Director: Adam Green
Writer: Adam Green
Stars: Ray Wise, Adam Green, Will Barratt
Run Time: 1 Hour, 29 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/30O3nku
Synopsis
We start out watching interviews of numerous celebrities and pseudo-celebrities talking about their love of movie monsters.
We then cut to ArieScope movie studio, and we talk to Adam Green, a director/writer who’s made lots of well-known horror films. He talks about stuff that people send him, like drawings and crazy books. We see a lot of scenes from their real-life movie productions. One such crazy book is from William Dekker, a guy who claims he knows where real monsters live, and he wants Adam to make a film about it. Adam was impressed enough with Dekker’s submission that he wants to film the subject of Dekker’s story.
We then shift to cuts of an interview filmed over several days with retired detective William Dekker. He talks about children born with birth defects who just vanish from society; he says most of them have gone on to this place to thrive. They are 100 yards beneath the surface; they have a whole world down there. When he was young, he saw a kind of serpent-faced man in a lumberyard. After that, he found others that hid in the woods each night. He found the entrance to their hiding place, and he called it “The Marrow.”
So they go out there. Past the old cemetery and deeper into the woods on the other side. Dekker seems a little crazy, but not so much that he couldn’t be on the level. He’s very evasive about his family, and he has a padlocked door in his house, so there are some red flags going up. Dekker keeps seeing things in the woods, but they can’t see anything with the camera lights off. Then they turn the lights on, and they all see it.
They wire up the cemetery with numerous cameras and install a floodlight to supply enough light to hopefully film one of the “people.” Dekker warns that just like everywhere else, there are some of these creatures that are dangerous; not most of them, but some are. Before long, they start catching monsters on camera.
Adam then has to leave on a month-long horror convention tour. Other directors start laughing when Adam tells them about Dekker; he’s approached all of them at one time or another. They all know Dekker’s crazy. Dekker’s been lying to them, and he’s also clearly got a secret. Still, Adam really wants to believe, and sometimes it’s hard to believe.
By the time it’s over, he’ll believe.
Commentary
The whole thing is done in the form of a found footage mixed with a documentary. Dekker’s initial explanation made it sound like the secret world of the “Nightbreed” film from the 80s.
Ray Wise has never been bad in anything, and this is no exception. When I heard he was “Starring” in a low-budget horror film, I assumed he’d be in it for five or ten minutes, tops. Not the case, he really is integral to the plot and he gets a lot of screen time.
There’s lots of Hollywood Horror cameos; Kane Hodder, Tony Todd, Tom Holland, Lloyd Kaufman, and others. From the trailers, I was expecting something along the lines of Blair Witch, but this is really nothing like that; it’s actually very good.