Yet again, critics call this "nature gone bad" movie a rip-off of Jaws. So, once again I should be inclined to bitch and rave about how this is NOT Jaws, because Jaws was about a shark, while this is about a bear! But, no one listens to me and I wasted enough space on this topic in my review for King Cobra (shameless plug there), so I won't bother with it here… and yes, I get the parallels between the two movies, it’s a joke. I just hope that when somebody’s retarded enough to make Jaws 5 that they do so by making the Great White flop around killing people in a national park. Now that would be art! One last mention in this paragraph before moving on: Grizzly was edited by a guy named Bud Asman. Bud's a lucky man, as he's spent his entire life just one letter away from being traumatized! HAHAHAHA! Fuck you Assman!
Alright, as for the movie, it's like an episode of "Wild America" gone bad. It goes all out, even including the cheesy nature show theme music! It's the beginning of camping season, and in a horror movie you know that's an open invite for flesh hungry animals, menacing escaped science projects, or serial killers in sportswear! This time is no different, as a quaint little national park is turned into a badly done bloodbath by a 15ft Grizzly Bear! Business is booming, as there are "more back packers in the woods then there are raccoons" as one ranger puts it, obviously devoid of a sense of humor, or at least any skill in pulling off a decent joke. Trust me, I know, we can smell our own. Sooner than later, a couple of suck-ulent campers of the vaginal kind are given a rude welcome to Jell-O Stone by one pissed off Yogi! Hungry for more than pick-a-nick baskets, Yogi tears the girls apart, ripping the wall off of a cabin to get at one of them! Now, it's all up to head ranger Mike Kelley (well, is he Mike or Kelley?!) and his fellow state funded employees to track down the angry mammal before he starts mauling others! Can they do it in time? Well, I've got an arsenal of Yogi Bear jokes to last us till they do... actually, it's just the same two jokes repeated, but you'll never notice the difference.
The rest of the movie plays as anyone would suspect: Yogi (or at least a furry claw on a stick) goes around the mountains hacking and slashing and gnashing (oh my!) campers left and right, throwing nature's instincts to the winds as he leads the rangers on one wild goose chase after another. Also, to make it easier for the bear, the rangers do the ever reliable "split up at a REALLY bad time" routine, making them extremely vulnerable. They may as well jump into a large bag labeled "Bear Chow" at this point. Once in a while we see more than Yogi's cheap looking claws, but not often. Eventually, after some researching, it appears that Yogi is the sole survivor of a grizzly bounty hunt from several years ago. He's also 15ft tall (though I'd say he never looks any taller than 8ft, maybe 10ft tops), weighs over 2000lbs, and hails from a giant bear species that supposedly went extinct over a millennia ago. Maybe he was just sleeping all this time and needed the motivation to attack, like Godzilla, or the US, or Ben Stein... Also, a little test of nature proves that Yogi is in fact a male. No, there's no 30 inch bear schlong waving to the camera, but when some hunters bait a trap for the bear with a baby bear, Yogi gets territorial and eats Boo-Boo! Good, I always hated his nasally voice. As for the trap, it fails.
Having finally decided on a pattern the bear's following, Ranger Kelley and his Gung-Ho naturalist hippy-gone-bad pal try to head the beast off at the pass. Soon enough Kelley is the last mammal standing after the bear kills the rugged hippy, thus forcing Ranger Kelley to resort to... a rocket launcher. Yep, apparently the US government decided that, after seeing Red Dawn, remote places like national parks have the potential to become war zones, so their rangers require extreme forms of artillery in case a situation such as this one would come up. Not only that, but I've seen an array of exploding forest creatures in my day, and that bear explosion was by far the cheapest! The special FX crew should take a cue from Peter Jackson's Bad Taste on the finer points of mammal detonation.
Bottom line, the gore was okay (though for bear attacks, those severed limbs seemed a little too clean cut) and the all around special FX were bad… though I've seen worse, especially when you think about Werewolf… which I try not to do. The acting was nothing memorable, the music was far too soothing, and the direction was bland and uninspired. You'd probably find more scares in one of those non-existent satirized shows like "When Animals Attack Power Tools", or in a Hanna-Barbera marathon, but in '76 I guess it was easier to make people lose bowel control.
The Moral of the Story: All animal control officers need to be well armed with heavy artillery. Grizzly bears? Rocket launchers. Timberwolves? Flamethrowers. Mountain lions? Tacticle nuclear weapons. There's a heirarchy...
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- Giant killer grizzly bear flick that lifts all of it's story elements from
Jaws, is ripe with gore and mutilations, includes a rocket launcher death, stars Christopher George AND it's directed by the guy who did
Project: Kill?! What the fuck are you waiting for!?
If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Prophecy (the bear movie, not the evil angel movie) or Night of the Demon (the bigfoot movie, not the demon movie)
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