Godawful Grizzly

0 stars

Usually, an animal attack movie like Grizzly Night comes with a warning that no animals were harmed during production. The makers of this mess didn’t need one because, aside from a few badly shot bear inserts and a cameo appearance by a dachshund named Squirt, there are no animals in the movie. There’s also no real action in the film, no tension about what will happen next, and no developing sense of empathy for the characters it’s going to happen to. It’s a cinematic sucker punch with a fun title, cool poster, and not much else.

And that’s too bad, because the story that Grizzly Night is based on sounds like the perfect framework for a cheesy horror movie: On August 12th, 1967, in Montana’s Glacier National Park, there were two fatal grizzly bear attacks. On the same night, nine miles apart. The victims, 19-year-old women, were friends. Imagine the possibilities (cause they’re not in the movie).

Co-written and directed by Burke Doeren, Grizzly Night spends much of its time introducing its dozen or so characters to the audience. With the possible exception of a rookie park ranger played by Lauren Call, none of them is particularly well-developed or very interesting. They’re just place holders to keep the audience guessing which one will be turned into bear poop by the final reel. As disparate as they try to be, all the different characters share one thing the audience picks up on from the start. None of them belongs in the woods. Not even the rangers.

Of course, none of this would matter if the film followed up on the promise of its title and poster. If you’re going to annoy viewers with a guy like the obnoxious and poorly named Raymond Noseck (Jack Griffo) or the sleazy Inn owner who baits the bears with garbage so tourists can watch them eat, then you owe it to them to see those jerks graphically chewed to bits by a rampaging grizzly bear or, given the limited budget of the film, a bug stunt man in a grizzly bear suit. If you don’t, you’re cheating them out of any reason to watch it.

Any genre fan will tell you that watching enough movies like this can make that sense of being fooled feel familiar and, for the most part, forgivable. You give it a star for effort and move on to the next movie, hoping it will be better. But the last shot of Grizzly Night kills any chance of that. As a result of the real-life attacks, game wardens went into the park and killed five grizzly bears, including one cub. Doeren isn’t stupid/ballsy enough to show us the cub being killed, but he ends his movie showing us the two rangers lining up the shot that will kill the bear cub and its mother. That takes the one star away.