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Damn, where do I start?
My kid and I have always been big fans of the 70's standby Grizzly, which I yammer about here. That William Girdler B film was among the highest grossing independent films of the 70's and was the #1 indy movie for its release year. Was it good? Well, read the blog post.
But Grizzly II?
Where do I start? Apparently the makers wrapped principal photography in Eastern Europe in 1983. Then there were funding issues, and completion issues, and apparently a curse or two, and basically they were unable to finish the damn thing. Word is that in 1988, Cannon Films was going to buy and finish it, but they had money problems of their own.
It wasn't long before it became something of a cinematic urban legend, until in the 2000's a very low quality workprint showed up on the internet. I guess, this sent the rights owner into action to get it completed.
Which she did. Sort of.
I went through the struggle of watching this film for The Samhain Project. Wow. It's interesting to see George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen get opening credits top billing and then die in the first 5 minutes. That's a hoot. Especially when most of their dialogue is unintelligible (the closed captioning even says so!). They're killed by a bear obviously, one who's height is claimed to be 18 feet tall according to the experts in the cast. But the POV has the bear being anywhere from as tall as a mobile home to a four story building. That's downright disorienting.
Deborah Raffin is the "bear expert" for the state park that this film takes place in. She's very upset when the forest ranger, played by Steve Inwood and his massive hair, want to kill it. It only wants revenge for the poaching of her cubs! (This happens in freshly shot footage at the open). I'll give the rest of the movie credit. It has been cleaned up and looks pretty sharp for its age and having been buried for close to 40 years. Even the segments shot at a rock concert that takes place in this particular national park.
Yes. This concert's apparently in the script.
There's way too much footage of the "performers". Obviously they used the overshoot to pad the film's 75 minute running time. There's too much, and it's awful. Is this a killer animal movie or a fucking music video? To top it all off, you have the always adorable Deborah Foreman, in like 3 scenes, and obviously 2 or 3 more were needed to have those make narrative sense. Either they were never shot or vanished during the films 40 year production period.
By the way, this concert is being produced by Louise Fletcher, who wants to be Nurse Ratched for the festival crowd, apparently. Lastly, we have a bellowing John Rhys Davies, (who would be everyone's favorite Lord of the Rings character, the dwarf Gimli), as a French Indian bear trapper that I swear to God has to be the inspiration for Jon Voight's wackadoo Cajun in Anaconda.
So one would think, after reading all this, that the bear is going to go after this massive crowd they've managed to film, right?
Nah.
It attacks from the rear of the stage during a fireworks accident, in one of the most poorly edited "action" sequences I've ever seen.
I'm out of breath. From both the writing and the unintentional laughter.
However, let's get serious, bears can be real trouble.
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