The trouble with being a middle-aged horror fan is never being able to quite remember where you heard something about a certain movie. I knew at one time, but now… that bit of data is gone forever, swallowed up by a sinkhole full of quicksand in my head that’s growing larger every day. (I would estimate it to be roughly the size of Rhode Island, at the moment.)
Anyway, I’d like to have a word with whomever advised me that Grizzly was “Jaws with a bear,” and “a classic gore-fest.” Sure, there’s blood and a respectable body count, but nothing that compares with Ben Gardner’s head floating out of a hole in the hull of his boat. Plus, Jaws had Spielberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Schieder, and Robert Shaw. Grizzly has to make do with director William Girdler and a cast of ham-and-eggers.
So there’s a grizzly bear running amok in a Georgia state park and it’s up to a chain-smoking park ranger (Christopher George), a goofy naturalist who dresses in animal furs (Richard Jaeckel), and a cynical ‘Nam vet helicopter pilot (Andrew Prine) to stop the beast. l
This arduous task takes up the entire running time of the movie, which is stone-cold boring except for periodic bear maulings, and frankly, they’re no great shakes in the blood and guts department.
Despite the fact that I found Grizzly on Hulu Plus under the designation “Classics”, I would hesitate to put it into any special category other than “Ho-Hum & Hokey.”
A much better film of this type is John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy, about a pollution-spawned mutant grizzly on the rampage. Go find that one, instead.
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