I laughed out loud many times while watching this movie. Unfortunately, it's not a comedy. No, Bear is a low-budget horror flick gone terribly, hilariously wrong. And it's the best kind of wrong, too. The sort that gets wronger and wronger as it goes along. This film starts out cheap looking but with a faint hint there might be something interesting in the offing. Then it slides into bad and keeps going into awful until about an hour in, it plunges to near Ed Woodian depths of suck. It's the sort of cinema suck where the filmmakers have absolutely no clue how horrible they are and the goofiest bits of addle-brained nonsense are allowed to play out on the screen. If these folks were trying to go for "so bad, it's good", I salute their accomplishment. If they weren't
I pity them.
Giving credit where it's due, this is a great concept for a motion picture. Combine Open Water with Jaws, except it's set in the woods with a grizzly bear. Tell me that's not a brilliant bit of inspiration! Of course, whatever screenwriters Roel Reiné and Ethan Wiley did to come up with it must have blown out every synapse in their brains because everything after the concept is staggeringly poor. Well, not everything. Some of the camera work in Bear is, well, not good but it shows a few glimmers of talent. And I suppose the bear does an okay acting job. The rest? Hoo boy.
Belittling older brother Sam (Patrick Scott Lewis), his nondescript wife Liz (Mary Alexandra Stiefvater), his family disappointment younger brother Nick (Brendan Michael Coughlin) and Nick's hippie skank girlfriend Christine (Katie Lowes) take a shortcut through the woods on the way to a party for Sam and Nick's parents. A flat tire sends them off the road and a bear wanders by, so Sam goes all Scarface on the bear and shoots it dead, blasting away even as it tries to lumber off. When the bear's angry mate arrives, Sam is out of bullets and the group has to take refuge in their broken down minivan and try to find a way to survive a 400 pound beast who's out for vengeance! So, I guess instead of Jaws this is more like Orca. Yeah, that's right. Orca.
I'm not going to go into a lot of the details of where, how and why Bear stinks on ice. This thing really is so mirthfully ghastly that you've got to experience it for yourself. I will say that, while these filmmakers did use a trained grizzly for many scenes, they also extensively employ a guy in a bear suit. It's not a good bear suit, either. Have you ever seen those Bear City vignettes from Saturday Night Live? It's more like that kind of bear suit. There's also a point where the film turns into a episode of the Maury Povich show with the bear playing the part of Maury.
I'm not kidding about that.
This is one of the most difficult movies I've ever tried to evaluate. Bear is truly atrocious, but in an at times spectacularly entertaining fashion. I didn't enjoy it, but I enjoyed laughing at it. To be fair to other films, the quality here deserves two stars. I must bump it up to three, though, because I had a much better time watching this than any other two star flick I've suffered through.
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