SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

MBunge 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.

ir_bork This movie was extremely boring. It should least not more than 15 minutes. The images of child and animal being killed were little bit disturbing.Usually I don't write comments but this one was so bad having so many good and excellent comments. I think in this case we are one step closer to honest assessment of this title.What more can I say? I fall asleep during this movie 3 times. It was about 4 hours after I had woken up from 8 hours long sleeping period. I think it is the point itself.There is no dialog between characters except maybe 2 sentences at the very end.When you fall asleep once watching it do not try to rewind and catch up because you will fall asleep again.

autnes The premise of the story is simple: An old man living alone in the woods accidentally stumble upon a murder of a small child, and tries to convince the police that the murder has occurred. Though very little dialog is provided throughout the film, the visual narrative told by the camera's eye alone made the film quite engaging. The setting of the gray woods conveys a feeling of loneliness, which complements the quietness of the characters themselves. We can also sense helplessness in the old man's inability to convince the police of the murder, which parallels the silenced child's inability to tell her own story.True horror lies in feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and irrationality. This film successfully addresses these elements by visuals alone, rather than relying on cheap sound effects or blood and gore that other bad horror films use when the narrative is weak.Cleverly, the story unfolds at a slow pace to build up tension for a few creepy and startling moments. The ending is also unexpected and believable. Reminiscent of Japanese horror films, such as "The Ring," and "Dark Water," or English horror films, such as "Lady in Black," and "The Innocents," this film provides viewers the experience of true atmosphere horror. I recommend anyone who enjoys a good chilling to the bone scare to give this film a try.By the way, if you haven't seen the films I just mentioned above, you might want to give them a try as well.

plan9-10 The plot is straightforward an old man living off a main road in woodland one day witnesses a man murdering a child in the woods. Soft For Digging follows the old man's attempts to try and convince the police that what he saw was not a figment of his imagination. However, there is a problem each time the old man guides the police to where the murder happen no corpse can be found. Soft For Digging has a diminutive dialogue which reflects the majority of the scenes of the film, an old man living by himself in a house. During the film I found that I was scared twice namely when the murdered child abruptly appears before the old man. The rest of the film I have to admit did not engage me; I found the tempo of the film a little too slow. The limited dialogue was not a problem. However, the development of the story and its conclusions, after watching the film, took too long. I feel more could have been made of the relationship, ghostly encounters, with the child and the old man. Alone in the woods at night unsure of your own mind can lead to some eerie situations, children are always scary as ghosts, see Dark Water.