Director
William Girdler
Cast
Christopher George - Michael Kelly
Andrew Prine - Don Stober
Joe Dorsey - Charley Kittridge
Joan McCall - Allison Corwin
Charles Kissinger - Dr. Hallitt
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, you got out of the water because a giant man-eating shark was swimming around. So, instead you thought it would be safer to take a nature hike through a national forest as an alternative excursion. Well, think again. Why? There's a man-eating grizzly bear lurking around, and eating people, and doing some bad bear things!
It's blatantly obvious that the 1976 movie Grizzly is a rip-off of the more popular movie Jaws which was released the year before. Even the posters look similar. Just compare them. The Jaws poster has the shark, bearing razor sharp teeth, lurking underneath the unsuspecting female swimmer. On the poster for Grizzly, the bear with its razor sharp teeth, looms over the unsuspecting female camper.
I first watched this movie shortly after I had started my endeavor through 1,000 horror movies. That's what this blog is all about. Grizzly was originally going to be my sixth movie. I kept dozing off trying to get through it.
But this silly ol' bear kept popping into my head, so I attempted another viewing.
The National Philharmonic Orchestra scores the opening shot as a helicopter flies over the treetops of a national forest. The pilot tells his guide that the forest below has been pretty much untouched since the Native Americans lived within.
The forest is currently in its busy vacation season as tourists and campers roam the main area of the park. Meanwhile, two female hikers are taking down their campsite when a grizzly mauls and hacks one of them to death. The other girl runs for her life and hides in a shack where the grizzly tears through the walls, leaving her no where else to go.
When the mangled remains of the girls are discovered, the Chief Park Ranger, Michael Kelly (Christopher George) is determined to find the bear and destroy it. Other grizzly deaths take place.
Meanwhile, Park Supervisor, Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey) thinks it's Kelly's fault the attacks took place as Kelly was responsible eliminating bears from out of the forest.
As attacks continue, including the mauling of a young boy and the death of his mother, time becomes crucial as Kelly and a team of hunters try to find this bear. Though Kelly doesn't appreciate the number of hunters roaming the forest as he believes they'll just kill any animal they come across.
All the while, Kelly and Kittridge argue back and forth about keeping the park open to campers, and how to locate and take down the bear.
It's revealed that grizzlies don't live in this particular forest as they were purposely eliminated from the region. But somehow, this one remains.
Kittridge wants the park to remain open for camping while the deaths of campers and hikers is obviously reason enough to close the park.
Split second shots of the horror scenes make it so the audience can't get a good look at the gore. It's a good way to disguise a low budget. The elusive bear kills. Experts can't find this giant bear. It kills again. Rinse and repeat.
Grizzly definitely piggybacks off the success of Jaws. The similarities are uncanny.
The grizzly survived an attempt at regional extinction. So, its presence in this National Forest is very peculiar... just like Jaws' presence in that particular beach of Amity Island was peculiar.
A park ranger has to endure a battle of the wills against a greedy supervisor ridiculously lacking enough emotion to close the park as that would lead to loss of revenue. He allows campers to continue camping in the park despite the number of deaths. It's a plot point reminiscent of Mayor Larry Vaughn's desire to keep the beach open in Jaws. Like Vaughn, who feared Amity Island's economy would suffer by closing the beach during the summer, the supervisor fears the same sort of thing at the hight of tourist season. And both won't consider the reasons presented by the experts.
The movie uses lazy special effects and repeated footage of the bear that resembles stock footage to attempt to terrorize the audience.
It makes little sense that the movie initially conceals the bear until midway through the movie. Why? We know it's a grizzly bear. Presumably, everyone in the audience knowns what a bear looks like. It doesn't have any physical abnormalities designed to scare the audience. It's just a menacing, hungry, normal looking grizzly standing at 18 feet tall (according to the poster.)
Aside from sinister music (like Jaws) and point-of-view shots as the bear sneaks up on naïve vacationers (again, like Jaws), there's not a lot of scare tactics here except for a lot of shots of screaming faces. It's drab, predicatble, and lacks much originality and imagination.
For those who love man versus deadly nature films, maybe this movie will appease on a Friday night. Otherwise, it painfully tries to be Jaws while trying not to be so.
If anyone out there thought the shark looked fake, there are a lot of scenes where the grizzly looks even worse.
On a side note, there is one interesting factor about this movie. The poster was designed by comic book legend Neal Adams.
Grizzly vs Jaws? Now that would be epic! I'd watch that.
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