Hollywood, if nothing else, will always shamelessly try to copy the unexpected success of a popular movie with thinly disguised rip-offs. Some are just more blatant than others. So, when Jaws gave us a killer shark, it was only natural that someone else might find some other sort of large predator to randomly attack, kill, and eat people. In fact, there were many, but in the case of Grizzy, that animal was a bear. Credit where it’s due: at least the bear isn’t an aquatic animal.
Yeah, I watched this one for the Fill-In Filmography poster…
It’s a standard summer at a national park, but one thing is not so standard: there’s a killer grizzly bear roaming in the forest. It quickly dispatches two twentysomething girls, one while she was hiding in a cabin, rather easily, and that’s just for starters. Chief Ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George) is on the case, and if only the park supervisor, Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey), would stay off Kelly’s case. Kittridge, in time honored tradition, not only refuses to shut down the park due to it being tourist season, but he actively blames Kelly for the rogue bear and invites amateur hunters in to kill the beast. Kelly, for his part, recruits all the various rangers as well as helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine) and tough guy naturalist and bear expert Arthur Scott (tough guy actor Richard Jaeckel). These three, if they can get along, may need to move fast. The body count keeps rising, starting with a female park ranger who split off on her own to strip down to her underwear and rest under a waterfall, as one does when there is a killer bear on the loose.
However, Scott has some grim news: the bear they are hunting is a particularly aggressive grizzly, and it’s going in an ever-widening circle, killing everyone it seems to come across or at least outright avoiding traps set for it. The bear, it seems, is a very smart animal, and it may like to play with its food.
You know, I knew this was almost certainly something of a Spielberg rip-off, but I wasn’t expecting what kind. By that, I mean whoever wrote or selected the music for this episode did a strange job of it. The music playing over the opening credits sure does sound like it came from a Spielberg movie, but one of his more family-friendly and innocuous ones. The only time the opening theme for the movie got at all ominous was when it flashed the movie’s title. Otherwise, it was the sort of uplifting music I might expect on an E.T. rip off.
If that seems like an odd thing to focus on, it’s because this movie is at times a bit confused. What happens with Kelly’s photographer girlfriend Allison (Joan McCall)? She just disappears at one point and that’s it. The bear is smarter than it probably should be, and it moves like a ninja despite being a 15 foot tall animal. Much like Jaws, the bear is kept off-screen as long as possible, with a real trained bear appearing in some shots, but never with any of the actors, and quite frankly, the actual bear, when it was on-screen, doesn’t quite sound all that threatening. Bottom line: Grizzy is a full bag of cliches and a story that basically little more than a Hollywood cash grab.
Grade: C
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