Adam Green who has given us "Hatchet" which I praised and "Frozen" which was a bore, brings us a semi-documentary style film as his late entry into the hand held genre craze. Yes, even during the disco era, most respected rockers broke down and did a disco song.

In this feature, Adam Green played himself. He is contacted by retired detective William Dekker (Ray Wise) about a group of "monsters" or deformed humans who live underground in what he calls "The Marrow." They travel around with a camera getting a lot of pictures of nothing and then like all hand held genre films, things pick up in the last few minutes.

The monster make-up was excellent, however Adam Green in front of the camera was not. In fact most of the horror film crowd who played themselves in front of the camera were a yawn including Kane Hodder without a hockey mask.

Worth a Redbox rental

Filmmakers Adam Green and Will Barratt are working on a documentary about horror genre-based art. The pair are contacted by cranky and obsessive retired detective William Dekker (an excellent and convincing performance by veteran character thesp Ray Wise),who claims that actual monsters do indeed exist amongst us.

Writer/director Green relates the clever and engrossing story at a constant pace, makes neat use of the faux documentary premise, generates some real tension in the harrowing last third, and, best of all, pokes witty and inspired fun at both himself and the inherently stressful and contrived nature of moviemaking in general and attempting to put together a documentary on a subject that is basically looked down upon as bogus and absurd in particular. This film further benefits from a neat assortment of familiar genre faces popping up in cool cameos as themselves. The monsters look super gnarly, too. And the ending manages to be creepy without coming across as hokey or overdone. A nifty little fright flick.

a documentary-style found footage film by the writer/director of Holliston and the Hatchet slasher series. i'd heard good things about the monster design and make-up, but wasn't very impressed. the monsters get only a few seconds a piece of shaky-camera screen time and are actually pretty cartoonishly goofy-looking if you pause on them

the movie suffers a bit from the shaky camera syndrome typical of its genre — there's a point where the crew is sitting in the woods at night, waiting for a monster to appear, and when one of them points to a shape moving through the trees, the camera guy focuses literally everywhere but where the character is pointing. i can only imagine it was done on purpose to parody the genre style, and the actors were laughing about it behind the scenes

the story is imaginative and compelling, and Ray Wise, as detective William Dekker who invites director Adam Green to witness and record proof of the existence of monsters, is a great actor and storyteller. my favourite scenes are the ones where Adam and the film crew are just sitting in Dekker's house, recording his stories of past encounters with and illustrations of monsters from a subterranean metropolis he calls The Marrow

i like the film despite it's flaws and wouldn't mind a sequel picking up exploration, where this one ends rather abruptly, of The Marrow and its inhabitants. recommended for fans of found footage monster movies