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Part mockumentary and part found footage film, Adam Green's Digging Up The Marrow is an ambitious film with a solidly fantastic concept that ultimately fails to grasp its full potential by depending far too much on its star's abilities to convey a genuine sense of realism. More grievously, it does away far too quickly with the wonderment inspired by its ideas. That is not to say that it's an absolute failure. Though it's admirable that the filmmakers tried to distance themselves from common found footage tropes (at the expense of immersion), the concept is so strong that the final minutes of third act payoff (itself the strongest found footage trope, ironically) is enough to reward the viewer with somewhat of a satisfying result.
Green has made a quick name for himself in the horror genre with his fresh and at times tongue in cheek approach to familiar material, genuinely harrowing pieces of work, and unique ideas. In a lot of ways Digging Up The Marrow is his love letter to the genre he loves so much and the fans that support him. Alas, it is also a love letter to his ego. Not to insinuate that he is a narcissist but his choice to play a fictionalized version of himself pursuing a fan's claims of a world where "real monsters" live showed perhaps a bit too much hubris on his part. In short, he is not a good actor and neither are his cohorts (all playing themselves). This immediately rips you out of the narrative. His dubious choice to cast a relatively recognizable actor as the potentially deranged fan puts the nail in the coffin. Both these choices were made to dispel any idea that he was claiming the events to be an actual documentary but it ruins the experience of watching the film because, really, how stupid does he thinks his fans are?
The unreliable narrator is poorly written but even if he wasn't Green and company fail to convey the proper reactions to his tale of creatures living beneath us that the viewer palpably feels were intended from each. And while found footage style films leave much in the shadows, this film lingers far too much on uninteresting non-actors reacting to virtually nothing in super incredulous ways.
THAT BEING SAID...the idea is genuinely brilliant. Taking a page, intentionally or not, from Clive Barker's brilliant short story "The Skins of the Fathers" and even from the Nightbreed of his story "Cabal", the movie poses the possibility of a world of the grotesque and potentially dangerous denizens of a world living just beyond the veil of our perception. And just like the heroes in those tales the protagonists in this one stumble across the splendidly macabre creatures only to find them to be more than they expected or wanted them to be. When this payoff does occur you see glimpses of what could of been with this story if they had just tried less to turn the tables on tropes and gone for a straightforward story that really furrowed deep into the rich and fertile ground of it's ideas. Alas, it is far too little to save the whole but, boy, it could of been brilliant.
Genre fans will feel a bit more warmth toward the picture than most as it also doubles as unabashed fan service but, again, it just comes off as stilted when director's that can't act cameo to further the plot. The creature designs of Alex Pardee and the effects are astonishing and, interestingly, part of the reason the story came to be as he was a fan that sent his work to Green and posited the idea of real monsters. I truly wish Green had approached this much more seriously (flat humor also abounds) and had focused more on bringing convincing portrayals to the forefront if only to spare the story such an unfortunate carry out. Not a total waste of time but definitely a waste of an idea.
