As sharks are to the sea, bears are to land. The polar bear is the largest carnivore outside of the oceans, capable of reaching a weight of more than a tonne, and #2 is the grizzly. Indeed, bears of one kind or another occupy six of the top nine slots – and that’s if you accept “liger” as a real animal, which… Yeah. And unlike sharks, there’s no foolproof, “staying out of the ocean” way of avoiding bears. Oh, you may think you’re safe in Britain. But just wait… Meanwhile, over here in Arizona, just a few months ago, a bear entered a cabin and attacked a teenager as he was watching TV. Last year, a man was dragged off and killed, about a hundred miles from here. Be right back. Checking the back door is secure.
What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears… I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
— Werner Herzog
Make no mistake though: a bear can fuck you up. It’s bigger than you – even black bears will be around 350 lbs – can outrun you, reaching 40 mph, and can climb trees. It’s equipped with canines which can be longer than those of a tiger, and can apply in excess of a thousand PSI pressure. Its claws can be up to six inches long, and even if you survive the initial attack, the odds of subsequent infections are high, with the bear’s diet making their mouth a playground of bacteria. There’s a whole litany of advice on how to handle an attack. I particularly liked, “Behaving calmly, moving slowly, and speaking in a low calm voice will help de-escalate the situation.” It probably also works on Dodgers fans.
Needless to say, it has also proven fertile ground for film-makers, which is why we are here. The first killer bear movie appears to be 1966’s, The Night of the Grizzly, but the genre really took off after Jaws largely invented the killer animal genre. There’s no doubt that sharks have remained more prolific since, and sadly, we’ve never seen things like Bearnado. But every few years, someone remembers the ursine alternative, and breaks out the fur suit. Here, and for the next few Fridays, we’ll be reviewing the results, mostly in new reviews, though I’ll also lob Cocaine Bear in. A couple of limitations. I won’t include films like The Revenant, where the bear attack is only one element – albeit a real doozy in that example. I also require an actual bear to be involved. Technically, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a bear attack movie. But, c’mon: it’s a guy in a mask. More’s the pity, I feel.
Grizzly (1976)
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 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.
Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)
Rating: D-
Dir: André Szöts
Star: Steve Inwood, Deborah Raffin, John Rhys-Davies, Louise Fletcher
In hindsight, maybe Grizzly wasn’t so bad. This misbegotten sequel to it has experienced one hell of a tortured path to the screen. Its production originally started in 1983, but filming in Hungary was rudely interrupted when the money ran out. In 2007, a pirated copy of a workprint surfaced. It eventually sparked enough interest that a (somewhat) finished version was finally released in 2021, more than thirty-seven years after work started. And they really shouldn’t have bothered. Because it is genuinely terrible. At best, it’s a poor copy of the original, which was itself a poor copy of Jaws. At worst – and that’s most of the time. A laughably bad effort, which should have remained lost.
It begins with a mother bear seeing her cub shot by a hunter. Well, it’s a bad CGI bullet hitting a stock footage cub, in a spray of bad CGI blood, anyway. This triggers her into a killing spree, attacking any humans she encounters. Except, these sequences were among the scenes not filmed, so border on the nonexistent. After mauling minor characters, this brings her to a concert, with tens of thousands of attendees (footage recorded at a show by Nazareth and Toto Corlo, who were apparently really big draws in eighties Hungary) which local superintendent Eileene Draygon (Fletcher) had refused to call off. There, Mama Bear runs around, setting off fireworks (!) before wrestling with Gimli from Lord of the Rings and getting electrocuted or something.
This is likely most remarkable for the greatest collection of no-names in one single scene. Early on, we meet three campers who become among the bear’s earliest victims. They are played by future stars, but then no more than nepo babies, Charlie Sheen (who got his SAG card for this), Laura Dern and George Clooney, This was even before the last-named’s infamous role in Return of the Killer Tomatoes. You can also spot Ian McNeice and Timothy Spall, providing you don’t blink. All of whom make considerably more impressive than the film’s technical stars. These are Inwood as park ranger Nick Hollister, and Raffin playing “bear management expert” Samantha Owens, whose idea of management appears to involve letting the bear eat whoever it wants.
The only genuinely interesting thing here is insane French-Canadian hunter Bouchard (Rhys-Davies). Although a shameless copy of Quint from Jaws, there is a mad intensity to him which is genuinely entertaining. For example, when he gleefully tells an increasingly horrified Owens of his bear capture technique, which basically involves pulling them apart with horses. Had the film leaned into Bouchard more, this could have been a fun slab of nonsense. Instead, it’s almost entirely dull, not least in the lengthy, tedious festival footage, which does act as a good counter-argument to my belief that the eighties had the best music. When not boring, it is instead completely laughable and inept. The previously mentioned scene of Bouchard engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the beast is a high-water mark of incompetence, few films can hope to match.
Grizzly Man (2005)
Rating: B
Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog, Jewel Palovak, Sam Egli
Treadwell was the man who, for more than a decade, spent summers living up in Alaska among the grizzly bears. He had a passion for animals, positioning himself as their protector. Not all the bears felt similarly. In October 2003, Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a bear. Audio footage of the attack was recorded. The quixotic endeavour of Treadwell and its ironic resolution resonated with Herzog – himself no stranger to the great outdoors and the insanity it can breed – who assembled a documentary on the life and death of the wilderness ddweller. What was Treadwell trying to accomplish? Was he the altruistic ecowarrior he portrayed? Or was there self aggrandisement involved?
As depicted here, it’s a bit of both. Treadwell appears to have been a complex character, prone to flights of fancy. He fabricated a background for himself in which he came from the Australian outback, and I don’t believe the story he lost out to Woody Harrelson for a role in Cheers. But there was clearly a genuine passion for wildlife, and bears in particular, misplaced and dumb a lot of his actions clearly were. Herzog speaks to an Alaskan native, Sven Haakanson Jr., who is aghast at what the outsider did: “You don’t invade their territory… Timothy Treadwell crossed a boundary that we have lived with for 7,000 years.” These particular bears didn’t really need protecting either, from what I’ve read.
Having said that, he didn’t deserve an unrepentantly grim fate, one of the responders explaining, “We hauled away four garbage bags of people out of that bear.” That’s before we get to the audio snuff tape. We don’t hear it. A coroner describes the recording, and we see the reaction of Herzog and a friend of Treadwell, Jewel Palovak, listening to it. That’s enough: the director advises her to destroy the tape, Herzog later calling it, “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” And that’s something, coming from a man who made multiple films with Klaus Kinski. [A relationship likely referenced when Herzog says of Treadwell in his later stages, “The actor in his film has taken over from the film-maker. I have seen this madness before on a film set…”]
I think this was tragedy born of hubris, an area which has frequently been at the core of Herzog’s work. Treadwell’s vision of bears ended up at odds with the reality. That it took so long before disaster struck is the most surprising thing – likely a result of these bears having easier sources of food than foolish humans. Large, omnivorous animals like bears, are your friends only until the salmon runs out, at which point harsh language is likely to provide insufficient protection. Otherwise, I perhaps don’t entirely disagree with the critical letter sent to Treadwell’s friend, Marc Gaede, which concludes, “We need to somehow drastically increase the number of bears in America. Especially in such key spots as the Berkeley campus.” But a scene where a fox steals Treadwell’s baseball cap and runs off with it, made me wonder if the foxes killed him, and framed the bears…
Backcountry (2014)
Rating: C+
Dir: Adam MacDonald
Star: Missy Peregrym, Jeff Roop, Eric Balfour, Nicholas Campbell
This is the kind of film where you can sit smugly on your comfortable sofa, shaking your head sadly at the poor choices made by the characters. The first and biggest, being the decision to go camping in the first place. Trust me when I say, this is not a mistake we will be making. Indeed, this might be a movie produced by the Hotel Owners’ Association of North America, because if you watch this and still have an interest in a vacation not involving room service, you simply aren’t paying attention. Not least because this is based on a true story, when a couple were attacked by a bear while on holiday in northern Ontario.
Here, it’s Alex (Roop) who drags him somewhat unwilling girlfriend Jenn (Peregrym) to his childhood haunt of Nibookaazo Provincial Park. [Fun fact: in Ojibwe, Nibookaazo translates as “Pretend to be Dead”] He plans to propose at a specific spot, but turns out his wilderness navigational skills aren’t as good as he thinks, after refusing the offer of a map. Making matters worse, he deliberately left Jenn’s cellphone back in the car, to avoid it being a distraction. Things get ominous early on, when they encounter suspicious hiker Brad (Balfour). However, it gradually becomes clear that a bigger, badder predator than Brad is to be found in the woods. There’s a black bear in the area, and it’s looking to fatten itself up on a hiker buffet, before going into hibernation for the winter.
You will have to sit through a good deal of set-up to get to the meat of the matter. The bear itself doesn’t appear until 48 minutes in, and then is still only glimpsed in silhouette, prowling around and snorting (derisively, I like to think) outside the couple’s tent. If only tents, unlike hotel rooms, came with deadbolts. The ursine creature does loom over things regardless, to the point the obvious red herring of Brad seems a pointless distraction. When it finally makes its move, however, it’s a brutal and unpleasant sequence, getting up there with The Revenant, I’d say. You don’t necessarily see a great deal: however, the audio work, in particular the screams of the victim, is excellent, and harrowing in the extreme.
Thereafter, it’s a case of the survivor trying to make their way out of the park to safety, with the bear largely back to lurking. To be honest, the film peaks with the attack. Nothing thereafter can match up, though a sequence involving the descent of a waterfall has its moments of tension. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for characters, who are largely suffering the consequences of their own actions, particularly in the case of Alex. It feels like MacDonald is vaguely seeking to make some statement about masculine hubris: this is the wilderness equivalent of refusing to stop and ask for directions. Any such point may well stick in the mind less well than the rending and gnawing.
Cocaine Bear (2023)
Rating: C+
Dir: Elizabeth Banks
Star: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Christian Convery
This is the most viral movie title since Snakes on a Plane. It doesn’t manage to be quite as successful, only fully embracing the lunacy of its central concept in intermittent fashion. However, the points when it does, leave this an adequately entertaining experience. Probably not quite the movie on which the late Ray Liotta would have chosen to go out, but few of us get that privilege. It does have more basis in fact than Snakes. A bear did indeed consume cocaine dumped from a plane. But it was relatively small (175 lbs) and rather than going on the rampage, it died on the spot. The stuffed corpse is now on display in a Kentucky souvenir store.
This harsh reality would not have made for much of a story – Cocaine Overdose Bear, or possibly Belushi Bear. So it is punched up with various groups converging to the Georgia national park, on which the coke was dropped. There are drug dealer minions Daveed (Jackson) and Eddie (Ehrenreich), seeking to recover the drugs for their boss (Liotta). Tennessee detective Bob is also present, a dead drug-runner having fallen from the sky on his turf. And local mom Sari (Russell) is seeking her daughter Dee Dee, who skipped school with her friend Henry (Convery) to visit the park. All of them will encounter momma bear, who has developed a nasty coke habit, and wants to fight anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path.
When that’s what the film delivers, it’s gory and glorious. The best section is likely the bear laying siege to the ranger station, followed by an ambulance showing up. This results in the scene, understandably showcased in the trailer, where the coke-enraged bear pursues the vehicle. [Jaunty Depeche Mode tune, Just Can’t Get Enough will never be the same again] Similarly, the sequence involving two trees, with a potential victim up each, is a well-staged slice of black comedy. It’s a shame the same cannot be said when the ursine villainess is off screen. It’s definitely a problem if a CGI creation is the most memorable character in your movie. That’s the case here: we finished watching it an hour ago, and I literally cannot remember anybody’s name.
It seems to be an issue with Banks, that she doesn’t understand why people are in the cinema. Her misconceived Charlie’s Angels reboot unilaterally decided to replace women kicking serious ass while looking good, and focus on Kristen Stewart playing an ugly lesbian. #SoBrave. Similarly, we do not care about Sari’s relationship with Dee Dee. We are here to see an animal off its tits, ripping faces. But Banks instead edited Liotta’s death scene, saying, “We didn’t want it to feel exploitative or unnecessary.” Sorry, Lizzy: I suspect that boat sailed… oh, I dunno, when you called your movie Cocaine Bear. We are 100% here for the unnecessary and the exploitative. Needs more bear. Or, possibly, Banks needed more cocaine, I’m not certain.