Grizzly (1976)

1976
Directed by William Girdler
Starring Christopher George, Andrew Prine, Richard Jaeckel, Joan McCall and Joe Dorsey

When I was a kid, I didn't watch He-Man or Transformers.  I was all about TBS creature features, baby.  For those of who too young to remember, TBS used to regularly have marathons of horror movies featuring all kinds of "nature run amok" stories.  Killer spiders, bees, fish, you name it.  Still to this day, if you make something like spiders or snakes scary, you'll get me every time.  But my favorites back then were undoubtedly the "giant killer bear" movies, especially the film in question today.

Folks, I used to friggin' LOVE Grizzly when I was younger.  Amazingly enough, I wasn't even really scared of it (with the exception of one scene, which we'll be getting to in due time).  Just like Gremlins, the impression I had was that this was a really, really big important movie.  Where I got THAT idea is entirely up for debate, but you're reading someone who also thought Wade the Duck from Garfield and Friends was a massive pop culture icon.  I actually thought that this flick was just as big of a deal as Prophecy, and that movie starred Adrian Balboa.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is that Giant Killer Bears = Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley combined in the childhood of Jon Lickness.  I reviewed Prophecy a while back on the blog, and while that film was legit a big-budget, big-star production, this was was not.  Does it hold up?  Well, take a stroll back to 1976 with me and find out.

Ever seen Jaws?  Well, if you have, I reckon you've already seen Grizzly, because it follows pretty much the same plot beats word-for-word.  The charge that it's a Jaws ripoff isn't exactly an original assertion.  Hell, the producers themselves pretty much readily acknowledged it at the time after they were able to scrap their $750,000 together to shoot this thing in the middle of the woods.  As far as Jaws-on-land movies go, though, it ain't too bad, even for a curmudgeonly 33-year-old horror fan.

Your star character is Michael Kelly, and this would be your Roy Scheider guy.  Played by Christopher George, he's a good-natured national park ranger in charge of overseeing a huge spike of tourists headed to the woods for the weekend.  Which works out fantastically for the script, since it means we get plenty of murder victims.  We're introduced to pretty much every side character in the first ten minutes, including the remainder of Kelly's ranger staff.  Of this bunch, the only one who sticks out is the Token Hot Girl who will give us a Token Hot Death soon enough.  The others are photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall), source of lukewarm romantic tension and also the daughter of the resort's restaurant owner, along with helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine) and naturalist Arthur (Richard Jaeckel), a dude who likes to wander around in bear costumes because reasons.  Hey, I don't write these screenplays.

It doesn't take long for the movie to give us some grizzly action, as two female vacationers (one of them wearing a fantastic mid-'70s halter top) bite it after some vicious paw swipes.  This leads to Kelly having the mandatory scene with the park supervisor that essentially amounts to the police officer in Shane Black movies getting berated by his superiors.  This guy's name is unimportant.  What you need to know is that he's basically Mayor Vaughan from Jaws.  Not long after this, the search is on for the bear, which then leads to another bloody scene as the Token Hot Ranger decides to take a break from searching for the bear to strip down to her underwear and take a dip in the river.  It ends just as well as you'd expect.

I gotta give some credit to the flick as far as how it managed to seem like a much bigger deal than it actually was.  The screenplay says that the bear is 15 feet tall.  Of course, I bought this hook, line and sinker as a little bastard, but I scoffed at this upon re-watching some 20 years later.  I was stunned to learn that the bear in this film was actually played by a real-life captive bear that stood some 11 feet tall.  Yeah, it's a 48-inch difference, but with some camera tricks it really wasn't too difficult to make the thing seem like the Jolly Green Giant.  Also, man...11 feet tall.  That's the reason why I sit on my ass and play Zelda on the weekends.

Amazingly enough, we're not done.  Kelly starts hamming it up more and more in his "tortured soul" scenes as the bodies begin piling up, leading to this amazing bit of chewing the scenery where he drills his boss about why the park is still open.  The death scenes themselves start getting more gruesome.  There's blood flying, limb-ripping, chunks soaring, you name it.  All the more hilarious that this flick was rated PG.  They don't make 'em like they used to, folks.  Some of the special effects here get a little hokey, and we only see it in "less is more" shots just like that giant killer shark movie up until a certain point...that point being where it comes time for the fur-wearing naturalist Arthur to bite it.  And it's something else.  He gets attacked, knocked out, and half-buried in the ground to be eaten later.  Upon waking up, he digs himself out...only to get immediately brutalized and killed again.  This was the aforementioned scene that scared the crap out of me as a kid, because man, what a nightmarish scenario.

When it comes to the horror stuff, I commend the film-makers on what they were able to accomplish here with their limited budget.  The pace on this movie is very fast, and while it doesn't clock in around 75 minutes like some of the dreck that I review, it still feels very lean and mean.  The bear scenes with the live-action bear are top notch by 1976 standards.   However, the acting is not.  It's nothing like Ricky from Silent Night, Deadly Night, but it's still pretty bad.  Even the main dude playing Kelly is pretty cringe-worthy in spots, but the worst offenders have to be the three dumbasses hunting the giant bear who think it's a good idea to use a kidnapped bear cub as bait.  Kids, if you find a baby bear in the woods...get the hell away.  I know this and I never go outside.

Also, it has a finale that I thought was the pinnacle of kickass when I was a little kid.  It's only slightly funny today.  Quite an accomplishment considering the stuff that I grew up on.

Time to hand out a rating.  I award Grizzly *** out of ****.  That's higher than just about any other review you're likely to read, but hey, I have respect for people who set out to copy Jaws with .5% of the budget.  Clearly, it worked at the time, as this was actually the highest-grossing independent flick ever for a brief spell before getting beaten by Halloween a couple years later.  And that's some pretty good company.  Check this one out for some good rampaging monster action.