DIGGING UP THE MARROW
A horror mockumentary? This ought to be fun. A load of horror movie stalwarts playing themselves (and one who isn’t) talking about the monster genre and then an outsider (Ray Wise) claims not only that monsters are real, but he knows where they live. Suddenly the documentary makers are making an entirely different sort of film. Is this guy nuts or is there really some weird stuff out there? Or maybe both? Like we say, it should be fun and actually, it is.
Digging Up the Marrow is the brainchild of writer/director Adam Green (Hatchet, Frozen, Holliston) and artist Alex Pardee, whose work is the inspiration for the “monsters” who live underground near an old graveyard (where else?). This could have easily not worked but Green’s direction is fairly deft and the cast of what we assume are his mates put on a good show (including a particularly amusing turn from Kane Hodder as, er, Kane Hodder, failing to understand that the film isn’t a found footage flick and repeatedly giving his opinion about the make-up). But it’s not just a comedy, and while the horror is low-budget and low-key (of the commendable “less is more” school) it does actually manage to deliver a few jumps, genuine scares and some proper chilling dark stuff. In fact, despite its format, it’s actually easy to forget it’s supposed to be a documentary when it starts to suck you in during those tense moments.
There’s really only one minor criticism we’ve got of Digging Up the Marrow. While Ray Wise is in pretty good form as Dekker, the slightly unhinged monster-follower, he is pretty well known in the genre. So, with everyone else playing themselves, it’s slightly incongruous to have Ray Wise not playing Ray Wise, if you see what we mean. Nitpicking? Yeah, possibly…
So basically this is sort of Nightbreed (1990) in mockumentary form but much more fun than that actually sounds. It’s got scares and quite a few laugh out loud moments (because we don’t say LOL here at STARBURST) but our favourite line is when Dekker asks Green how soft the light he’s planning on setting up in the graveyard is. “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say it was very, very soft”. Well, we laughed…
INFO: CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: ADAM GREEN / SCREENPLAY: ADAM GREEN / STARRING: RAY WISE, ADAM GREEN, WILL BARRETT, RILEAH VANDERBILT, JOSH ETHIER, KANE HODDER / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 22ND
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