Bullet Points: The Wild Man (2022)

If your movie is slated to release anywhere near Halloween then it damn well better be scary. So many of us block off the entire month of October for movies that give you the creeps that I feel it is a prerequisite that these new films should send a shiver or two up our collective spines.

While I had never heard of a skunk ape before watching The Wild Man. It doesn’t take a genius to know it’s some sort of humanoid bigfoot creature that can probably tear your arms off if you’re unlucky enough to meet one. Let’s hope I’m right and this thing tears some limbs off!

Synopsis: Young women have been going missing in Ochopee, FL, without a single suspect in custody. A young journalist, Sara, convinces her crew to join her investigation as she travels to Ochopee to document her discoveries, but they soon realize their presence in this town is not welcome. Determined to find her story, Sara convinces her friends to stick with her, because they’re onto something big. Upon meeting Dale, the town’s notorious conspiracy theorist, she’s convinced he knows more than he is willing to share. The crew humors Dale’s ridiculous theories, even accompanying him into the Florida swamps on his quest to show them “The Wild Man”, hoping he’ll somehow reveal his guilt. But what the crew discovers is a secret much deeper than fairy tales and legends. What they discover is much darker and more sinister than they bargained for.

• Do gooders: Three documentary makers head into the small town of Ochopee with very little info and not much money in their pockets. They do what they can to question the locals but mostly get the runaround and end up focusing on one of the main “suspects” for the missing girls in the local crazy Dale. He’s full-on conspiracy guy who also is the town expert on the skunk ape. The opening scenes are following Sarah, Tim, and her bf Brandon as they try to make sense of the missing women and whether or not Dale or some other creature killed them.
• Dale the crazy redneck: They, of course, end up going into the woods with the potential murderer without any weapons at all. What they hell were they thinking? Dale could have led them in there just so he could saw their limbs off to build a treehouse but instead we get a bunch of found-footage running through the woods and our very first look at the skunk ape.

• On the run: In all of the footage I’ve seen of bigfoot he’s a slow-ass runner. I’m pretty sure I could juke him out of his shoes (or whatever the bigfoot equivalent is) and bash his skull in with a heavy branch before he’d even have time to bend his stiff ass over to grab me. This isn’t your typical bigfoot, though, and this film quickly goes from “who could have killed this young girl” to “dear God don’t let me get eaten by a sasquatch”.
• The Plot thickens: As always happens in times like these, the government gets their grubby little hands involved and tries their best to mess everything up. Veteran action dude Michael Pare leads his team of ghillie suit wearing soldiers after the skunk ape and take it down with some high quality tranq guns. I would have liked to have seen more use of these soldiers in ghillie suits as it looked way cooler than just dudes in generic black uniforms. Tim disappears and it leaves Sarah and her bf Brandon a little clueless as what to do next.

• The secret facility: This movie proves that the internet is good for more than just action movie reviews and hardcore pornography. Sarah finds some weird dudes online that she meets up with and then decides to go on a wild mission with. She’s a very trusting person, isn’t she? It’s all a bit of a stretch for the character who is investigating the potential deaths of these girls. She will literally go anywhere and trust anyone without any tool or weapon to defend herself. Brave and very stupid.
• The quest for the truth: Secret facilities, government conspiracies, black uniforms, and Michael Pare only uttering a few lines. It’s a tough run down the stretch as the film turns back into a “bigfoot kills people” type of movie. It probably should have been this type of film for the entirety and we could have all be saved the boredom. Sarah and her peeps never learn their lesson even though they learn a different lesson; don’t fuck with nature.

The Verdict: Let me make it very clear when I say that The Wild Man was very much a mixed bag of thoughts and ideas that mostly missed for me. At times, it felt like this story and the handful of actors involved might take a somewhat lazy idea and turn it into something special. At other times, it felt like the story didn’t know what it was trying to be and ended up being ineffective at everything all at once. What started as something of a murder mystery with a potential cryptid creature as the killer turned into a slow gov’t conspiracy that made very little sense. As cute as Lauren Crandall was, there are better bigfoot movies out there to watch this October and hopefully those other ones involve somebody getting their limbs torn off!