Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

guionn A marauding Grizzly eating his way through a public campground and the authorities don't evacuate and close the park to the public? I'm losing count of the different lawsuits that could be and would be filed against various Government agencies.....also.....POOR Bear cub!! :-( (The acting is also abysmal! How did this break box office receipt records until the premier of "Halloween"?? Good blood and guts flick though.

BA_Harrison I watched director William Girdler's animal attack movie Grizzly a while back and completely forgot to write a review about it. Still, it doesn't matter too much that the details are now a little vague, because this film can be summed up easily in three words: Jaws on land.Instead of swimmers being gobbled up in the sea, it's hikers and campers that are on the menu of an 18-foot tall grizzly bear in a national park, with concerned ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George) in charge of hunting the hairy beast down. He is aided in this task by naturalist Scott (Richard Jaeckel) and helicopter pilot, Don (Andrew Prine), but is hampered by a stupid official who wants to keep the park open.Of course, Girdler's film isn't a patch on Jaws, the director not nearly in the same class as Spielberg when on top form, but it does offer up some cheesy B-movie fun, with a few gory killings (the first victim has her arm torn off and is gripped in a deadly bear hug, a young boy loses his leg, and a horse is decapitated!), an entertaining attack on a lookout tower, and a craptabulous finale in which the bear has a go at Don's helicopter before finally being blown to smithereens with a rocket launcher.

warejohnm The original New York Times review in 1976 and the Wikipedia page for Grizzly detail the many ways in which Grizzly replicates Jaws (1975). When not borrowing from Jaws, the film borders on incoherence. Character, action, and dialogue invoke the value of the national park system, greed at the expense of safety, science and myth, sex and the woods, and the good life. None of these ideas are developed; they're simply laced throughout a film whose only continuity is a bear that is running around and killing people whether they're in the grass, in a shed, in a tent, in a fire tower, or in a helicopter. It's fitting that the film ends by zooming out from the scene of Kelly the park ranger next to the dead body of the helicopter pilot which is next to the burning patch of grass marking the spot where the bear was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. Bear dead ... end of story, such as it is.All that having been said, it's interesting to note that Grizzly was made and was successful, which means that all these fragments found some resonance with a wide audience. If you're not worried about the film's quality, you can find plenty to consider, especially when put in relation to other films. Why does the bear victimize so many women? The film toys with male/female relationships, but never develops it. What is the appeal of the blend of authority that Jaws sets out and Grizzly follows so closely: the trio of legal authority, scientific authority, and hunting authority? What was the appeal to 1970's audiences of locating monstrous behavior in animals? You can wring something interesting out of Grizzly, but you might start to wonder if you're working harder than the anyone involved with the original film.

TheRedDeath30 I remember, as a kid, seeing the box for this movie in my local videostore. That incredible Neal Adams artwork drew me in. My childhood brain reasoned that a movie with art like that about a killer bear must be the most awesome horror movie ever. Time and again, though, my mother refused to rent it for me and I never did get to see the movie as a kid. It always kept a little place in the back of my brain, though, where I was certain that somewhere out there was still the greatest animal killer movie ever and one day I would get to see this treasure.The truth is that I was so wrong. So very, very wrong. Yes, this is JAWS in the woods only with bad acting, bad effects and a complete lack of quality script writing. Oh how I wish that I kept this movie relegated to the tantalizing possibility of how great it could have been, rather than viewing the awful reality.The movie goes to great lengths to mimic JAWS, not just in the ideas, but down to the characters and plot beats. Just about every memorable scene in JAWS has a duplicate in this movie. The deaths begin early on and copy the format of using a POV camera to signify the bear's arrival much as Spielberg used POV for the shark. The early kill scenes are probably the best because we don't yet see much. We close in with a POV on a lovely young lady, then an obviously fake arm reaches out and death ensues. The makeup efx are bad. I mean, there isn't even any attempt to create scratch wounds or flesh tears or anything. They simply paint fake blood on the victims in the form of five nail scratches and that's about all you get. Sadly, it gets worse from there. As the deaths ratchet up, we still see little of the monster, but the victims start thrashing around in ways that seem implausible and don't make much sense in terms of a bear attack. Then, we finally meet the bear. Thankfully, there are shots of a real bear and not some horrible animatronic, but the death scenes get worse from there. Now, we get kills where we cut from closeups of the bear's head as he growls into the air and then cut back to a guy in a suit bear-hugging the victims to death. The movie cries out so much for a believable bear killing, teeth rending, nails tearing, knock down the victim death. Instead, it pretty much all boils down to bear hugs.The three main characters are total facsimiles of the three characters in JAWS: the sheriff in over his head, the grizzled war vet who will lead the hunt and the animal scientist. Problem is that none are really good in their roles, mostly because they're given the worst script ever. Don't even get me started on the "herd of grizzlies killed some Indians" speech given by the copter pilot as a poor imitation of the USS Indianapolis story in Jaws. I knew, at this point, this wasn't going to be a gem, but was hoping for some trashy 70s horror fun. Instead, I spent most of the run time just hoping it would be over soon and wishing I was really watching JAWS instead.