Just imagine you and your friends, a bunch of cinema fans, have time to kill, and one comes out with the idea: let's make a zero budget movie. If you are in this mood this movie is an absolute must: you will get a lot of good hints and a (short) list of things to avoid. And dream to be as good a beginner as this Kaufman is. You will need a location: if it is good you can just write the script inside it, by night. An abandoned, gloomy, brownish, creepy warehouse would be perfect; you can have it for just a few beers. The genre, of course, horror/fantasy to avoid the traps of intimate dramas, or the costs action movies. With a wise script special effects can be very simple and at the same time so pertinent to their background to be unarguable (when you see them in this movie, just reflect how they are obtained and what's the relationship with the story). The movie has apparently no pretensions, the language is simple, the end may be imagined, the use of cinematographic archetypes abundant, citations range from Charlie Chaplin (a character features this across the whole movie, and, please don't think it's naive or stupid, on the contrary, it gives a special flavor) to the standard up-to-date gore. A partial theatrical approach also helps giving some structure, but in the whole, it is the location that keeps all together. There are nice ideas here and there that put salt in the soup, some scenes that need a bit of cleaning, the suspense is always alive. A film to look with critical eye to fully enjoy it. But if you are a lazy consumer and like the genre, it is worth the price anyway.
Review of 13 Hours in a Warehouse
