VIDEO: "Grizzly" Was the Landlubber's Answer to "Jaws!"
In a humorous social media post this week, the National Park Service posted an image of a man pushing someone else over accompanied by the caption "Friends Don't Use Friends As Bear Bait." Obviously this was a joke... right?
It sounds like it could have been a scene in the movie "Grizzly," indisputably the best bad horror movie about bears ever made.
Made the year after the astronomically profitable "Jaws" raced to the top of the box office, "Grizzly" attempted to replicate the film's success, a feat which even the "Jaws" sequels themselves could not accomplish.
Instead of an unnaturally smart great white shark, we get a preternaturally smart grizzly bear which are, after all, the sharks of the Northern Rockies. The grizzly bear is also ridiculously huge - 18 feet tall and weighing two tons, which makes him the size of a prehistoric cave bear. The film reproduces the story of "Jaws" almost exactly except that there was no USS Indianapolis for bears, thank god.
Surely featuring such a fearsome monster must have made "Grizzly" as memorable and perennially culturally relevant as "Jaws," right? Well, not exactly. But as inevitably happens with bad movies, it has since become a cult classic. The filmmakers may not appreciate that their film has become an accidental comedy, but at the same time, maybe they would be happy to have more eyes on it.
So without further ado: the trailer for the 1976 schlock classic "Grizzly."