Director Ryan Justice’s film The Wild Man is a wild mystery-thriller based on Florida’s own star-cryptid, the Skunk Ape. The Wild Man is equal parts found footage, documentary, and cinematic film; a hodgepodge of production styles with an equally diverse and eclectic cast of characters. Like the film’s setting, the story of The Wild Man starts small and goes to unexpected places, making it one of the more fun viewings of cryptid ape-man tales I have watched.

Three friends — Sarah (Lauren Crandall), Tim (Mike Reed), and Brandon (Julian Green) — venture into a small town in Florida in order to make an investigative documentary on the disappearances of local women. Immediately townspeople point their fingers primarily at a local legend — the Skunk Ape — an ape-man told to attack and kill people. The team solicits a local nature and Skunk Ape enthusiast, Dale (David E. McMahon), to take them in search of the creature, but his eccentricity and connection to the latest missing girl draw their suspicions. Just as they begin to suspect that the Skunk Ape isn’t real and that their guide is the killer, they soon find out that they were wrong, and that the real killer is far more monstrous than they imagined.

The Wild Man had a unique approach to telling an ape-man tale, standing out from the typical ‘woodland-adventure gone awry’ formula by creating its own unique blend of genres and production styles. Focusing on Southeast America’s cryptid-ape, the “Skunk Ape”,  The Wild Man mixed the supernatural magic of an urban legend with the science fiction of DNA experimentation; the end result was a premise so good that it outweighed the many inconsistencies in editing that sometimes made the film confusing to watch.

Many rewinds were needed for my viewing of The Wild Man, as the film’s tendency to switch back and forth between points of view made sequences feel chaotic and events misunderstood. What’s more, the film could not seem to pick a production style between theatrical or documentary. Much of the film felt like a mix of Small Town Monsters documentary production with Bobcat Goldwaith’s found-footage sasquatch-flick Willow Creek, only enhanced for entertainment with mystery and comedy. Though the film’s technical difficulties sometimes distracted me from the story, in the end, I enjoyed my watch of The Wild Man.

In addition to the stars of The Wild Man, the screen/story writing for the film are aspects to be celebrated in this project. Starring Lauren Crandall as Sarah, her character had much of the legwork to do and Crandall seemingly had no problems stepping into her character and running the film. The story was unique in its efforts to make more than just a supernatural slaughter in the woods, but it may have been too ambitious of a story to properly portray with any consistency. I could not help but to think that in the hands of an experienced comedy-action director — perhaps someone like Edgar Wright — that The Wild Man could be a beloved ape-man movie for cryptid and creature-feature lovers to enjoy,

6.75 out of 10