Man Vs. (2015)

Doug Woods (Chris Diamantopoulos) is the star of a reality TV show where he is dropped off in various types of wilderness with only a couple of useful things to hand, filming himself doing the survivalist thing for five days. This time around, it’s off to some pretty wet patch of woods, rivers and lake in Canada. Off-camera, Doug isn’t quite as alone as it seems to his audience, for he does have twice daily contact with his production team. However, the film treats this – surprisingly and pleasantly enough - not as a sign of Doug’s dishonesty but as a simple sign of sanity. Plus, once trouble starts, a satellite phone is such a nice lifeline to take away from a guy.

And trouble does indeed start, after something that leaves a trace of broken trees behind crashes in the lake where our protagonist makes his camp. At first, Doug believes it to be a wolf or a bear that’s now starting to bother his animal traps and lurks around unseen just out of sight, but once the evil alien (that’s not a spoiler, surely) that is his actual problem starts on things like making moves in Doug’s solitaire chess game, our protagonist finds himself increasingly disturbed and losing control.

Adam Massey’s Canadian piece of survivalist SF horror is one of those films whose strengths tend to lie in the things they don’t do wrong more than in those they do right, which generally does tend to make a writer sound a bit lukewarm. And, truthfully, this modest little man against monster movie is not the sort of thing that’ll get anyone hot and bothered; it may very well take away quite a bit of Sunday morning boredom, though.

So, the things Man Vs. does not do wrong are only a few and relatively simple yet pretty useful for its effect. Number one is the simple decision to not make this one the POV horror film you might have suspected/feared after the description, but to instead use traditional camera work, unless taking Doug’s supposed footage makes for the more effective shot. That works out well for most of the time, while still keeping the monster as an unseen presence for rather a long time. Which is a good idea when  that monster turns out to be a pretty sad looking CG job once we get to see it (for some reason in broad daylight), indifferently designed and lacking any suggestion of being an actual physical presence. That’s obviously not terribly great for the film’s final act, when the Man vs Monster fight gets serious, but if you’re wise in the ways of low budget horror movies, you won’t hate the film because of it either.

The second important not wrong decision Man Vs. makes is to not turn Doug into the more typical all-around asshole reality TV people more often than not are in horror movies but into a surprisingly non-macho guy with a sense of self-irony and an ego of at worst middling size. This way, instead of enjoying to see some complete asshole suffering, a viewer might actually root for the guy getting out alive and back to his family.


The rest of the film is solidly made in its unremarkable yet professional way, staging decent enough suspense sequences, doing its best with the monster fight and the final reveal (of a type that sort of makes sense, even), filling a viewer’s time well enough. Which isn’t as much of a matter of course than it should be.