Year Of The Knockoff! Grizzly (1976)

Just when thought it was safe to go anywhere ever. 

As we just recently celebrated Shark Week on the show talking about Jaws and a film about a killer mammal in the ocean, I figured I would take it one step further and head out of the water and into the woods and look at another film that was chasing Jaws's success. Grizzly has been on my radar since our discussion about The Exorcist and its knock off, Abby. I really enjoyed Abby and was excited to see what director William Girdler could do with a slightly larger budget. So let's dig into Grizzly and see if it is truly Jaws on land.

Here is the wikipedia page, and the imdb.com listing.

Grizzly gets quickly to its premise: a giant (sometimes 15 feet tall, sometimes 18 feet tall, sometimes visibly 11 feet tall) Grizzly Bear has wandered down from the highlands of an unmanned national park and attacks two female campers. The point of view of the bear is done exactly like in Jaws, and the music is very reminiscent of John William's score. How the women don't hear the grunting and huffing of a VERY LARGE bear, is beyond me. They are soon attacked (and beary scared?) and fall victim to one large paw. 

Give me five... or more!

Talk to the paw, they face don't want none.

Michael Kelly (Christopher George), the park's chief ranger, is soon investigating the missing girls and quickly finds their remains. He knows this is likely a bear attack and is trying to convince his boss, Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey) to close the park and get all of the campers out. Kittridge blames Kelly for this attack as he and the park naturalist, Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) were to have supposedly gotten all of the bears out of the park before the season started. Kelly knows that they moved all the bears and that this one that attacked must be unknown to the park. 

What manpower Kelly has he puts into use as Kittridge is hesitant to get anyone else involved as he has aspirations of running for public office, and sends out the remaining rangers to go searching the vicinity of where the original attack happened. A pair of rangers who happen to be dating, are searching together when the split up at a waterfall. He decides to keep searching, she 'wants to dip her feet in the waterfall' proceeds to take off all her clothes, save her underwear, and frolics in the falls. The bear, obviously angry about the female ranger's disregard for decency, attacks.

'Is that Head and Shoulders I smell'?

People are ordered by radio broadcast out of the park, and they starting running in large groups out of the higher areas. This is a very sensible response. I too would run like hell with the knowledge that three people have been attacked and eaten by a bear in less than 24 hours. 

Kelly finds Scott up in the highlands, dressed in animal fur, and going on about how this isn't your typical bear that is wandering around. He claims that this bear is from an ancient line of large carnivore Grizzly Bears. Supposedly they were driven from the woods a long time ago, but this one is now back, looking for fresh meat.

When you can't afford to have seperate Quint and Hooper characters, just combine them into one.

That evening, the campers that panicked and ran to the lower areas of the park TO GET AWAY FROM THE KILLER GRIZZLY BEAR, are surprised when the bear comes to their camp and kills yet another woman. I would think if I was the bear, I would appreciate having all of my food get closer together so that I would have to spend less time wandering around finding single campers. The only thing that would have made this situation more enticing would probably be to have a parked truck with a bed full of dipping sauce for easy access.   

Kitteridge starts allowing hunters (i.e. drunk hunting parties) to enter the park in hopes to quickly kill the bear and still keep any higher ups from coming and starting to ask questions (though I am sure four deaths in two days should warrant at least a follow up phone call from someone in power) Kelly and Scott are furious about this as they know that this is going to lead to more trouble and the potential of more people killed. And just as soon as the hunters are let loose, one gets chased by the Grizzly, but only to get away because he fell into a creek and floated downstream.

That evening, a bear does approach a group of sleeping hunters, but it turns out to be a cub and not a threat. The hunters decide to use the cub as bait, hoping that the bigger one in the woods is its mother. They wait in the distance and hear a noise... of the bigger bear eating the cub. I never thought of the Grizzly as a monster. Eat humans? Sure, that's fine. They shouldn't be in your backyard messing with your stuff. Eat a cub? I want to see you get blown up by a rocket launcher. 

If you thought I would make a gif about a cub being eaten... shame on you!

Kelly then realizes he has to attempt to coordinate the hunters into a semblance of a functioning group as they have proven to do more harm than good. He sets them up along a specific area, having them making a bunch of noise in hopes of driving the Grizzly towards where they want it to go. A ranger, the guy who lost his girlfriend in the waterfall attack, is stationed at a lookout tower in hopes of spotting the Grizzly as it makes away from the hunting party. The Grizzly has other plans.

This what I do to vending machines when my candy bar gets stuck.

Kelly and company still are not able to capture the bear and it keeps getting closer to the nearby town. It eventually attacks a young boy and mother and this finally causes the dam to break and bring in the national press to start asking questions. This also finally gets Kitteridge to close the park and ban the hunters. Kelly is also relieved of his duties. Scott doesn't care if they are fired or not and heads back into the park on his own to find the Grizzly.

Kelly and a local helicopter pilot (Andrew Prine as Don Stober... more on him during the wrap up below) load up the copter with a large number of guns and a bazooka (you could say they were loaded for bear) and make a last ditch effort to find the Grizzly. 

A nice quiet moment of contemplation about the potential
 use of a bazooka to kill a bear

Meanwhile, Scott believes he is close to finding the Grizzly. He spots some recent tracks and tries to tempt the bear out of hiding by pulling a deer carcass behind him while on horseback.

The Grizzly finds Scott... and cleanly knocks the head off of the horse.

An homage to the Godfather? 

Fearing that Scott is dead and running out of options, Kelly and Strober see the Grizzly running back into hiding and decide to land the helicopter nearby and try to stop the bear once and for all. The bear, not afraid of the helicopter, openly attacks it, keeping Kelly inside and unable to help Strober. Strober distracts the bear long enough (and gets killed for it) for Kelly to get free and grab the bazooka. This leads to one of the greatest 3 seconds in film history.

This is how the bakery makes bear claws fresh daily.

And that's the end of the film. It literally went out with a bang. I appreciate it. 

So a note about the bear in the film. His actual name was Teddy and he was 11 feet tall. He was trained but not tamed. He was kept in check by being tricked into thinking that the area he was in was electrified (to match his enclosure he was kept in regularly) by a piece of green string and a ticking kitchen timer. The crew was told never to cross the string. Think about that for a second. The only thing between you and A LARGE GRIZZLY BEAR is string and a timer. The 1970's was a weird and crazy time to make films. 

Now you need to supply them with a hot tub and a marg just to keep them placated.

Or if you are in Canada, just a polite request to go away.

Teddy wasn't all bad though. Evidently he didn't roar, so they had to trick him into opening his mouth by giving him marshmallows. They would give him a few and then keep the last one just far enough away so that he would stretch out his neck and open his jaws wide. The film makers then added the roar in later. So now please watch this moment of Teddy attacking a woman and think about him just wanting marshmallows. 

'Her name is Marsha? Teddy, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!'

Some brief statements about the cast and their counterparts in Jaws. Christopher George as Ranger Kelly was a good fit for the film. He could play quiet when needed but he was mainly there to be voice of reason and you could see the loss of life mounting on his face as he moved forward. Very good proxy for Brody. Richard Jaeckel as Arthur Scott was an odd turn that I liked. He was a man about nature and very direct about how he felt about things but wasn't always in tune with the social interactions going on around him. Two or three times during the film he would just start eating a sandwich when others were having a serious discussion. He had the smarts of Hooper by the bluntness of Quint. Andrew Prine as Don Stobler was left some Quint like qualities as well, with his constant jawing at Scott and had monologue about a Native American tribe that fought a pack of cannibalistic Grizzly Bears that is very similar to the USS Indianapolis speech that Quint gave. He was fine but I don't think his character would have existed in Grizzly if the story didn't need a helicopter pilot to get deep into the national park.  

Grizzly is a pretty good film for what it set out to be (It also made roughly 52 times more than its budget back while in the theaters, which made it the most successful independent film of all time until the original Halloween came out). William Girdler's directing is very confident and it goes a long way towards selling some of the cheaper effects (though the gore here is pretty over the top and also makes you forget that you are mainly seeing just a fake bear arm swipe at people). There are some really nice panning shots and some smart placement of the actors in heavier dialogue scenes that keep things interesting. I look forward to checking out more of his work. Its a shame that he died young, less then three years after this film came out, because I believe there is real talent on display here. 

It is obvious that Grizzly was using the same blueprint as Jaws. A lot of other films would use it and still do. Grizzly is different enough with changing its setting from sea to land to give its own flavor. It is weirdly more grim than Jaws as there isn't much comic relief in the film (the bear arm swipes aren't meant to be funny but I laughed every time). I think this film would be a good double feature with Orca as they aren't exactly like Jaws and show you how the 'large animal attack' sub-genre of horror films can be approached somewhat differently.

Now, before I get to my final feelings about Grizzly, I do need to post an important message for those of you who may ignore my warnings about never going out into nature. Here are some very useful tips if you happened to be approached by a bear. You will thank me later.

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I am going to go with a 6 for tone, story, and character beats. The story is about an area with tourist traffic that the powers that be do not want to shut down. A constant point of view shot being used when the Grizzly is stalking victims. A ranger/officer with limited man power trying to stop a creature bigger and more savage than everyone else believes. There's an expert who is more about the animals than people. There's the above mentioned speech about a worse incident involving similar animals being to told to the others while at night. The animal is blown up. A lot.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator? 

Grizzly is better than Ator in a lot of ways but Ator is still more fun. Also, Ator has a cute bear cub THAT DOES NOT GET EATEN BY ANOTHER BEAR. 

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

Absolutely. If you love Jaws then you are already on board for another large animal attack film. If you don't want to take Grizzly super seriously, there is a RiffTrax version available. 

Bonus:

If you want to watch the movie for 'free,' there's a surprisingly clean looking version up on YouTube.