BY TODD GARBARINI
In the days before the home video revolution
made its way into my family, the only way to see a movie on television was to
either watch it when it was aired or beg my grandmother to ask her brother to
record it for me on his $1200 Magnavox video tape recorder. Just before
Halloween in 1983, she told me of a movie that she had seen in a local theater in
1954 called The Maze, which starred
one of her favorite actors, Richard Carlson. Channel 5 in New York was showing
it at 2:30 am and we later viewed it at her brother’s house on VHS. I recall a
TV trailer for Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession
airing during the commercial break, oblivious that it would become one of my
favorite horror movies seven years later.
The
Maze,
which was released in 3-D in July 1953 and played at the RKO Albee Theater in
Brooklyn, NY with William Beaudine’s Roar
of the Crowd with Howard Duff of all things, has all of the charms that one
associates with B-movies of the 1950s. After a brief 1979 theatrical re-release
of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) in 3-D, the format was
experiencing a resurgence at the box office beginning in the early 1980s with Ferdinando
Baldi’s Comin’ at Ya!, which I was so
disappointed to see was rated R! The Maze
is a film that lacks action, something that was all too familiar in the 3-D
resurgence and exactly what you want from the format. There is a lot of talking
and discussions up until the very end, and this review contains spoilers regarding
the very ridiculous denouement, so
you’ve been warned!
Richard Carlson plays a Scotsman with no
Scottish accent named Gerald MacTeam on vacation in Cannes. He’s engaged to his
girlfriend Kitty (Veronica Hurst) and the pair seem perfectly happy until he
receives a letter from William, his Uncle Samuel’s butler, informing him of his
uncle having taken sick. Despite not having a relationship with his uncle (a
Baronet), Gerald feels a moral obligation to go to his side and pushes aside
his initial reluctance to help. Uncle Samuel resides in the foreboding Craven
Castle, a stately manor bereft of modern conveniences such as electricity or
telephones and it isn’t long before he passes away, his obituary capturing
Kitty’s eye despite no communication from Gerald. Kitty is perplexed by his
silence until he writes her some weeks later, “releasing†her from the
engagement.
Kitty and her aunt make their way to the
castle and Gerald is unsurprisingly distressed to see them both. He also looks
like he’s aged fifteen years and is unceremoniously aloof. Kitty and her aunt
stay the night, and Kitty discovers a hidden passage (remember the hidden room
in 1979’s The Changeling?) that leads
to a lookout tower which reveals a hedge maze in the rear of the castle (think
1980’s The Shining) and detects
strange noises and movement in the middle of the night. The remainder of the
film attempts to keep this secret from the audience and when its revealed to
eyes 66 years hence, it’s difficult not to laugh. The “secret†is a frog-like
monster who used to be the castle’s master and meets an untimely death
following a horrific illness. In the end, Gerald is able to return to a normal
existence.