Launching my #monsterdon thread for "Grizzly", a 1976 movie where a bear eats people. I think. I also think the premise might have been "Jaws but on land". I never saw Jaws, but I'm pretty sure that it had a shark that ate people.
Monsterdon is a thing where we watch old monster movies every week and make fun of them (usually). We make a lot of posts every time we do it; consider muting the hash tag if this sounds un-fun to you. Or join in next week, if this sounds fun to you.
So Grizzy starts with a helicopter flying over some North American Woodlands. Inside there are some senators and the pilot is a park ranger and trying to tell them that nature is good and parks are good and the government should stop encroachment on the park lands.
The politicians decline to respond; so instead credits roll, and we see an Exciting Woodland Flyover Sequence set to Orchestral Music. The credits are very yellow.
The camera has decided to land, where a Green Station Wagon is drifting into a park, and the park rangers are having a briefing because they're about to get a lot of tourists at their Indian Trading Post themed tourist shoppe and other Park Facilities.
We learn that the boss ranger is named Kelly. Another character is Girl Ranger. A third character is Girl Ranger's boyfriend (I think).
In the next seen, we inside of a restraunt and witness a fascinating restaurant logistics argument. I think. I was typing a post and not completely paying attention. But the important part is that we have another character, who is Restaurant Girl, and her dad is the Restaurant guy I think. Maybe she's Ranger Kelly's girlfriend, I'm not sure. Follow me for more vague descriptions of characters.
Next, the girls have decided to go camping because this is a park; and I think the Ranger Girl is in flannel because she's a lumberjack and/or bisexual.
Something startles them, and the audience expects it to be a monster, but its actually the ranger whose name I don't care about, who is riding them a horse and telling them to be careful. Thanks Ranger-Forgot-Your-Name! That's good advice in a horror movie!
We are then greeted to a (presumably) Bear's eye view as the probably titular Grizzly trots through the forest and snorts heavily with every step. Then it finds the flannel girl and brutally kills her with its Maul attack. I think she was the ranger, but I was actually wrong and she was someone else.
The other girl, now equipped with a pink shirt-bikini runs away, hides in a barn and is also bear murdered.
So next Ranger Kelly is meeting up with Ranger Girl, who was Not Wearing Flannel, I Apologize Profusely For This Prior Mistake, and Ranger Horse Guy, whose name I don't remember tells them that they're missing some girls. So they do like a park ranger search and discover a shed. Then one of them pokes a post and the body of Bikini-Shirt falls down from the roof, because that's how dead bodies work in horror movies.
Meanwhile the other park rangers are doing a thorough search for the other missing person, like one of the ones where you get like a squad of guys to comb the woods. Anyway, they didn't find the body yet and its night time. Ranger Girl is searching for places to take photos at, even though its at night. I guess she has a night camera or something.
Anyway, then she trips on mud and lands on the Flannel Girl's body, then screams in Abject Shock.
We next have an autopsy scene, where Doctor Mustache theorizes that the campers found a bear cub, got too close to it, and then this made the bear mother mad, and she murdered them.
This hypothesis is wrong, but there is no way for Doctor Mustache to know that we are actually dealing with a Fearsome Murder Bear.
What motivates the murder bear? Is it lust for power or gold? Or was it simply born with a heart full of... beary murder?
Because we are unusually efficient in this movie, we decide to go ahead and tell people to evacuate the park because there's a Murder Bear there. But the National Park visitors insist that the Camping and Hiking must go on, so they flock to the park in droves anywhere.
After a phone call where Ranger Kelly yells about regulations to prove that he's a tough, non-nonsense park ranger, Ranger Kelly calls a new character, who I will call Aragorn, who is secretly tailing deer while wearing a deerskin cape, so he can do a deer anthropology. Or a deer diplomacy. A deerplomacy.
Aragorn is mad that this phone call scared his deer friends away, Ranger Kelly explains that he had to tell Aragorn about the murder bear.
Next, we get a guy ranger and a girl ranger wandering through the woods with guns. They split up so the girl can take off her clothes and walk into a waterfall, so we get an underwear scene. Then she is murdered by the Murder Bear.
Next scene is Ranger Kelly having dinner with his wife, where they talk about ice cubes and the Murder Bear. Next Ranger Kelly is riding a helicopter around, and the helicopter guy from before is trying to give him bear advice. Then they find a splotch that they decide looks suspicious and land to investigate, triggering Dramatic Music.
Instead of the splotch being a Bear or a dead person, it turns out that the splotch is Aragorn, who comes from the West with an exciting revelation - the murder bear is not a normal brown bear, but rather an oversized grizzly bear, which they do not expect to see in this area. And the bear has claimed this forest as its own.
Also, the bear is one of those extinct north american superbears from the past, but is not actually extinct in this movie.
Because no kids have yet died in this movie, we switch to a forest party where a bunch of children are singing "I've been working on the railroad" while adults kiss each other heterosexually nearby.
Then the adult woman decides to check her makeup while the adult man drinks a bear. Then the woman is murdered by a bear and everyone screams.
I was expecting the children to also be mauled, but I guess they were lucky.
So far the murder bear has only murdered women. I am not sure why. Until further information is provided, I will blame 4chan.
The Bear Movie Cycle:
A pretty girl does something
Murder Bear kills the pretty girl
Everyone Screams
The Park Rangers have an angry conversation about the Murder Bear
Montage of people doing outdoors things.
(cycle repeats)
For the next montage, a bunch of unorganized militia (random hunter dudes) have arrived to try to hunt the bear. They are more numerous than I'd expect, as they have at least a squad worth of riflemen.
But they failed to do the buddy system and so one of them, named Orange Hat Man, runs off on his own; he sees the murder bear but drops his gun and runs away, dunking into the water and floating down river.
Shout out to Hunter Orange Hat for being A) the first boy to be targeted by the murder bear and B) the first person targeted by the bear to not die (yet).
In the next obligatory Angry Park Ranger scene, Ranger Kelly is mad at the Park Supervisor for opening the park and summoning hunters to try to shoot the bear, because this is dangerous. They snarl at each other over who is the real owner of the park, Ranger Kelly who has prowled the woods or the supervisor who has more Manager levels.
Since we had the angry park ranger scene, we get another Bear scene, where a grunting bear sneaks up on some sleeping hunters. But it is not the Murder Bear, it is simply a normal bear, and a baby. not all bears are murder bears. #notAllBears
Because they are jerks, the hunters decide to use the bear as live bait, and its gets eaten. RIP baby bear.
The Park Rangers meet the rangers and decide that the Murder Bear is a boy because only male bears will eat other bears, like the poor bear cub. They draft the hunters as sidekicks to give them extra redshirts when they meet the bear again.
Ranger Bear assigns Ranger Horse to go spawn camp in a tower. Ranger Horse dislikes this because he doesn't want to miss the Bear War, even if watching a tower is still serving in the Bear War.
People killed by bear in this #monsterdon so far:
Flannel Girl
Bikini-Shirt Girl
Makeup Girl
(Non-Murder) Bear Cub
From the current rate, I predict 4 more bear murders, plus or minus 20.
For our next Angry Park Ranger conversation, Aragorn suggests tranquilizing the bear, and Ranger Kelly responds with a weird story about some Indians and a herd of man eating grizzlies. it seems like one of those nonsense stories that a CEO tells their employees on an all hands call after taking too much cocaine.
The next daytime, Ranger Horse is standing guard in his designated watch tower, looking everywhere with his binoculars as a bunch of the hunters decide to run in a herd and whoop for no reason. The bear notices him and approaches the tower.
Then he sees the Murder Bear and reports it via radiophone. The Murder Bear is mad and so starts shaking his tower; because it is poorly constructed and the bear has super strength the whole thing shakes a lot when the Bear hits it.
Ranger Horse grabbed an M1 rifle and tried to shoot the bear, but because everyone who grabs a gun in this movie has to drop it, he drops it. Then the bear knocks over his watch tower and mauls him. RIP Ranger Horse.
This scene reminded me of the MS-DOS strategy game Warcraft II, where your orcs could knock over watch towers by hitting them. Only instead of orcs, there was a bear.
We get another scene where Ranger Kelly is yelling at the Park Administrator asking him to close the park; Ranger Kelly accuses the evil park admin of leaving the park open so the murder bear can kill people so he gets his name in the papers so he can go to washington and get a big office and be famous for "the guy who ran that park where a bear murdered a lot of people"
This movie would be better if all the Arguing Ranger scenes were replaced with this dialog:
Ranger 1: "Well... a murder bear killed someone again."
Ranger 2: "Well... fffffuuuuuucccccckkkkk."
Another scene where a child is playing outside and petting a rabbit, while being stalked by the Murder Bear. This is notable because the rabbit is super cute.
Then the rabbit murders the child and his mother. Shout out to the mother for swatting at the bear a little bit.
We have decided to use a helicopter to hunt the bear, I think, so Ranger Kelly and the Helicopter Guy start loading up the helicopter with supplies. Helicopter Guy tells a story about how he killed people (hopefully soldiers and not civilians) in Vietnam and called them "gooks" so it wouldn't get personal, but it got personal and gave him a trauma.
Meanwhile Aragorn has run off on a horse to do his own thing, probably try to tranquilize the bear.
Reminder that I am bored by most of the park ranger dialog so I may not be a reliable reporter of the park ranger's latest anti-bear plans.
But, I guess this one involves taking a helicopter to the woods and putting up a dear carcass as bait and then lurking.
Our deer carcass plan almost works, but the bear notices the rangers at the last minute and it runs away, and they fail to shoot it.
We now have a Man Vs Bear chase scene where the grizzly is running followed by Ranger Kelly and Helicopter Guy. The grizzly escapes to safety by crossing a river, somehow confusing his pursuers.
I think this movie would be better if the murder bear was bullet proof for no reason and every time the hunters find it they shoot at it to no effect instead of dropping their guns.
That would make less sense but be more fun, change my mind.
@floatybirb I think Aragorn probably could have used less cocaine now that I think about it.
Floaty Birb
Jonathan Sadow
RamenCatholic 🐢🌈