Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Digging Up the Marrow Blu-ray Movie Review

Avid Fan

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 25, 2015

Anyone familiar with Adam Green's FEARnet TV series, Holliston, will immediately recognize the distinctive style of the writer/director's latest feature, Digging Up the Marrow. Unfortunately, the film is being marketed as pure horror, which will leave many viewers disappointed when they find they're watching a faux reality show featuring Green and his co-workers, friends and family. It's a tongue-in-cheek comedy that gets infiltrated by horror elements, even as you're trying to decide whether to take them seriously.

Green struggled for years to get Holliston made, because networks kept trying to treat it as a traditional sitcom. Marrow is similarly hard to categorize, because it doesn't fit into a genre "box". It masquerades as a documentary being made by Green and his producing partner, Will Barratt, but then telegraphs almost immediately that the film is scripted fiction by casting the familiar face of Ray Wise (Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks) as a crazed "detective" who insists that monsters are real. The film draws liberally from Green's own experience with horror fandom, a world to which he has often expressed gratitude for his success, and yet it repeatedly parodies the excesses of fan culture. It provides an even more literal portrait of Green than Holliston, while at the same time encouraging the audience to laugh at his geeky fantasy life (a constant source of mockery in Holliston). All the while, the film builds to a logical conclusion that is both hilarious and creepy, in the giggly vein that often characterizes the end of a Holliston episode where the cast is randomly slaughtered.

Digging Up the Marrow was inspired by a letter Green received in 2010 from a fan who insisted that Victor Crowley, the fearsome killer played by Kane Hodder in the Hatchet franchise, is a real person whom the fan knew personally—and that Green has gotten his story wrong. At about the same time, Green met artist and illustrator Alex Pardee, who gave him a collection of imaginative drawings of monsters woven together by a fictional narrative about a detective whose "descriptions" had allegedly inspired Pardee's drawings. Green combined these two notions into the script for Digging Up the Marrow, which was shot over the next four years, with Pardee as art director and executive producer. The film debuted in August 2014 at London's Film 4 Fright Fest and was released in the U.S. theatrically and on VOD in February 2015.

The versions of Adam Green and Will Barratt who appear in Digging Up the Marrow are virtually indistinguishable from their real-life selves. They have a production company called ArieScope, where significant portions of the film were shot. Barratt is the film's cinematographer, as he is for most of Green's films, and he is usually holding the camera. Green is the successful creator of Frozen, Hatchet and Holliston, among other works, and a regular at fan conventions, excerpts of which are included throughout the film. The film's editor, Josh Ethier, plays himself, sitting at his editing station reviewing previously shot material with Green. Green's friend and long-time collaborator, Kane Hodder, stops by to view what Green considers an especially stunning scene. (Hodder's reaction disappoints: "Found footage. Boy, that hasn't been done before.") Holliston producer Sarah Elbert hassles Green for the Season 3 scripts he hasn't yet written. At home, Green's wife, Rileah Vanderbilt, worries that he's spending too much time on a project of questionable value and says she doesn't want to have to call Green's mother to report that he's been killed by a crazed fan he accompanied into the woods on a monster hunt. (Green's reply: "My mother would understand.")

To emphasize the realism, the film is littered with T-shirts, caps and posters for ArieScope productions, including the Hatchet films, Holliston and Chillerama. Some viewers have complained that this is self-promotion, but the more obvious explanation is economic: ArieScope didn't have to get clearances or pay licensing fees for its own merchandise. Indeed, on the disc's commentary track, Green points out a scene that had to be reshot when, during editing, he realized that one wall of the ArieScope office was filled with posters featuring Eighties heavy-metal bands, for none of which they had the rights.

In the midst of this realistic milieu appears William Dekker (Wise), a former detective with the Boston P.D., who tells Green and Barratt a fantastic story about real monsters who inhabit a secret world one hundred yards beneath the surface of our own in a place that Dekker has christened "the marrow". The marrow's inhabitants are grossly deformed human children who disappear long before they reach adulthood; in fact, they have fled (or been abducted) to the marrow. Dekker has no photographs, only artist's renderings based on descriptions from his sightings (the drawings are Pardee's). In interviews filled with bizarre anecdotes and paranoid ramblings, Dekker describes how, over the years, he has found various "entrances" to the marrow, only to have them disappear when the inhabitants realized they'd been discovered. The latest is a hole in the ground in an old and remote cemetery that can only be accessed through a state park in Chatsworth, California.

Green listens to Dekker's tales with a mixture of skepticism and belief. Like Fox Mulder hearing about aliens, he is eager for proof that monsters exist. (At one point, he even repeats Mulder's famous slogan: "I want to believe.") After Green and Barratt spend several nights with Dekker staking out the alleged entrance to the marrow, with inconclusive results, they decide to install miniature cameras near the site. Those recordings don't necessarily show monsters, but they do deepen the mystery of Dekker's story and lead to a series of revelations confirming that Dekker is more than just a horror fan with mental problems (although it is obvious from the outset that he isn't telling everything he knows). Key insights are supplied by directors Tom Holland (Fright Night) and Mick Garris (The Stand), both of whom Green consults at a horror convention. The last word, however, belongs to . . . well, you decide who it is.

Digging Up the Marrow Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Will Barratt was the cinematographer for Digging Up the Marrow, just as he is in the film, where he uses a variety of digital cameras. The credits list a "colorist" but no digital intermediate, and it appears that the output from the various sources was simply cut together at the digital workstation where Green and editor Josh Ethier are shown reviewing footage captured from the interviews and expeditions with William Dekker. (Green confirms in the commentary that this is Ethier's actual workstation at ArieScope.) Barratt's camera of choice in all of his recent projects for ArieScope, including Holliston, Hatchet III and Chillerama, has been the Red One, and some of Marrow's shots have the clean, sharp and detailed look that is typical of Red capture. However, Barratt is often shown holding a smaller, more portable camera, especially in scenes shot informally with no crew, and those images have a rougher, noisier texture that is especially noticeable when it is intercut with the smoother Red footage. Noisier still are the images captured by the mini-cams placed around the alleged entrance to the marrow, in part because of lighting conditions and in part because the cameras are of lesser quality. (This effect is, of course, intentional.)

Since Image Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably derived by a direct digital path, one can reasonably assume that the color shifts are what Green and Barratt intended. The palette skews toward bright and cheerful at the ArieScope offices and at Green's home. In Ethier's editing room, the colors even become hot and flushed (expressing Green's excitement, perhaps?). Then, in the scenes with William Dekker, the color intensity dials down to suggest something shady, mysterious, maybe even ghostly. In the night scenes near the "entrance" to the marrow, black and contrast levels have been manipulated to obscure detail; Green and Barratt want the viewer to be peering at the screen, trying to make out whether something is there. The same is true of the footage from the remote mini-cams, which Green and his editor study on their monitors with equal intensity. In a climactic sequence near the end, which cannot be described without spoilers, the interplay of blackness, light and color has been precisely balanced so that, along with the rapid editing, the image reveals just enough to create the desired effect.

Although Marrow runs only 89 minutes, the Blu-ray contains substantial extras in HD, so that Image has used a BD-50. The film's average bitrate is 29.99 Mbps, which is very good for a digitally acquired film. Compression and other artifacts were nowhere to be seen.

Digging Up the Marrow Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The 5.1 soundtrack for Digging Up the Marrow, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, opens with a revealing effect. The film begins with a montage of clips from fan conventions with documentary-like mono sound in the front center, but then the title appears and the soundscape immediately expands into the front left and right and the surrounds. This audio envelopment continues for the rest of the film, but it is used primarily to define the environment in relation to the person holding the camera (usually, but not always, Will Barratt). For the most part, the sounds other than dialogue (which is clear and distinct) are environmental in nature: car engines and traffic during driving scenes; telephones and electronic equipment at ArieScope; forest sounds in the cemetery where Dekker believes the marrow has an entrance. In a few key scenes, however—and, once again, these cannot be described without spoilers—other sounds occur in front of, behind, above or to either side of the camera, and the placement in the sonic field is precise. The dynamic range is also up to the challenge.

Digging Up the Marrow has a minimalist, atmospheric underscore, which is by Green's Holliston composer, Bear McCreary (who is better known for scoring Battlestar Galactica). It's subtle enough to pass almost unnoticed.

Digging Up the Marrow Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Writer/Director Adam Green, Artist Alex Pardee, Will Barratt & Ray Wise: Green dominates this informative commentary, with substantial input from Barratt and Pardee and the occasional insight from Wise. The discussion covers everything from the origin of the project to the specifics of shooting and editing to the final release. Green also addresses certain key decisions, such as having Dekker played by a recognizable actor instead of an unknown, and the omnipresence of ArieScope's own products and logos throughout the film. Finally, he adds several personal notes, including the recent death of Holliston co-star Dave Brockie, a/k/a Oderus Urungus, who appears in fan convention scenes, and the even more recent divorce of Green and Rileah Vanderbilt.



• Deleted/Extended Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 30:43): Green introduces each of the five scenes with an explanation of where it fit in the original script and why it was removed or shortened. The longest are the initial cut of Dekker's first interview and the original version of Kane Hodder's visit to ArieScope. A short deleted scene features Laura Ortiz rehearsing a Holliston episode.



• Monsters of the Marrow (1080p; 1.78:1; 28:32): Green, Pardee, sculptor Greg Aronowitz and effects department head Robert Pendergraft describe the painstaking process of transforming Pardee's drawings into three-dimensional moving figures.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:32): The trailer is a good example of the film's misleading promotion, because it concentrates entirely on jumps and scares, which isn't representative of the film as a whole.



• Additional Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Odd Thomas, Wolfcop and The Houses October Built, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Digging Up the Marrow Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

No one appreciates horror fans more than Adam Green. Having started as a hardcore fan himself, and having built a career as an independent filmmaker on the strength of fan loyalty and enthusiasm, Green has an intimate understanding of the intricacies of fan culture. Just as Holliston's dense layering of inside jokes and obscure horror references represented an invitation for horror fans to join a party in progress, Digging Up the Marrow offers a tribute to the fans who have supported Green and his colleagues in their projects to date. Despite its often ironic tone, the film offers a cautionary tale to purveyors of horror to treat even a weirdo admirer with utmost respect. His story may sound strange, but he might just be onto something. Highly recommended.