Man Vs is a 2015 Canadian science fiction film directed by Adam Massey. As it follows a documentary method of filmmaking, the tale follows an intriguing pattern. However, the picture incorporates themes of horror, mystery, and science fiction, all of which are subtly hinted at.
The film follows Doug Woods, a television survival expert who travels to a secluded spot in Northern Ontario’s woodlands. For the third season of his successful survival series, he wants to film himself surviving in a harsh condition for five days.
Doug is a seasoned professional, so this shouldn’t be too difficult for him. It is, however. Because there’s something else in the woods. Doug would have been lucky if it had been merely a tiger or wolf. But nothing could be further from the truth. We’ll get into the story of Doug and the strange predator he has to deal with in this video.
Before we get started with the programming, we have a tiny request for our viewers. Please consider being a Marvelous Videos subscriber. Like and comment on our videos, and click the bell button to get notified when we add new ones. We’d be grateful, and we hope to provide you with the best nerdy material possible. Let’s jump right into the video without further ado.
Man In The Woods Finds An Unexpected Challenge
Doug Woods, played by actor Chris Diamantopoulus (sounds like a surname straight out of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series) is the centerpiece of a popular survival television series called Man Vs. Doug is left alone in the middle of the woods for a few days with minimal provisions. Of course, he will have his production crew monitoring his actions and being there for his safety. His objective is simple – he has to document his survival, which will later be edited by his brother before it goes on air and gets picked up by cable networks.
Doug’s show has had successful seasons in the past and for the latest season, he is going to be making a trip to Northern Ontario. His brother, Terry, is part of the production crew alongside Bill and Angie and they will be accompanying him to the forest. However, the crew will live in a tent, ready with their communication devices and medical kits while Doug will venture into the woods for five days all by himself. They also have a guy called Duncan who will stay back at a small cottage to supervise the entire situation and get them back to town when necessary.
Doug reaches the forest and is not properly equipped. He has a hat, a bright flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, his camera, a phone, gum, and an energy drink. The first thing he does is to make a shelter for himself. However, he gets terribly injured in the very beginning when a shrapnel from a tree gets under his nail. And the viewers are made to see all the blood during a scene where Doug pulls out the shrapnel from his nail bed. Yay.
Throughout the first half of the film, Doug makes his commentaries educational as he tries to explain what he is doing and how he is doing it. Of course, he expects predators to be around. Wolves, bears, and the likes. But they can be kept away with a fire present. And so, he lights up a fire.
Later, Doug goes on a hunt and finds a couple of rabbits. He cooks one of them and stores the others near the tree under a rock so that other predators cannot take it away. Day 1 goes by smoothly. However, things get more and more intense at night when Doug tries to sleep. He keeps hearing a weird sound and a huge attack takes place outside. Fortunately for Doug, he does not investigate it.
The next day, he finds that the forest across a nearby lake has literally been split apart. And it cannot be the work of a lightning bolt or the wolf that was hunting nearby. On top of that, the surface of the lake was brimming with the corpses of dead fishes. Despite the suspicious situation, Doug goes by his day and contacts the crew when necessary. Later, he decides to play chess…by himself.
Things start getting worse the next day when Doug finds that the rock under which he had kept the other rabbit has been smashed with incredible force. His prey seems to be missing as well. On top of that, a mysterious, black liquid was found by him at that very spot. It could only be the blood of the predator, but the blood did not seem like it belonged to an animal.
Doug gets back to his shelter and realizes that someone has played a move on his chessboard. He begins to feel that a psychotic human is present instead of an animal since animals do not play chess. On top of that, his cellphone was missing as well.
He later found that cellphone near his fireplace, absolutely disassembled. On top of that, his energy drink had been drained and that place was also full of half eaten bloodied prey. The chess pieces had moved to check Doug’s king and one of his cameras had been shattered. This made things extremely terrifying for Doug who could not wrap his head around the ongoing events.
He half believed that his brother was pulling these pranks to mess with him. However, no matter how much he tried, he was unable to contact his crew. On day four, he finally decided to leave the forest as he could not be around a psychotic stalker for longer and sent out a smoke signal. But no one came to his rescue. Suddenly, a creature screeched and groaned. We don’t get to see it and neither does Doug. But it let out a force that shot Doug out of the land and far into the water.
Doug swam back to the surface, wounded and terrified, and began to run. However, he soon fell into a ditch and wounded his forearms. After he heard a girl shrieking, he realized that he had to leave the place as soon as he could.
He somehow managed to climb out of the ditch by grabbing onto the bricks (which is why pull-ups and muscle-ups are important) and began to run. Things got worse when he found Terry, terribly wounded and almost dead alongside a dead Bill and Angie. He soon found their tent and tried to use the radio to contact help but no one responded. He then tended to his own wounds and went out, only to find an extraterrestrial creature feasting on his brother.
It then began to chase Doug who tried his best to hide. Ultimately, Doug was able to take it back to the ditch. He used the flashlight to shock the creature and threw him into the ditch. He then chucked rocks at the creature from above in order to kill it.
Doug went back to Terry and covered the bodies of his dead friends. He recorded a message for his wife, Jo, and daughter Holly, even though he was unlikely to make it out of the woods. But, with some main character plot armor, he managed to survive and got back to the cottage to find Duncan. As you can already expect, Duncan was nowhere to be found.
Doug switched on the television and watched the news, just to be bombarded with the most absurd thing ever. There had been a global alien invasion and the major cities of the world had taken the biggest hit. Humanity’s artillery was not nearly enough to go against these dangerous creatures. And with that, Doug realized what kind of a predator he had almost become prey to.
He left the cottage and got on one of Duncan’s boats to escape. However, Duncan arrived right then and so did the creature Doug thought he had killed. It killed Duncan but Doug managed to kill it once and for all with the propellor of the boat he was on. He then headed towards one of the big cities for his family probably. The scene shifted to one where several comets neared the planet and the movie ended.
The premise of his show is quite similar to shows like ‘Man vs Wild’, ‘Naked And Afraid’, and ‘Man, Woman, And Wild’. In fact, Doug Woods kinda reminds us of Bear Grylls himself.
The film is also made in the documentary style. So most of the shots are taken from the perspective of a camera made to record oneself. But here’s the thing about filmmaking. Directors will often opt for particular shots and styles of shooting to foreshadow the upcoming events.
One such super popular shot is the one where it looks like it has been taken by someone else who is recording the character from afar. This shot is often used to portray the presence of someone else in what is supposed to be a place of solitude or basically any place where others are not supposed to be present except the characters needed. We see this for the first time when Doug tries to start a fire. It is executed quite a number of times throughout the movie such as from the time when he was seen playing chess by himself. There is also the occasional glitch in the audio and the visual, signifying that there is something suspicious.
The film also revels in static shots and several point-of-view shots from the cameras mounted on the grounds and the usage of selfie sticks. The plot is quite predictable, but that is also because a lot of people are accustomed to how this survival shows work. There is also a weird plot twist, which can be a hit or a miss, mostly a miss. Basically, the predator being an alien is a bit strange because normally you would expect some huge, disgusting creature.
But that’s not where it ends. The plot heavily dives into this alien invasion thing, which completely changes the genre of the show from a survival documentary to potential science fiction. Interestingly, even that is more predictable than Bear Grylls spending the night inside a camel, drinking his own urine, and eating an elk’s heart. Fortunately, the creature left enough dead fishes for Doug so he did not have to survive on maggots.
The Terrifying Creature That Puts Forests And Good Chess Players To Shame: Cyborg Hunter
This stalker creature makes its presence ominous, terrifying, and mysterious throughout the course of the movie. So much so, that ultimately, it almost changes the film’s genre. So let’s talk about it, shall we?
Firstly, no one expects an extraterrestrial creature to show up in the middle of a Canadian forest. However, we cannot say that it has not been foreshadowed. An audiovisual glitch in the camerawork works perfectly to tell us that this is not your casual predator in the woods. Plus, it has enough intelligence to terrify Doug with its chess moves. Do aliens play chess? Who knows. Probably not. With that in mind, we can assume that it instinctively picked up on chess while stalking Doug and then bested him with its stellar moves.
It also knows how to disassemble a phone. Did it already have this skill? Probably not. Was it trying to figure out this human device? Maybe. Once again, a human predator would not disassemble a phone. Maybe it likes human things since it clearly enjoys chess and Doug’s energy drink. But then it also likes humans itself. Especially when it comes to eating them. Unfortunately, Doug’s potential preys and friends fall victim to the alien’s ravenous hunger.
But even before the reporter spoke about the creature’s extraterrestrial nature, we were already aware of it. It literally looks like a stereotypical alien but with the body of a cyborg. This Cyborg Hunter has the regular, alien eyes, dope-shaped head, protrusions coming out of that dome-shaped head, and a strange skin tone (in his case it is green). It also enjoys wearing a blue outfit.
The creature grunts, groans, and screeches. You would guess an intelligent creature would use a language instead of autotuned animalistic sounds. It is also quite tall. Easily above 6 feet. The alien invasion will be a success then since its height will make it popular with the ladies and the entertainment industry. But you would not like its voice which can throw you away. It is strong enough to mimic a destruction more massive than what can be caused by a lightning bolt. So maybe we should not make such a mockery of it.
We get to see its complete body twice and it literally looks electronic. Its eyes also work to kind of scan its prey. When Doug attacks the creature with the propellor, it breaks apart like a device. The black blood situation could be the oil or the tar that keeps the thing running. But for all we know, it is a creature and not any device. Only because it is a whole different species that attack the world.
But why a creature interested in invading the Earth would spend its time stalking a random guy in the forest and stealing his energy drink is beyond us.
Why You Should Watch Man Vs (2015)
The best thing about the film is Chris Diamantopoulos’ acting. He has not been a lead actor in too many movies. However, this is an eighty-seven-minute movie that dominantly features only one character on screen, and that is Doug. To be able to pull an entire film and all of its tense emotions and suspense all alone is a stellar feat indeed.
It is understandable if someone is not a fan of this unexpected sci-fi plot twist. But the movie builds itself up really well, with all the tension surrounding Doug and his experience in the Woods. Overall, the script is simple and the cast is tight. With little budget, the film has been executed pretty well. The CGI is not great but there are really very few scenes where CGI has been used. Most of the movie depicts the predator as a suspicious creature who cannot be seen by us or Doug. So, this minimizes the need of using CGI and maximizes the mystery that surrounds the events.
With interesting sound effects, a tense build-up, and clever camerawork, Man Vs. becomes a must-watch.