Written and Directed by Michael P. Blevins
Starring Ford Austin, Tom Fitzpatrick, Rachel Alig
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes
Available digitally June 1

by Stacey Osbeck, Staff Writer

State and local laws differ, and I’m no lawyer, but I think most people would agree if a homeowner finds something in their house or on the property they should get to keep it.  If the previous owner leaves a Mickey Mantle card on the floor, he clearly didn’t want it and it’s now mine.  So in writer-director Michael P. Blevins’ Digging to Death, when David (Ford Austin) moves into his new home and then, in the midst of installing his own septic tank, unearths three million plus dollars in cash there really should be no reason he needs to tell anyone or reach out to the authorities.  No reason, except for the dead body he finds rotting beside it.    

This storyline taps into a secret dream so many have: without stealing or doing anything wrong, someone stumbles upon a ton of cash.  The money will change their lives exponentially for the better. But no one can ever find out.  No Country for Old Men and A Simple Plan tackled similar stories in the thriller genre, whereby Blevins realizes it through horror.   

The corpse, in the large buried shipping crate in the backyard, isn’t fine with staying dead.  It’s not clear what he’s after which makes him even creepier. Does he want the house back?  David has already taken on the whole mortgage.  Does he desire the money?  Honestly he’s a corpse how will he spend it?  Clearly, an encounter with the walking dead it outside of the scope of the living’s logic.   

This film has its issues.  The first thing is it starts out a horror and later shifts to camp slasher, so it leads in with scares and rounds out in playful exaggeration.  I would have preferred one or the other over both in the same film.   

Also, David doesn’t have a plan.  And long after the cat’s out of the bag and he should clearly leave town, he stays.  I realize most of the population, if they had that amount of money thrust upon them, wouldn’t have a solid plan.  That’s why you hear about professional athletes who earned millions and later in life have to work at the Home Depot to make ends meet.  When it comes to big money a lot of people can’t come up with a strong course of action.  The thing is David doesn’t seem to try.   

He decides to grab the stash out of the underground wooden crate in the backyard.  Then determines he doesn’t want the cash the house after all and moves it back.  David takes the weight of not reporting a dead body seriously, debating both sides with himself in the mirror.  What he doesn’t openly consider are all the new paths money could create for him and his adult daughter, Jessica (Rachel Alig).  He just sits on it.  In a frazzled state, David calls his daughter begging her to come see him.  She’s with her new boyfriend, but still drops everything to go.  When Jessica arrives, he changes his mind and decides not to tell her.  Even though her heart condition, and the expensive aspects of it insurance won’t cover, is one of the main reasons given as to why he should keep the dough, he doesn’t give her any of the money.  I mean he couldn’t give her a hundred bucks for gas? 

The scares in the first half of the film were well earned.  The fact that David became so frayed and exhausted from the stress that he can't distinguish between genuine threats and what's merely a bump in the night, adds an extra layer of fear.  

Part way through the movie there’s a brief moment of foreshadowing.  When I saw it I thought, wait is that where this is going because that would be cool and watched as things led to that, and yes it was cool.   

This film is low budget, low production value, but the makeup job on the corpse by Sheila Mia Seifi was terrifyingly well done.  Not to mention the strong performance of Tom Fitzpatrick, the reanimated dead man, who knew when to keep it subtle and when to go full on shriek fest.  The ending made this indie a win for me and I’d be interested to see what the filmmaker comes out with next.