Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 22, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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While every filmmaker and his brother have been attempting homages to ’70s slaughter-survival shockers lately, The Wild Man of the Navidad goes for something a little different. It’s a homage to drive-in docudramas like The Legend of Boggy Creek, telling the supposedly true account (can you prove it didn’t happen?) of a man-beast that terrorized the area around Texas’ Navidad River. Yet beyond the crackly audio behind an opening title card, filmmakers Justin Meeks and Duane Graves don’t employ a self-conscious replication of vintage low-budget production aesthetics. Wild Man is a cleanly shot and often atmospheric film that doesn’t require nostalgia to enjoy.
The setting is the rather ironically named town of Sublime, a place whose population, as the movie presents it, consists largely of deer-huntin’, moonshine-swillin’, big-beard-sportin’, country-music-listenin’ yahoos who spend most of their time in the local bar. And if anyone has reason to drink, it’s Dale S. Rogers, played by Meeks and upon whose journals the movie is based. As the movie opens, he gets let go from a welding job, which will make it even more difficult to care for his invalid stroke-victim wife Jean (Stacy Meeks, Justin’s cousin)—who, unbeknownst to Dale, is occasionally molested by her perverted caretaker Mario (Alex Garcia). Oh, and every night, Dale must carry on the long-standing family tradition of leaving a dead rabbit on his doorstep to feed the Wild Man, a ravenous creature that has been roaming the area since at least the 1800s.
Kim Henkel of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre produced Wild Man of the Navidad with Meeks and Graves, and the new project has some of the same sense of open-air dread (not to mention a couple of shots that seem like direct homages to the earlier movie). For a good portion of the running time, the filmmakers effectively opt for the power of suggestion to generate the terror, and the Wild Man is little more than a vaguely glimpsed presence loping through the brush or growling and snarling outside Dale’s house as he listens fearfully inside. That changes once Dale, strapped for cash in the wake of his firing, decides to open up the vast tract of land he owns to hunters who have long coveted the game-rich area. Needless to say, it’s the people who venture onto the property who become the hunted, and the Wild Man’s mood isn’t helped by the fact that he’s been shot by one of the first rifle-bearers to venture onto his turf.
The Wild Man’s frightening presence in the film’s first half actually becomes somewhat less so as he starts building up a body count, complete with explicit butcher-shop special FX as he tears into hapless victims with lethally wielded deer antlers. Yet the general ominous mood is sustained throughout, and even those cheesy entrail-slinging moments manage to fit the ’70s vibe that Wild Man elicits. Graves’ muted cinematography provides the right atmosphere, while in front of the camera, Meeks delivers a sustained low-key turn that keeps the proceedings grounded.
The other performances are a mixed bag; once again in the Boggy Creek tradition, many of the supporting players are non-pros, and their acting ranges from convincingly down-home to distractingly amateurish. (You can’t argue that they don’t all look their parts, though.) Skeptical viewers might also doubt the veracity of this supposedly real-life tale—particularly its climax, which one would have to figure resulted in more evidence of the Wild Man’s existence than is actually out there. But then, a little embellishment has always been part of flicks like this, and The Wild Man of the Navidad succeeds as an unironic evocation of a particular strain of B-filmmaking that has unfortunately been overtaken by “based on fact” serial-killer schlockers. It also marks Meeks and Graves, who previously crafted a series of evocative short films, as burgeoning talents on the feature scene.
Speaking of which, and also hailing from the South, the 22-minute Kirksdale is another worthy Tribeca entry, playing in the Short Student Competition. Written and directed by Georgia’s Ryan Spindell, it’s set in and around the titular Florida mental institution in the 1960s, the destination of a deputy (Joshua Mikel) who’s delivering a rebellious teenager (Jessica Mansfield) in need of a little “therapy.” The situation goes sour early on when the lawman attempts to take advantage of the girl, only to be interrupted by a wandering, threatening patient who seems to have escaped from the asylum. But when the officer makes the acquaintance of the head doctor (Greg Thompson, from Brian Avenet-Bradley’s Dark Remains and Ghost of the Needle), he discovers that the place is more out of control that he could have imagined.
Well-acted and well-paced, Kirksdale is a solid little mood piece that makes a turn to the graphic midway through, delivering an assortment of nightmare images and at least one gore gag (strong special makeup work by Josh Counsel’s Toxic Image Studios) guaranteed to get the audience vocally freaking out. Spindell, who scripted with Bradford Hodgson, demonstrates a knack for building tension and developing his themes in the short form, ending with a nice little kicker that reveals the depths of his villain’s depravity. He’s one to watch, and so is Kirksdale.
