Rating: C+
Dir: William Girdler
Star: Christopher George, Andrew Prine, Richard Jaeckel, Joan McCall
In the wake of the massive success enjoyed by Jaws, the animal attack genre really took off. The rest of the decade include movies where the creatures in question were spiders, piranhas, killer whales and bees, but this one was likely among the most successful, especially relative to its budget. Costing three-quarters of a million dollars, it’s reported to have taken $39 million at the box-office, becoming the most successful independent film ever, holding the record until Halloween , two years later. Quite an impressive feat, considering this is more or less a shameless Jaws knockoff, which does little more than replace the shark with a bear, and a beach with a national park.
You can almost map the characters onto each other as well. Instead of police chief Brody, we get park ranger Michael Kelly (George). He is the one trying to keep visitors safe, organize a search for the murderous animal, and convince a local official – in this case, park supervisor, Charley Kittridge – to close the area for safety reasons. Just as in Jaws, the hero gets assistance from two quirky individuals, helicopter pilot Stober (Prine) and naturalist Arthur Scott (Jaeckel). There’s even a sequence where the official opens up the hunt to amateurs, and naturally, this goes about as well as in the Spielberg blockbuster. The main way this stands out is in its enthusiastic gore, all the more striking because this was rated ‘PG’ at the time of release.
The bear maulings are easily the best thing about this. At times, this feels almost like it could be a precursor to Halloween In particular, the highly stalker-ish scene, heavy on attacker POV and exaggerated breathing, where the bear appears to be spying on a shapely park ranger taking a shower in a waterfall (the victim is played by Victoria Lynn Johnson, who’d go on to be Angie Dickinson’s body double in Dressed to Kill). It’s also so damn good at dismemberment. I was left wondering if it was carrying a Hattori Hanzō katana, since it can literally decapitate a horse with one sweep of its paw. Men, women, kids: it’s certainly an equal opportunity attacker. No wonder it requires heavy artillery to defeat it.
More or less everything else unfolds exactly as you’d expect, though sadly I didn’t quite get the scene I wanted, where the grizzly leaps up out of the forest to drag down Stober’s helicopter. Wilful government incompetence leads to unnecessary deaths, and we learn that lookout towers are no match for ursine strength, before Kelly has had enough and takes matters into his own hands. He’ll have to get through the bear’s plot armour first, because as well as carrying a sword, it seems to be sporting a Kevlar vest. Everyone here is so dumb, the animal is probably more intelligent than half the people, and you would be forgiven for losing attention during the human-based drama. I can’t deny being somewhat entertained, however.