★ 7 / 10
Trashy creature feature cash in that's a whole
John Chard
Trashy creature feature cash in that's a whole lot of fun. Grizzly is directed by William Girdler, written by Harvey Flaxman & David Sheldon and stars…
Trashy creature feature cash in that's a whole lot of fun.
Grizzly is directed by William Girdler, written by Harvey Flaxman & David Sheldon and stars Christopher George, Andrew Prine & Richard Jaeckel. Story sees a giant Grizzly Bear terrorise campers and hikers at a state park. The head park ranger sets about capturing and killing the beast but he's met with resistance from his superior and troubled by the number of glory hunting hunters who descend upon the park.
If you pardon the pun, Grizzly was a "monster" surprise hit of 1976. Made for a paltry $750,000, it went on to make over $39 million Worldwide. It may well be a "Jaws" coat tail hugging copycat (and it unashamedly is), but credit where credit is due, William Girdler & David Sheldon spotted an opening in the market and got in there in a blaze of blood, grue and roaring ferocity. It was also one of the first of a number of "Jaws" knock offs, and while it's silly at times, and beset with bad acting, it is, however, one of the most popular and fun cult horrors of the 1970s. Filmed on location in Clayton, Georgia, Girdler's movie knows exactly what it's about. Keeping it relatively free of extraneous and expositional filler, Girdler knows (and so does the cast) that the bear is the star of the show - well more to the point, that the bear shredding and chomping down on humans is the star of the show. And so it goes, the humans - except for our hero protagonist (George) & wise sage naturalist (Jaeckel) - are annoying and lining up to be either bear lunch or to be badly proved wrong. And what fun it is. It's the sort of film that scared us to death as kids, and now makes us smile as adults.
The film has proved popular enough over the years to warrant a double disc DVD release. A release that wouldn't be out of place for some critical Oscar winning darling I might add! Now available in a quite lovely anamorphic widescreen presentation (2.35:1), Girdler's (and cinematographer William Asman) shooting around Clayton is very pleasing on the eye. Sure some of the inexperience of the editing and lighting departments exists, and the budget restrictions are now even more evident (check out the blood), but Grizzly actually does look rather nice. The extra disc is chock full of goodies, with the "Jaws With Claws" featurette enjoyable and showing the makers to be very tongue in cheek about the whole thing. So, a must for B movie creature feature fans who don't mind a bit of camp on their cheese sandwich then. Those looking for an "Alien" or "Gorilla's In The Midst" obviously need not apply, so lets mark it as 6.5/10 for the film, and 7/10 for Shriek Show's smart 2 disc DVD package
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★ 5 / 10
Basically Jaws with a grizzly instead of a shark and woods instead of ocean.
Aaron1375
This is one of those movies that almost had it right, but did a few things wrong that kept it from being a really good horror film. This one was obviously…
This is one of those movies that almost had it right, but did a few things wrong that kept it from being a really good horror film. This one was obviously doing a Jaws type movie, its problem, it tried to be too much like Jaws. What I mean is, there are scenes in Jaws that cannot be recreated due to the fact the shark resides in an ocean. It just does not translate to the woods or any other territory that is not water. They try to recreate the scene when they were chasing the shark with the boat, but running on foot, just is not the same. Still, they did have some pretty good kills and the cast was good too.
The story, a killer grizzly is in the woods as it dispatches two girls camping. Soon, they have to go on the hunt, but unfortunately, it kills a ranger. Then it takes out a man's wife which prompts hunters to flood the woods to kill the bear. This leads to two men flying a helicopter trying to get the bear and another whose home is the woods riding a horse and trying to capture it. However, this bear is a lot more clever than the hunters know!
Christopher George plays the head forest ranger with Andrew Prine as the copter pilot and Richard Jaekel as the outdoors man. All of them are good and as I said good kills. Too bad there are just some stupid things going on during this film that one has to take off points for. One of the first things that was head scratching, during the search for the bear in the early stages of the film a female park ranger takes her clothes off and starts rinsing herself off in the waterfall where she is devoured. I am just thinking, who does this while they are working? There is also a scene near the end where the bead buries a guy and the guy is alive and gets out and is promptly attacked by the bear again and killed making one wonder what the point of him initially surviving was!
So, not a bad movie, but not really an all that good film either. It does contain a good amount of blood and gore for a PG rated film, the do an okay job with the attacks and the acting is fairly decent. On the other hand they try to recreate scenes from Jaws and it just does not work, there are more than a few scenes that are just stupid and you just have to wonder, why didn't the bear get its head lopped off when it attacked the helicopter as the blades were still spinning!?!
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Someone seed please