Movie Review: Grizzly (1976)
The legend of Grizzly looms large in my family. The movie is just a Jaws ripoff that was actually pretty successful, grossing $39 million despite costing less than $1 million to make.
But that’s not why I know about it. I know about it because when my father was a teenager, he spent 89 minutes out of his Christmas to watch this movie in a packed theater, uproarious in laughter.
I first heard that story when I was young (six or seven, probably), and we found it at a video store and watched it. At the time, Jaws was my favorite movie, and even then I was able to see this movie for what it was.
Since then, I hadn’t given it much thought. It might be good for a laugh here or there, if my brother refers to it, but it’s not a movie I ever had much of a desire to revisit, even for laughs…until one day, I saw the tagline peeking out from behind a blu-ray case at my current video store. “18 FEET OF TOWERING FURY!,” it read. It seemed familiar. I soon realized why.
The movie was directed by William Girdler, who appears to be a pretty prolific schlock director, directing nine movies from 1972 to 1978, including a few blaxploitation movies and an Exorcist ripoff. His most well-known film is the 1978 film The Manitou, a horror movie starring Tony Curtis and Burgess Meredith, and based on Native American mythology. Sadly, he died just two years after Grizzly’s release, at the age of just 30, from a helicopter crash while he was scouting locations for another movie.
Knowing that, it’s a bit disturbing how heavily helicopters are featured in this movie. A helicopter is nearly the first thing you see when it starts, though the first thing you notice is that it has that cheesy, cheap ’70s look to it. It looks like an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, or like one of my favorite ’70s movies, Benji, which was made for well under $1 million. Even though it looks cheap, it’s an aesthetic that just seems inviting to me. It’s certainly a few steps above the exploitation movies that were being made at the time, like The Last House on the Left (a film I hesitate to call “exploitation,” considering there’s genuine craft there, but it certainly came from that tradition).
The helicopter provides some nice shots zooming above a massive and beautiful National Forest. We see the pilot, but he’s not really introduced until later in the movie. The music over the opening credits is nice, even if it resembles John Williams’s score for Jaws a bit. At least it doesn’t resemble the music when the shark approaches — just the more optimistic, heroic music.
We then meet a number of the characters, including our protagonist, chief park ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George), photographer Allison (Joan McCall), and a few other park rangers and minor characters, and it’s mentioned (in a Jaws-like way) that the park is flooded with hikers for its current season.
We meet two of these hikers, some young women whom I don’t recall being named. The bear approaches them with a POV shot that resembles Friday the 13th, or more accurately, Jaws, with the shark’s point of view over the opening credits. Curiously, though, the POV is up high, indicating that the bear apparently approaches them while walking on its hind legs only. Strange.
The first hiker is attacked with a claw swiping, and a detached arm goes sailing. It’s kind of funny how easily that happens. The attack continues, killing her by her tent, and the other hiker escapes into a shack, where she thinks she’s safe. Well, the bear ends up tearing apart half the shack to kill her.
A park ranger meets Kelly and Allison, and says that he has two hikers he has to go off and look for. They come along, and they make their way into the shack to find a dead body. They then find parts of the other one.
The movie then cuts to a doctor and a discussion of what must have been an unusually large bear, and there’s already some guy in a suit that complains about how Kelly is handling the case. I don’t recall what exactly his occupation was (that’s on me; I’m sure it’s mentioned), but I’ll hereon be referring to him as the Mayor, because that’s clearly the character in Jaws that he’s modeled after. They argue about closing the park, but decide to just move all the hikers, I guess.
We get some more bear POV shots (including one from about thirty feet up in the air, unless he’s supposed to be on a cliff or something) as it tracks a female park ranger who inexplicably begins to strip to her underwear to go hang out at a waterfall. It seems to me this scene would make a lot more sense if it weren’t a ranger, but just a hiker. Anyways, while in the waterfall, a giant, fuzzy, very comfortable-looking bear arm grabs her, and the water begins to turn red because the director had seen and enjoyed Jaws.
The movie’s next scene is in Allison’s father’s restaurant, where she and Kelly talk, with Kelly reflecting on how he’s not doing enough. It’s a really quick scene, and it doesn’t accomplish much.
In the next scene, Kelly goes up in a helicopter with the pilot, Don (Andrew Prine). He’s the outside help that they bring in to hunt down the bear, a la Quint in Jaws. They spot something moving in a clearing, and land, only to find that it’s just a naturalist (Arthur Scott) in camouflage. He’ll be your Hooper for the rest of the movie. He gives the obligatory speech about how it’s not a brown bear, and it’s a grizzly bear, which nobody thought was possible for whatever part of the country they’re in, and how this one’s at least 15 feet tall, while the average grizzly is about seven feet tall. I’m not sure the logic of measuring a four-legged animal by its height when standing on two legs (which I assume is what this is referring to, since a four-legged 15-foot tall creature would be bigger than an elephant), but I guess this film has already showed that bears spend a lot of time on just two legs. In a silly, unnecessary moment, he even theorizes that it’s some kind of prehistoric bear that was the dominant predator a million years ago. He says something about the bear needing killing all these people to eat, which is weird, since the victim in the shack certainly wasn’t eaten.
At night, the bear claims its fourth victim at a crowded camp, when it pulls a woman out of her tent and kills her while dangling her awkwardly in the air. There was a line earlier jokingly pointing out that the bear prefers women, but now with all four victims being women, it doesn’t seem like such a joke. What’s up with this bear? Or rather, what’s up with these filmmakers? Slasher movies of the ’80s were often criticized for their portrayal of women, with critics often incorrectly citing the victims as primarily being female (virtually every slasher movie I’ve seen has more male victims, though criticizing those movies for having their actresses get nude all the time seems pretty fair). Here, we’ve got only women victims so far, and one even inexplicably stripped to her underwear. It’s unsettling.
Kelly and the Mayor guy get into another argument, and the Mayor doesn’t believe what the Hooper character has to say about it being a grizzly. We then learn that this movie’s version of the beaches being open/closed is the Mayor’s refusal to call in more guys from “Washington,” which I think means DC, even though this appears to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. You’d think state troopers would have a better response time, but the Mayor nonetheless stresses that Kelly has enough men and just has to do his job. The first scene after the credits let us know that this isn’t true, though, with Kelly mentioning to his small group of rangers (which he now has one less than, remember) that the park was overcrowded, and they didn’t have enough men.
A bunch of hunters arrive on the scene, and the Hooper character says something about how they’ll probably end up shooting all the wildlife, and Kelly is concerned about some rangers getting shot.
A bear tracks a hunter — and thank God, it’s a male this time. Though I had to pause it to be certain, since he’s got that long ’70s hair. We get some nice shots of an actual bear walking, just of its legs. It’s neat that they were able to use a bear, but I can’t help but continue to question why all the POV shots are from high up as if it’s walking on two legs, when we see the shots of the bear walking on four. These POV shots are less exaggeratedly high, though, or at least most of them are, so maybe these shots are supposed to be from the perspective of an impossibly big bear on four legs.
Anyways, the hunter sees the bear, drops his gun like an idiot, and exits, pursued by the bear, who we see in the POV shots in the woods and then of the shots of its legs that it’s moving along grass.
He trips and falls into a river, seemingly floating to safety. So maybe we don’t have a male victim yet. Or maybe we do. The last we see of him for now is him sort of turning and falling away from view in the rapids while a bear growls. Maybe that’s implied that the bear will get him, but I can’t be certain now.
I must say, as lame as this chase scene was, given its inconsistencies in perspective and the hunter unnecessarily going down a tree like a fire pole to get off of a rock that’s about ten or twelve feet of the ground, the music is pretty effective.
We get another scene of the Mayor arguing with Kelly, who’s accompanied by the helicopter pilot and naturalist. Kelly then learns that the bear had a hold of a hunter, but he got away, though wounded. So I guess that last shot and growl was meant to imply that the bear got him, though we still don’t have a dead male in this movie, and haven’t seen one attacked yet. Instead of using this as an opportunity to gloat in the Mayor’s face about how telling hunters to go out there was stupid, he instead goes away and finds Allison.
The film then shows a few hunters sleeping outside in sleeping bags, while a bear approaches them. There are some closeups of a real bear’s eyes, and the hunters scream when they wake up, only to find that it’s a pretty damn tame brown bear (the bear is colored black, but I believe a lot of brown bears are, and brown bears were mentioned as the common bear in the area). They decide it’s a cub, even though it’s about their size, and they’re like hugging it and petting it. They think it might be the killer bear’s cub, and one of the hunters suggests they use it as bait, to which the others agree.
The music and POV shots indicate the killer bear approaching the tame one, and then it comically cuts to Kelly saying, “Whose stupid idea was it to use that live cub as bait?” The movie has a lot of humorous moments, but this was a genuine laugh-out-loud moment for me. The bear flat-out ate another bear. Whether or not that happens in real life doesn’t concern me (I understand it does, actually); it’s just so damn funny.
The three main characters are discussing going after him, and the Hooper character proposes that he wants to capture him, and shows off his tranquilizer shells, which the Quint character mocks, just as the actual Quint mocks the actual Hooper’s shark-resistant cage.
Then, in the most shameless scene in the movie, the Quint character delivers his USS Indianapolis monologue. He tells a story about a bunch of Indians that were attacked by a herd of grizzly bears. “They tore ’em all up — little children, sick ones, everybody.” This is where Grizzly is most unforgivable in its ripping off of Jaws. It’s one thing to imitate the structure of a really successful animal attack movie, but to steal the most intricate of details is just something else. Coincidentally, this is one of the least effective scenes of the movie. Whereas Quint’s Indianapolis speech in Jaws was genuinely chilling in the way it was shot and performed, and made all the more so because it abruptly shifted the tone from a comedic scene, this speech just sort of happens. It’s really brief, and not at all scary.
The next day, a ranger atop a wooden watchtower gets attacked when the bear tries to bring the tower down. This is our first full glimpse of the bear, and overall it’s a pretty good use of a live animal, but it’s still a hard scene to take seriously. You see a lot of the bear, who just kind of awkwardly throws its paws against the wood repeatedly.
This is probably my favorite scene of the movie. It’s a weird mix of laughable and competent filmmaking that is capped off by the tower falling and revealing a really bad dummy getting crushed.
The three main characters arrive just a little too late, and we see how the bear isn’t at all sticking to that “he’s killing for food” mentality, when they see the dead body of the ranger. Later, the Mayor character is very apologetic towards Kelly, now that he’s lost one of his own, which I guess means they never found out about the dead female ranger. Kelly and the Hooper character talk about how the bear is intelligent and seems to know what they’re thinking. Kelly then begs for the Mayor to close the park, and he refuses, so this is another shameless ripoff. The Mayor wants the press there to see how capable his men are of handling this situation, which is strange, given how he’s spent the entire duration of the movie complaining about how Kelly’s handling the situation.
We then get a repulsive scene of a little boy playing with his pet bunny when he gets attacked by the bear. Coming so soon off of the movie’s comedic highlight, this scene seemed to singlehandedly kill my enjoyment of the movie. Yes, I know a kid gets attacked in Jaws, and that’s unfortuante. But it also was early in the movie, and worked as a plot device to make Brody feel ashamed for not standing up to the Mayor. I guess it works as a plot device here, too, with the Mayor finally letting Kelly close down the park afterwards. Really, the big difference here is that Jaws is a good movie, so I guess the moral of the story is you can get away with killing a kid in a good movie.
To be fair, the kid is alive, or, as Kelly puts it, “Part of him is.” You see the bear pick him up and throw him down, missing a leg, and covered in blood. His mother went to defend him with nothing but a broom, and she’s definitely killed. It’s just an ugly scene that leaves you with a rotten feeling.
And we’re still at no dead male characters, with the only male we see getting attacked being a child of probably about five. Yikes, this movie’s weird.
The Quint character and Kelly go out in the helicopter for one final hunt, with the Hooper character already out there trying to capture it. They bring a dead buck to use as bait, which they tie to the end of a rope and hang from a tree. They’re of course armed with rifles. The bear recognizes the whole situation as a trap when he hears a gun cock, and he goes running, and we get a musical sting that’s taken right from Jaws. It sounds almost exactly like “Out to Sea.”
The two men give chase on foot, but lose the bear. They return and see that the bear had taken them in a giant circle so that he could take the deer carcass.
At nightfall, Quint and Kelly take exchange watches, with Kelly taking the first one. In terms of a horror movie, we get maybe the most effective moment of the movie, though it’s very brief, with Kelly staring off into the woods while some eerie music plays. The music itself is perhaps the movie’s best feature outside the use of an actual bear. It’s appropriately scary sometimes, and other times it’s fun and adventurous, if sounding too much like Jaws.
In the morning, Hooper finds the half-eaten deer, and radios in to Kelly, and tells him he’s going to drag the deer towards them in hopes of bringing the bear, despite Kelly telling him not to. The bear attacks, ripping off Hooper’s horse’s head with ease. He gets clawed in the face, and the bear buries him, with just his head sticking out. He comes to, though, while the other two approach in their helicopter. He starts to get up and hears the bear breathing, turning to see it standing on two.
The movie cuts to the other two, now walking, when they find the naturalist’s body. Kelly proposes that they bury him there, which is kind of funny. How often does a guy get buried twice in the span of about an hour? Flying in the helicopter, we have a pointless but brief moment of the Quint character feeling bad, and stressing that he meant no harm when he was kidding around with the guy. The movie didn’t give us a whole lot of opportunities to see that playful behavior, but it gave us even less of an opportunity to believe what Kelly says in response: “You two are a lot alike.”
They find the bear in the clearing and chase him around a bit before Kelly says they should land because the bear is tired. There was a line about a rocket, I think. The bear then attacks the helicopter after it lands in a brief but laughable shot of a guy in a costume, throwing the Quint character clear. Now we’re back to the real bear as it closes in on two legs. Quint shoots at him a few times until he runs out of ammo. The bear closes in, and he’s ready to fight by hitting him with his gun, but instead gets hugged to death by a man in a costume, blood coming out of his mouth while it happens.
Kelly runs out of ammo in his gun, and so he goes and gets the rocket launcher from the helicopter. I guess I heard right. He has a moment where he’s unable to fire the gun so as to create some tension and suspense as the bear stands on two legs and lumbers towards him. And then he shoots it and the bear explodes. Kelly reacts to this somberly, which is probably pretty fair. I’m putting the death of the helicopter pilot completely on him. They could have just shot the thing with the rocket from the air. The movie then ends with Kelly going over to the pilot’s body.
This movie is terrible, but it’s entertaining. It’s actually not as bad as I remember it. There are a few things that are actually decent, like the score by Robert O. Ragland, the location (Clayton, Georgia, where Deliverance was shot), and the fact that they used a real bear. They accomplished this by using electrical wires everywhere to keep the bear from the actors and the crew.
So much of this movie almost feels like a parody. It steals so much from Jaws that it becomes comedic. I may even suspect that some of it was meant to be. I started listening to the commentary track to see if that would come up, but it never did. Producer/Writer David Sheldon and his wife Joan McCall certainly talk about it as if they made an actual movie. Well, at least Sheldon does. It’s pretty interesting to hear him taling about how effective the first attack scene is, and then to hear Joan McCall laugh about the fake bear arm that attacks the second hiker. Of course, we can’t hear from director William Girdler, given his unfortunately young passing.
After listening to most of the commentary track, and watching the “Jaws with Claws: A Look Back at Grizzly” featurette that the inexplicably two-disc DVD contains, I have to say this movie appears to have been genuine, and that makes it all the more funny. Sheldon certainly seems proud of the movie, and certaily of the movie’s success, crediting it to the movie being the first movie after Jaws to deal with animal horror. The other writer and also co-producer, Harvey Flaxman, certainly credits Jaws with the inspiration, as well as a real life camping trip to Yellowstone, where he was kept out because he didn’t have the right tent, since a grizzly bear was wandering around somewhere.
It sounds like some of the excuses for the copycat script can be credited to the sense of urgency Sheldon and Flaxman had to be the first ones to make a movie of this kind after Jaws, because apparently other people were working on developing similar movies. That makes a lot of sense, actually.
I must say, I like hearing David Sheldon talk about this movie. He’s so enthusiastic about it, you’d think he had actually been describing his experiences on Jaws. He seems completely out of touch to talk about it as if it’s a quality horror movie, but that’s part of the fun. At least he admits that the one shot of the guy in the bear suit attacking the helicopter looks awful, and apparently they had a mechanical bear, but someone left it out in the rain last night, so it didn’t work, and they had to scramble to figure something else out.
I’m going to give this movie a bad rating of course, because it’s not a good movie. But I’d still recommend it.
Rating: 3/10
