Critic Reviews

More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.

Ultimately, Digging Up The Marrow is more of an affectionate comedy than a horror movie, despite a third act that features some tense moments and hostile critters.

In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.

A playfully self-reflexive exercise whose endless in-jokes will best be appreciated by only the most ardent genre aficionados.

Digging Up the Marrow could have been an effective riff on Barker's "Nightbreed," but instead becomes just another found footage horror lark, with occasionally nifty effects and an overriding sense that Green's ego, and not a wonderful Ray Wise performance, is what the movie is really about.

After poking fun at both Green's lack of originality and the hackneyed nature of found-footage shockers, Digging Up the Marrow merely resorts to climactic shaky-cam footage of people running through the pitch-black woods -- thereby becoming the very dull, clichéd thing it mocks.

The results are decidedly more mind-numbing than bone-chilling.

Green, who plays a snotty version of himself, doesn't follow through on any of the ideas that make his film stand out. As a result, Digging Up the Marrow just uselessly lies there, like a cat during a heat wave.