Grizzly

Released in 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws was a gigantic, huge phenomenal success that basically spawned the summer blockbuster. Naturally, it wasn't long before similar movies arrived on the scene dealing with mako sharks, orcas, piranhas, and giant squids. Notice a trend? They're all in the water. If like me, you've been looking for a Jaws ripoff on good old dry land, well, I found it, 1976's epically bad Grizzly.

What sets Grizzly apart from so many other Jaws ripoffs is that there is little to no effort whatsoever to actually distance itself from the original shark attack classic. You know, other than replacing the great white shark with a 15-foot grizzly bear. Whole scenes are completely ripped off so the writing staff probably saved a lot of time and effort just translating the story from the Atlantic Ocean to a National Park in the deep south, including my favorite, the new grizzly version of Robert Shaw's famous USS Indianapolis monologue. Sorry, couldn't find the video, but you can read it at IMDB's memorable quotes, third one down.

It's the height of the tourist season and park ranger Kelly (Christopher George) is dealing with a shortage of rangers to patrol the park's expansive grounds. Making it worse, some campers are found mangled beyond recognition out in the woods. Most think it's the work of a brown bear, but naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) thinks it was a 15-foot tall grizzly bear weighing over 2,000 lbs., or twice the size of an average grizzly. With the help of local chopper pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine), Kelly and Scott go out hunting with pressure on their back from the park supervisor who wants to keep the grounds open for all the cash that's flowing in.

Before I dive into this one, I should say I expected a clunker of epic proportions going into this B-movie. But even with those low expectations, Grizzly found a way to dig deeper. Working with a budget under $1 million, the whole movie has a cheap feel to it. Early on, the bear isn't even shown, instead we get POV shots from the mammoth grizzly with some growling and heavy breathing played on the soundtrack. Then, when the bear is shown, it's a paw or arm here. The full-on shots of the bear, a captive animal named Teddy, are impressive but it seems to be the same shot of the grizzly growling over and over again.

Thanks to that small budget, the death scenes are pretty laughable with buckets of red paint standing in for blood as hikers, hunters and assorted nameless bear meals are mauled and torn apart. Some nice Youtube user was nice enough to upload a video with all of Grizzly's kills, some worse than others, which you can see -- obvious SPOILERS -- here. My personal favorite, the young lady in bra and panties being hugged to death under a waterfall. Ah, good stuff. This all builds to the climactic helicopter vs. bear showdown that audiences were begging for with possibly the greatest use of a missile launcher in a movie EVER.

Stumbled across this gem because of the cast with three of my favorite character actors -- George, Prine and Jaeckel -- stepping into the limelight, sort of. This is clearly one of those movies where you showed up, delivered your lines and got your check for services rendered. All three seem to be enjoying themselves delivering the unintentionally funny lines, and listen closely for a few flubs of lines that were left in the final print. An awesomely bad movie if there ever was, Grizzly is 90 minutes of low-budget cheesiness that should provide some laughs if nothing else in a land version of Jaws.

Grizzly <---trailer (1976): **/****