Virgil Manoven (Edmond Mercier) is an elderly man who lives a hermit's existence out in the forests of Maryland, though he's not so divorced from civilisation that he doesn't have his newspaper delivered or manage his trips to the store to collect his groceries. In the main, though, his usual company is his pet cat which he dotes over, so when one morning after waking the moggy slips out of the door, Virgil feels it is his duty to go after the animal and try to retrieve it. As he walks further into the woods, mug of tea in hand and leaving an egg boiling on the stove, he is ill-prepared for the sight he is about to see which will change his life, even at this stage of advancing years...
But Soft for Digging was no trite parable about how it was never too late to change for the better, it was a rural horror movie that was reputedly made on a budget of six thousand dollars, as it started its existence as a student film, made for writer and director J.T. Petty's thesis project, then when his talent was recognised he managed to get a distribution deal, not bad for a movie with no stars and nothing in the way of Hollywood glamour. The good news for Petty was that it got him noticed and he went onto bigger things, becoming one of the most sought after computer games authors for some time afterwards.
He continued to make films as well, most notably the horror Western The Burrowers, but there were some chiller fans who still had a soft spot in their hearts for this debut, which made a virtue of its tiny budget as many filmmakers working on slender means did, by venturing out to a rural locations and taking advantage of the most natural "sets" in the world, reminiscent of the then-recent The Blair Witch Project. The forest in this case was one in the middle of winter, with a stark, unwelcoming appearance just right for the bleak tale that would play out amidst the leafless trees, and just as well since Petty really put his star Mercier through his paces in what would be his sole movie appearance.
As with the Blair Witch business, to keep on walking would seem to be the impetus here, as that's what he did, lots of it, through the chilled woods until he found, not his cat (though that showed up later on) but a murder scene - as the murder was in progress. What he witnesses is a man and a little girl who doesn't respond when Virgil waves, then is scooped up by the presumed guardian and strangled to death; our ageing hero is understandably horrified, and sets out to fetch the police while simultaneously making good his escape before the killer can notice he was being watched. However, despite an extensive search the girl (Sarah Ingerson) is never found, so the possibility that the old geezer had hallucinated the entire experience raises its head.
Virgil only utters one line in the whole hour and a quarter it takes for the movie to last, one solitary word in fact, and the other characters are similarly reticent to strike up conversation, leaving the methods closer to silent movies with the frequent intertitles to let us know where we had reached in the plot and what would happen next, though these messages were guarded in their language. With a weirdly obsessive dedication to recording the minutiae of its hero's journey which could have been a way of extending the running time, but actually plays out as strangely compelling in its grim mundanity, Petty was patently making the most of some very meagre funds, and even by the finale it was not entirely clear what had happened, just that either Virgil was a sap for wanting justice or that he had done the right thing, yet the consequences were too murky to judge if that was going to be beneficial to him or indeed the world at large. Soft for Digging was in no way going to satisfy conventional moviegoers, but if you liked to take a dip in more experimental waters, it did impress within its means.
