Review by Louis Fowler | Available from Shriek Show | Buy at Amazon.com
From the director of my favorite nature-gone-amok film, DAY OF THE ANIMALS, the late William Girdler, comes his take on Jaws, the comparably-if-not-more-awesome, GRIZZLY. Sorry, Señor Spielbergo!
Like the poster screams, "18 Feet of Towering Fury!" has taken over a national park – a gigantic, quasi-intelligent grizzly that can decapitate and dismember with one swoop of his monstrous paw. He's not averse to stealing the occasional pick-a-nick basket... of death! At first, he's just chomping down on the lone stray camper, but eventually this Mecha-Yogi's pair get bigger and brassier, and soon enough he's attacking camp sites, lookout towers, ranger stations and, in the film's piece de resistance, he's knocking the flying fuck out of a helicopter. As the leads surmise somewhat inefficiently, they believe that this giant, furry killer is not the brown bears that peacefully roam the park, but a possibly-prehistoric leftover who been hibernating for God knows how long and, consequently, is hungrier than a fat trucker at the Big Texan.
It becomes pretty obvious to ranger Christopher George and naturalist Richard Jaeckel – both of DAY OF THE ANIMALS fame – that your typical rifle-bullets and tranq darts ain't gonna take this Smokey out – so, in one of the greatest cinematic scenes ever to be imagined, conceived, correlated, staged, filmed and shown in a public arena to a mass group of ticket-buyers, it becomes a battle of hulking forest beast verses super rocket launcher. That's right – a rocket launcher. Guess who wins? You, the viewer does! Grizzly bits go flying overhead in a scene that needs to be, if I may use a cliché, seen to be believed.
The special effects are laughably awesome – most of the attacks take place in the bear's point of view, with someone wearing a bear-paw mitten swinging blindly at actors, whom, to their credit, react without too much laughing. The scenes featuring the actual towering bear-furno are usually shot from the ground up, and I'm no bear scientist, but I could have sworn that the grizzly shots were frequently interchanged with that of a harmlesser brown bear.
Either way, it's get blown up by a rocket launcher.
And that's why, after finishing GRIZZLY, I sat back for a minute and smiled. I felt complete. I felt like a little part of my life was a little bit better. I had realized that I had lived for too long without GRIZZLY in my life. And while I may not be a better person for it, by God, at least I have seen an exploding bear.
