responsible for producing, writing and assisting with both
the editing and the cinematography. Unfortunately this multi-tasking left
nobody to whack his nose with a rolled up newspaper and sternly tell him “No!”
It was surprising to
learn this was Cowell’s second movie (his first was called Raindrops) as it
really looks as though all the film making experience he had ever had before
making this movie was perhaps filming a friends wedding video for them. I say
that because he seems to have only just found the special camera effects button
in whatever editing program he had found a free trial of. For some reason
throughout the movie Cowell keeps inserting multiple angle shots of the same
scene in small floating boxes. He seems to love these more than George Lucas
loves screen wipes or JJ Abrams loves lens flare. When he isn’t using SFX that
not even the makers of workplace health and safety videos use anymore, Cowell
decides to randomly insert shots of random objects into the movie (or just
shaky shots of corn). It’s like a watching a bizarre game show, “here’s what
you could win if you escape from the maze…”
The cinematography
itself is so strange that you have to wonder what Cowell could have possibly
been thinking (or taking). At one point the camera rotates 360° for no reason whatsoever, and every conceivable
angle is used to film Cowell walking (including upside down). The camera also
loses focus quite often and nobody on the set has any concept of lighting, as
once darkness falls the movie is lit by a single spotlight. This film is
basically the least professional thing I’ve ever watched.
Cowell (or editor
Robert Imbs) also seems to not have grasped the fact that editing a movie
involves cutting pointless scenes. Actually if all the pointless scenes were
cut, we’d be watching something little more than a trailer. However they could
have least made them shorter as they really are bizarrely long in places. As I
mentioned before, much of the movie consists of Cowell wandering around
shouting “girls!”, but other
extended scenes include long static scenes of the corn field, nearly an
entire minute of the camera focusing in on a statue of Jesus, his daughters
screaming into a video camera for a few minutes, and Cowell digging for even
longer.
I couldn’t tell you
which fact I learned about this movie whilst researching it I found more
shocking. Firstly that this movie actually won an award! It was named as the
Best Feature Film – Suspense at the 2004 New York International Independent
Film & Video Festival. I can only imagine that it was the only film entered
into that category that year… Or secondly, that Cowell actually made a sequel (The Maize 2: Forever Yours),
which at the time of writing has a score of 1.2 on IMDB (thankfully not enough
reviews to reach the bottom 100 when our list was compiled though, as really
not sure I could bear to watch another couple of hours of Cowell’s handiwork).
Because of it’s many
faults, I’m sure this movie could be enjoyed with some good friends and a lot
of alcohol, but this is not a movie you want to tackle sober and alone as I
did. Not so much The Maize: The Movie, more I’m amazed they dare call this a
movie!
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