Oh crap. Is this really a low-budget indie short about the Holocaust? It is? Ugh.
Escape from the Fire begins with a little boy (Jordan Goldberg) running through the woods. He’s got curly hair and he’s wearing a Star of David band on his beige uniform sleeve so right away you know you’re in for a Farrelly-esque laugh-riot. The little boy seeks refuge in a house where he finds a little girl (Allison Sparrow). The two of them hide from Nazis and other bad men and everybody learns an important lesson about, you know, genocide and stuff.
Perhaps director Joel Dunn assumed that if he made a movie about cute little children hiding from Nazis, there was no way anyone could criticize it. Well, I’m not going to let him get off that easily. For a 13-minute movie, the little boy sure does a lot of running. He runs through the woods. He runs around the house. He runs through more woods. The good thing about a movie in which there isn’t really any dialog (there’s some un-subtitled German and lots of gesturing) is that you can fast forward through it without missing anything. Yes, the Holocaust was a horrible tragedy. But that doesn’t mean that we needed another movie about it. Especially if it doesn’t have anything new to say on the subject that we didn’t already learn from Anne Frank.
In short, “Escape from the Fire” is nothing special. But that little boy is pretty cute.
