This one caught my be surprise, but after doing some research I felt I gotta see it. Thank Satan it didn't take long for it to be released after I discovered it, and here it is: Digging Up the Marrow, the new horror film from director and writer Adam Green. To be honest, between us, I never been a fan of Adam Green's work. Not that he seems like unsympathetic guy - quite the opposite, I just didn't connect to the Hatchet movies as well as some of my fellow horror fans out there. But I really love Frozen, a brilliant piece of thriller/drama, simple yet effective. That was my favorite one… until now.
Adam Green is a director of horror movies and that means he have a loyal fan base who he interacts with. One day an elderly man, Dekker (Ray Wise) contacts him and claims monsters are real. Green and his photographer Will seeks out old Dekker and interviews him, let him show all his sketches of the monsters and tell the story of...The Marrow, a series of underground metropolises, where human monsters live after being rejected from society (Nightbreed, anyone?) But is Dekker really telling the truth? Or is he just making things up to get some attention, to cope with the loss of an eventual son? But Green can’t let it go, and one night - at what Dekker claims is one of many entrances to The Marrow - the caught something one tape, and then it’s just impossible to back away!
Digging Up the Marrow is a mockumentary, and spends a considerable time building up the story, setting the characters - and sometimes pads the running time with some stuff that really doesn’t matter in the end - but I can buy that, because that’s documentaries to me, sometime you need to find a story in something that’s not from the beginning is a story. So in that way Digging Up the Marrow is more realistic than others in the same genre. This is a monster movie, but it’s carried by Adam Green and Ray Wise in many ways. You could call it a vanity project for Green, he’s the writer, director and star - but truth be told, he also gives us a good performance, showing both weaknesses as a human being and celebrity, a sense of being rejected when he finds out Dekker have gone to every other horror director in LA first, before catching Green on the hook.
It reminds me of the criminally underrated Incident at Loch Ness (2004), where writer Zak Penn both makes a horror movie, mockumentary and spoofs his own Hollywood-persona. That one and Digging could be a nice double feature actually. But like with Loch Ness and Werner Herzog, Digging Up the Marrow have it’s own scene stealer, and that’s Ray Wise - who’s absolutely stunning as the slippery, not-always-so-trustworthy Dekker. There’s especially one scene, during an interview, when he’s wickedly eerie. And isn’t it odd his character took (which is hinted at) a name, Dekker, so similar to David Cronenberg’s character in Nightbreed, Decker?
So how about the monsters? Let me put it like this: it’s awesome, so fucking awesome, but you wanna see more. I really wanted to see much more! But hey, that might also be good, because now it’s triggered my imagination so much I can’t stop myself from analyzing the mythology and creating my own stories, which might be the best rating a movie like this could get. The more I think of it the better it get and I need to watch it again soon, just because it’s so ambitious and sometimes quite scary - which is rare nowadays.
Digging Up the Marrow is an original piece of mockumentary/fake footage, a bit too talky at times, but the emotional quality is there and the monsters are awesome. It’s a great movie and it will probably land on my list of the best genre films of 2015! I really, really, really hope Adam Green and his colleagues will expand this movie, either with a sequel, a web series or hell, even a comic book. I just want to know more.
Please, Mr Green. Please?
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