 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: The Wild Man of the Navidad • Year: 2008 • Country: USA • Director: Duane Graves, Justin Meeks • Main cast: Justin Meeks, Charlie Hurtin, Alex Garcia, Stacy Meeks • Runtime: 86 minutes • Production company: Greeks Productions • TRAILER
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Besides sharing the same producer, Kim Henkel, and being set in the white trash rural deserts of Texas in the 1970s, The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) doesn’t have many points in common with cult classic slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as one could first think. That could be a good or a bad thing, the Tobe Hooper slasher masterpiece has already got enough sequels, remakes, and copies.
The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) is mainly a Bigfoot film, where a bunch of hunters in the opening of the deer season start to get missing. It is allegedly based on the real-life journals of Dale S. Rogers, here portrayed by the co-director Justin Meeks, a man who, in the 1970s, lived along the banks of the Navidad River in Sublime, Texas – the same area where the original legend of the Wild Man of the Navidad surfaced back in the late 1800s.
For sure, The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) is one of the dirtiest and dustiest movies I have seen in a while. It is populated by a bunch of nasty rifle-loving characters representative of low-class deep America, still anchored in the wild west past but riding motor vehicles and listening to 24/7 country music radio stations. The entire staging of the movie is sublime, and for sure its biggest asset.
But, sadly, behind the gritty landscapes and the obese disgusting teeth-missing trashy town folks so well depicted, there is not much more to outstand in the movie. The plot doesn’t contribute with much excitement, the acting is at best mediocre, with some awful performances by a group of individuals that probably are not professional actors, and the climax scene is too dull, despite the attempt to push up the adrenaline with a sinister intriguing score. But, in the end, The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) is just another sasquatch ordinary flick.
The filmmakers make an attempt to exploit the shocking factor by adding a few gruesome sequences showing in an explicit way the cruelty and rawness of the hunting and the skinned dead animals, as well as making some gory moments when the mysterious Bigfoot is attacking some of his victims, but those scenes look too much constrained and they don’t result credible in the global tone of the movie. This is a low-budget film and those limitations show off being too evident when they are forced.
But, despite the general negative feeling once you start to analyze the movie, The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) is not a painful show to witness. As mentioned at first, the atmosphere of the decadence of the rural America of the 1970s is an asset that keeps the whole watching of the film alive. And although the story is weak, it has some intriguing moments. It is true that the negative aspects of the film exceed in number the positive ones, but those positive ones are powerful enough and bring a sense of authenticity so hard to achieve and so glad to see. The movie is as arid as the images in it but still manages to entertain for an hour and a half. Perhaps the pretensions of the filmmakers were aiming too high and they didn’t achieve the instant cult-classic horror film they envisioned, but The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008) is not the kind of title to be ashamed of.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0829442
