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.