Grizzly (1976) – Review

Following the success of Spielberg’s summer blockbuster Jaws, the cinema was quickly flooded with killer shark movies but one of the most blatant rip-offs didn’t involve a shark or even take place in the water as this movie dealt with “18 feet of gut-wrenching, man-eating terror!” and by that I mean William Girdler’s Grizzly, a film that didn’t just rip off Spielberg’s classic but used it as a point-by-point playbook.

As the case with many “Nature Attacks Movies” there wasn’t a whole lot of plotting required for a film about a killer grizzly bear, maybe even less than usual, as the story centers around a giant bear that suddenly appears amongst a bunch of campers in a national park, which causes some undue alarm, and the head Park Ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George) is tasked with finding this animal after it kills a pair of female campers.  We’re talking about your basic “Nature Attacks” movie but for some reason, this film also felt the need to throw in a love interest in the form of a photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall), the daughter of a local restaurant owner, who is a character that if completely cut out would have no effect on the end product whatsoever. Her sole purpose seems to be tripping over the remains of a victim and providing at least one-bed scene, which one could argue is not all that essential, but what is essential is creating the threat of this rampaging grizzly bear and in that area, William Girdler’s film is a little more hit and miss. For this type of movie to work, we have to be on the side of the hero, but Park Ranger Kelly is a bit of a one-note mess and things are not helped by the film not providing him much of a mystery to uncover. We know it’s a bear, everyone in the movie knows it’s a bear and the only real argument we get in this film is what kind of bear is it.

“This was no camping accident!”

In Spielberg’s Jaws, a good deal of the conflict was not man against shark but man against bureaucratic assholes, with the local mayor refusing to shut down the beaches because that would harm the island’s economy, but with Grizzly we have park supervisor, Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey), who blames Kelly for the attacks, saying that the bears were supposed to have been moved from the park, which I’m not sure is an actual thing park rangers are supposed to do. It’s not like there are ways to stop a bear from wandering back down into camping areas. The antagonism between Kelly and Kittridge is so poorly manufactured it’s quite laughable at times, with Kittridge spouting off such lines as “Kelly, you’re a maverick. We don’t have room for mavericks!” which begs the question, what exactly does it take to be considered a maverick park ranger?

“My ego is also cashing cheques my body can’t cash.”

We later get some bullshit about Kittridge refusing to close the parks only it’s not because “It’s the 4th of July!” but because he was hoping to parlay the press coverage into somehow landing a cushy government job in Washington. Now, I’m no political insider but I’m not sure how keeping a park open so that more people can be eaten by a bear is somehow attractive to those on the beltway, then again, I’m not a political insider so maybe that is on-brand. He does invite in every yahoo with a rifle, so maybe he was courting the gun lobby? Of course, the Kelly and Kittridge dynamic is only part of the drama as we also have helicopter pilot Don Strober (Andrew Prine), a Vietnam veteran who will wax poetically about killing “Gooks” and will give us this film’s version of Quint’s U.S.S. Indianapolis speech from Jaws in the form of a story about an Indian massacre perpetrated by a killer grizzly.

“Well let me tell you a little story boy. A long time ago there was a tribe of Indians up here in these woods. They were all laying down in these parts… or something I can’t remember. Any way these herd of grizzlies smelt them out. They came in and they ate them. They thorn them all up. Little children, sick ones everybody! There were few braves to go out on the hunt. They came back and the grizzlies turned on them! So there you got yourself a little situation. A whole herd of man-eating grizzlies. Just running around tearing up them Indians!”

“And that’s why I won’t wear a lifejacket in the woods.”

While Andrew Pine may, at first glance, be this film’s Quint analog we also have naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) who dresses up in animal skins and is in charge of giving the audience the required “bear facts” and while this fits the Richard Dreyfus/Matt Hooper character his gruff manliness is also clearly trying to channel Robert Shaw as well. Sadly, these three men do not set out on a small boat to hunt down a Great White Shark, more’s the pity, because them wandering around these woods is less than exciting and is downright tedious at times. A key problem with Grizzly is that we never get the suspense that Spielberg managed so expertly to create with Jaws, in this film we will simply see some poor sap in the woods, then the bear will mosey up and eat them, no dramatic tension provided.

Was this attack intended to rival the shower scene in Psycho?

Stray Observations:

• If the bear doesn’t look to be “18 feet of gut-wrenching, man-eating terror” as the poster claims that’s because it was an 11-foot tall bear named Teddy, who actually preferred eating marshmallows rather than campers.
• To prove this wasn’t a Jaws rip-off the filmmakers clearly thought that killing two women instead of just one in the opening scene, as was the case with poor Chrissy in Jaws, would be enough of a difference, which to be fair is typical thinking for this genre.
• A female park ranger takes a break from hunting a killer bear to skinny dip in the river because…she was hot? Now, I’m all for a little nudity in my “Nature Attacks Movies” but they couldn’t come up with something less stupid than that?
• Our park ranger hero states to his supervisor “Those campers are in my jurisdiction, now I’m going to deal with it the way I’ve seen it fit. Now you just try and stop me!” which technically shouldn’t be too hard as he’s your boss and could simply fire your ass.
• Scotty wants to capture the grizzly alive, using some kind of tranquillizer bullet, but for years it’s been standard wildlife procedure to euthanize a bear once it has killed a human.
• I like to believe that the shark attacking the helicopter in Jaws 2 was a case of Universal ripping off the climax of Grizzly as some kind of bizarre payback.
• Apparently, Kelly was unable to find an oxygen tank to stuff in the bear’s gaping maw so he had to resort to a bazooka to blow it up.

“Smile, you son of a bitch”

If imitation is the highest form of flattering then Steven Spielberg must be one of the most flattered men in the world but writers Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon have since stated that didn’t think they were making a Jaws rip-off at the time, which either means these two men were either extremely self-delusional or possibly just winking at the world while the money rolled in. While this entry in the “Man against Nature” genre sports a decent cast at no point did I find this film about an “18 feet of gut-wrenching, man-eating terror” to be all that terrifying, which is odd considering a grizzly bear can be bloody fucking terrifying, yet endless shots of this particular Teddy bear running through forest never raised my fear level above modest concern. That all said, Grizzly did become the top-grossing independent film of 1976 and held that title until John Carpenter’s Halloween came out a couple of years later, and though it will go down in history as one of the more blatant rip-offs of Jaws it at least can also be considered one of the better ones.  Which isn’t saying much.

Trivia Note: William Girdler had a “robot bear” constructed using a taxidermist provided grizzly bear but it was even less convincing than “Bruce the Shark” from Jaws and thus 99.9% of this movie consists of shots of a real bear with an occasional glimpse of a guy in a bear suit.