Grizzly II

Just before Halloween, Flix ran a new-to-me movie called Grizzly II: Revenge that had such a dumb plot synopsis that it sounded like it would be a fun watch. It's on the Flix schedule again tomorrow at 9:00 AM (and again on, I believe, November 30). So I watched it to do a review on it here.

George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen are atop the opening credits as the nominal stars of the show, and indeed we see them right at the beginning of the movie. They're three friends who are going out for a hike in a national park one day, walking blithely past a sign warning them that there's a danger of bears in the area. So you know something bad is liable to happen to them. Sure enough, once they bed down for the night, a giant grizzly bear gets all three of them. Maybe 10 minutes into the movie, our three top-billed cast members are all dead.

Meanwhile, down at the foot of all the hills, the park rangers and bear experts are worried about the bear attacks, and angry that they've got more to deal with than just a grizzly bear running amok. The park superintendent, Draygon (Louise Fletcher -- yes, that Louise Fletcher) has decided to grant a permit for a festival-style rock concert that's going to bring tens of thousands of young fans to the park. Never mind that it would trash the park; the head ranger is worried about how to keep the music fans safe while there's a rampaging bear out there.

Back up at higher elevation, the bear is still killing people, so the ranger consults with expert French-Canadian hunter Bouchard on how to track the bear and kill it. All of this is intercut with scenes of the various musical artists going through dress rehearsals for the concert; it's pretty obvious that the bear and the concert are going to cross paths for the movie's climax. As for the music, most of the artists sound like a terrible Eastern European simulacrum of early 1980s New Wave music. Indeed, one of the keyboardists even sings in Hungarian.

And that helps to explain why what the viewer gets when watching Grizzly II: Revenge is so bizarre. I didn't recall that in the wake of Jaws there was an original Grizzly among the wave of animal-themed horror. So several years later, it's not unnatural that somebody would come up with the idea of a low-budget sequel. But while the box guide says this is a 1983 movie, IMDb says it's a 2020 release.

Therein lies the real story. Apparently the producer went to Hungary, which was slightly more open than the rest of Eastern Europe at the time, with the exception of Yugoslavia. The American producer hired a Hungarian director and brought a bunch of western actors over for what presumably would be an interesting payday. However, money ran out and Hungary kept the film elements. Some bootlegs were released 10 or 15 years ago, but one of the producers was eventually able to get enough elements together, cobble together a film, and give us an official release which is what we see here.

The result is something that is spectacularly bad. There's not much of a plot; the acting is wooden; there's all sorts of out-of-place 2020 footage; the the concert music is hilariously awful. Frankly, the time warp of vintage Eastern European music ought to be the highlight here, and it's a shame that more of it wasn't (or maybe couldn't be) used. Indeed, there's one bizarre intercutting of a band wearing "Greenpoint" T-shirts, clearling referring to the hipster section of Brooklyn that probably nobody in Hungary would have known about in 1983.

Overall, Grizzly II: Revenge is so bad it's hilariously funny, and definitely needs to be seen to be believed.