 |
| George Clooney had a falling out with the bear a while ago, don't ask him about it. |
When Steven and I took our trip through the Year of the Knockoff a couple of years ago, we had a lot of fun discovering what popular trends studios were trying to chase and capitalize off of. A lot of it didn't work as just making a copy with no heart is easily sniffed out and forgotten. Sometimes it did though, and there was a few legitimate surprises that we quite enjoyed.
Abby, a Blaxploitation take on the Exorcist was a lot of fun and introduced us to the work of William Girdler, a director that showed a lot of potential and was able to stretch a low budget just far enough to make entertaining genre knock off affairs. Abby had me interested in seeing what else Girdler had done and that lead me to 1976's Grizzly.
Grizzly, which I covered previously on the blog, is a knock off of Jaws as it involved an usually large predator being forced out of its normal habitat and into a higher populated tourist location. The local leadership want to keep the parks open for the money and those that understand that A LARGE BEAR IS EATING PEOPLE want to keep people away from the large bear. It is a template a lot of other films would use to varying degrees of success, but Grizzly gets a lot more right than it does wrong. Even though you know Grizzly came after Jaws and exists because of Jaws, it stands on its own two overly large bear feet as a fun nature run amok film. I enjoy Grizzly. It's fun and does what it sets out to do.
 |
| It should have had a dance competition in it though. |
When doing my research for that
original blog post, I had read about an abandoned sequel that
collapsed spectacularly due to the sudden loss of budget and how it
never got to post production as a lot of the film was not shot.
The premise of this second film was to involve another giant Grizzly going on a rampage at a very large rock concert in a national park. That sounds like a pretty kick ass sequel, right? It definitely ups the ante by having a very large group of people all crowded together with loud music playing so when panic sets in, along with a large murderous bear, the chaos would be magnificent. Man, that would have been a great film to see.
It was announced in September of 2020 that producer Suzanne C. Nagy had spent the last few years completing the film and it was set to be released this month. For a film that died mid production, I thought this was great news. We get to see what Grizzly II attempted to be. We even got a teaser trailer for it, with some pretty big names in it.
I was excited to see what this film was all about. I wasn't expecting greatness or even the fun of the first Grizzly. I understood that this was a troubled production and that it was going to be a bit of a rough go. The option to rent it on Amazon was $5.00 or to own for $8.00. Hell why not buy it for $8.00? I am sure I will want to watch this again based upon the simple goodwill that the first film had with me.
Grizzly II is a shameless cash grab and a straight up bait and switch. It runs 72 minutes long, never a good starting sign, and its big names of George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen are in the first 5 minutes of it and are then killed off. When your teaser trailer is the three of them in pretty much their only scene, that's a large shovelful of bullshit being chucked your way. I wasn't expecting them to be big integral parts of the film and was sure they all would be eaten by a bear at some point during the run time, but the promise of the trailer and what we got is a slap in the face of anyone who was honestly looking forward to this film.
That isn't the biggest sin that Grizzly II commits. It's the editing and the addition of 'new' footage that really just sets this trash heap ablaze in a way I didn't think was possible for a film being finished in 2019/2020 would be able to do anymore.
Let's get to the editing first. It is obvious from what is being presented that a lot of surrounding plot leading up to the concert was not shot or properly covered and that the bulk of the concert footage was a lot of B roll that was intended to be inserted when appropriate. It is like the producer Nagy just handed over a jigsaw puzzle missing 40% of it's pieces and asked the editor to make it resemble the picture on the box, which she did not show them. Someone got paid to string this thing together and I sure they were never happy with any of single moment of it. A lot of it is nonsensical and is an exercise in madness to make your brain fit it together.
Editing is an art form that gets overlooked so often because if it is done well, you will never notice. I don't pretend to be master at it or even a novice. I will say when I was college we had an assignment to take a scene from Gunsmoke and edit together a fight sequence. We were given multiple shots of both actors involved, different angles of their interactions and of the fight, and a series of cutaway reaction shots from the towns folk watching it all. We weren't told how long or how short we can make the sequence, just that we had to tell a story from point A to point B in that scene. Some students chose not to include any townsfolk and make it a much faster scene. Others trimmed the fight down and made it more of a piece about the town reacting. Everyone had the power of how they wanted to make this scene. I haven't forgotten the two big lessons from that assignment: match action is very important (meaning when cowboy A takes a swing at cowboy B, the punch needs to move in the same direct from cut to cut and it should be seamless) and that for an editor to be successful, they need multiple takes and sources to pull from to tell the best story possible. It's clear in Grizzly II that they didn't have this additional footage to pull from as it was never shot and it shows.
This leads to the second big sin, the new footage shot. I knew something was amiss when during the intro title sequence, the wilderness looked clean. Like HD quality clean you see from all the drone camera videos out there now. I was going to try and forgive it until what came next: stock HD footage of two bear cubs playing with each other and other shots of nature like a fucking documentary. Then a hunter, who's face we never see, loads a rifle in 2019 and 'shoots' one of the cubs. The effect is one of those shitty digital gunshot effects you expect to see in Birdemic. It would have just been better to have the screen go black and hear a shot fired. At this point, I knew that $8.00 was too much for this film.
What was shot in 1983 was shot on actual film stock. It's a physical medium that results in the look of the movie having actual film grain. It is absolutely jarring to be watching what was done almost forty years ago cut to something that was shot in the last few years with no grain whatsoever. I mean, I understand that if you don't have usable footage, go shoot some more. That isn't the end of the process. To show that you gave a single shit about completing this project, you could take it one small step further and add film grain to the new footage to make it make more seamlessly. Its not a difficult process in this far off year of 2018:
It would have gone a long way to make Grizzly II feel better as train wreck had they just taken this minimal step.
Grizzly II doesn't care about me liking it. Grizzly II drank in my rage as I shouted 'Fuck You' at the screen for what new additions they added to the concert portion.
 |
| Pictured: Me. |
During the concert sequence in the last third of the film, which appears to have plenty of actually footage to pull from (more on that below), the film makes the unfathomable mistake of putting HD inserts of people at newer concerts and festivals, with no attempt to hide contemporary clothing or, you know, adding film grain. Oh, then a brief image* from a Color Run shows up:
 |
| *Not the actual footage from the film. These people at least seem proud of themselves for finishing something. |
WHAT THE FUCK?! WHY. Okay, Paul, calm down, you need to finish this and try to forget that Suzanne C. Nagy now has your $8.00. But then I remember that they also included what appears to be a friend's SKA/College Radio garage band (as in they just play in garage because they can't go in public because they agreed to be in Grizzly II) with a brand new song that is so not 1983. It is pure insanity.
But Paul, there has to be some sweet Grizzly kills in a film with that word in its title? Nope. Evidently the bear rig they built didn't work, no surprise) and a lot of the kills are from the POV of the bear. Oh, and when the bear dies at the end, you see it for brief second and the credits. YOU HAD ONE JOB GRIZZLY II. YOU NEEDED TO DO THE BEAR MINIUM AND COULDN'T EVEN DO THAT.
*breathes into a paper bag*
Sometimes unfinished films should stay unfinished. Sometimes dead is better.
I am not saying that some partial finished projects should stay abandoned. In fact, there are a few that have come to surface the last few years that were given proper care and have been well received. Here is one example of some previous lost Doctor Who episodes being recreated and restored.
Grizzly II could have been given a similar treatment. Don't have the needed footage to tell the complete story? You could have done some animated bits, make it look like a pulp comic and at least give the story the ability to finish. Or, even better, just take some of the more salvageable scenes and shine them up and make a great mini documentary about the film that was never meant to be. I would have enjoyed the hell out of the film about how this film never got made a lot more than what we actually got.
Are they are positives to this piece bear shit? Yeah, there are two. One is John Rhys-Davies playing a French Canadian tracker named Bouchard. He knew what kind of film he was in and he was fun to watch. I would have preferred just a film of him doing his own thing. The second is the construction of the stage and the footage of the concert itself. The stage is massive and the crowd is huge. You see what they were aiming for and how that setup could have been horrific but it just never came together.
I am a champion of bad movies that were made with the best of intentions. Even in failure there is respect for people trying to bring their vision to life. This is why I adore Miami Connection and Dangerous Men. They came from passion and drive. They just happen to be bad but you can feel the heart.
Grizzly II was probably never going to be good even if it got finished, but this is a fucking slap in the face of people who paid for the promise of something actually worth their time. Avoid giving this film any more money. It has my $8.00. You can come over to my place and watch it and I won't charge you, but I am sure it will still cost you.
