Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Overrated

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I honestly want to punch the director in the throat for making this god awful piece of garbage. I LOVE creepy depraved extreme horror flicks and this was a pure waste of time. I was turned onto the movie after watching a documentary about snuff films and figured it would be decent. WOW was I wrong. It had everything it needed to be amazing minus the key part... HORROR. It was slow, boring and monotone. There was truly nothing about the movie that made me want to continue to watch it. The chapters gave away what was going to happen and it was left WIDE open from the get go. Sad I wasted time tracking the film down and making an evening of watching it. Thank god for A Serbian Film and the like.

As a film school project, Soft For Digging would probably merit an A-. As a work of professional cinema, it hovers somewhere between C- and D+, depending on how tough you are a grader. It's nowhere near as insultingly awful as other movies of dubious commercial origins, but there's still no reason it needed to be released for public consumption.Virgil Manoven (Edmond Mercier) is an old man who lives in a cabin in the woods. He looks like the love child of former New York City mayor Ed Koch and Col. Klink from Hogan's Heroes. His standard outfit is long johns and an uncinched bath robe. One day, Virgil's cat scampers off into the woods and he follows. He doesn't find the cat but does see a man kill a young girl. The authorities can find no trace of the girl or any murder, so Virgil mopes around his cabin, sucking on reindeer candy canes and having visions of the dead girl. Coincidence eventually leads Virgil to the truth behind the dead girl, leading to a scene of spectral revenge that dances on the line between laughable and unnerving. Virgil then returns home and finds his missing cat waiting for him.Evaluated as the work of a student filmmaker, there's a lot to admire about Soft For Digging. Yeah, it's a little rough when it comes to technique, slightly derivative when it comes to style and at least twice as long as it needs to be, but writer/director J.T. Petty shows a good eye for visuals and a firm hand at storytelling. There's barely more than 3 words of dialog in the film, until a handful of poorly lip synched sentences at the very end, yet Petty's direction never stumbles and he effectively conveys a number of different plot and emotional developments. Whether you like this movie or not, you can't watch it and deny that Petty knows what he's doing behind a camera.Unfortunately, knowing what you're doing doesn't always result in doing something good. As a 20 minute film festival entry, Soft For Digging might have been passable. Stretched out to over an hour, it becomes the sort of movie that people just can't sit through. I would bet $50 that the majority of folks who've tried to watch this, in a theater or at home, gave up on it well before it was halfway done. It's too rudimentary a tale to be extended like this. Since I'm reviewing it, I had to watch the whole thing and it was an unrewarding slog.If J.T. Petty goes on to greatness in the movie business, scenes out of Soft For Digging are what would be played during his interviews on late night talks shows so the host could make fun of his extremely humble beginnings. You're better off waiting to see this film in that format, rather than waste you time and money on the real thing.

Virgil Manoven is an old man who lives alone in his remote rural farmhouse.Chasing his beloved cat one morning into the woods around his property,Manoven glimpses what looks like the murder of a young child in the middle of the woods.He reports the crime to the police but there's no body to be found.Troubled by disturbing visions,he investigates further and eventually is guided to a spooky orphanage where events take a supernatural turn…"Soft for Digging" is a fantastic experimental horror with lots of creepy atmosphere to spare.This minimalist film is almost completely devoid of dialogue.Some scenes are genuinely nightmarish and the acting is excellent.The location sets provide plenty of creepiness:the eerie Maryland woods rival those used in "The Blair Witch Projcect".Give this strange horror film a chance.9 out of 10.

Take the low budget, settings, and direction of Evil Dead crossed with The Blair Witch Project and mix it with the theme and atmosphere of The Ring and you have Soft For Digging. Sounds promising, eh? Well, it is…but with some faults. Some will be turned off by the slow pace, others by the almost complete lack of dialogue. For me, neither of these things were major problems. The biggest complaint I had is that it wasn't quite as "scary" as it should've been. It's like right on the edge of being a truly frightening film but somehow fails to take the big plunge, at least for me. If you thought The Ring was scary, this flick will be right up your alley. Nonetheless though, I did find it rather enjoyable (if that's the right word) and like I said, being right up to the edge, it did provide me a few chills and effective scenes. Good, dark-humored ending too.