Grizzly 2 (1983)

A gigantic (twenty feet tall!) female Grizzly goes on a rampage after watching her cub be gutted by some crummy poacher.  And getting her leg caught in a large bear trap does nothing to sweeten her up, either.  Meanwhile, a big concert is being set up over in nearby Grover Meadow, and no one involved has any idea what’s headed their way (very, very slowly).  So, it’s up to acting Chief (of Park Rangers), Nick (Steve Innwood), Director of Bear Management, Samantha Owens (Deborah Raffin), and mad-as-a-hatter, French Canadian Grizzly hunter, Bouchard (Jonathan Rhys-Davies), to stop the animal before people who actually count start turning up dead.

André Szöts’ Grizzly 2 (aka Grizzly: The Concert, aka Predator: The Concert, and various other permutations thereof) is an unfinished film, so we do need to adjust our perspective on how we gauge it, if only slightly.  There is a rough (very rough) work print available on Youtube, if you fancy having a watch.  The movie is a sequel to William Girdler’s great 1976 film (which had one of the greatest film climaxes I ever witnessed as a youth), and just like that one was a riff on JAWS, this one is a riff on JAWS 2.  Grizzly 2 is much more youth-oriented and much more improbable outside of the verisimilitude of a crazed Grizzly going on a tear.  From what can be seen of the extant footage, I like to think this would have been a modest hit, but more likely than not it would have been remembered in the same breath with Jaws: The Revenge, all things considered.  The production was troubled from jump street with money issues, script issues, and special effects issues galore.  You can read about it in more detail here:  http://nypost.com/2014/06/29/the-star-studded-film-youll-probably-never-see/.  If anyone mentions the film at all, it is most likely to note that it had early appearances of Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern, as well as being the feature film debut of George Clooney (who?)  Outside of adding to three actors’ celluloid closets, though, (thanks for the nomenclature, Fangoria) they are not nearly the attraction that co-lead Deborah Foreman is to my mind, and from the quality of the video I watched, it took some work on this viewer’s part to recognize the three at all (and all in the same scene, no less).

So, what can you expect from a viewing of Grizzly 2?  Well, the sound is unmixed, and you can clearly hear actors being given dialogue cues from off camera.  This is most interesting (to me, at least) in the performance footage and scenes around the concert in general.  You can actually hear the live voices of some of the musicians (particularly a girl group made up of some fetching lasses), and they are, believe it or not, not terrible.  It would also be a good guess that Szöts or someone near to him was a big fan of Michael Jackson, because several of his tunes are used on the soundtrack in non-performance sequences for temp scoring (and I suspect these songs were played on set during filming to set the mood).   There is no foley track, so scenes that were shot MOS (aka without sync sound) are totally silent as a result.  Blank frames are inserted as placeholders for cutaways, effects shots, and so forth that I assume weren’t yet filmed (and probably never would be).  

Of course, the editing is not slick, as expected, but what can be seen leads me to believe that the story’s structure could use a lot of tightening up (according the New York Post article, the film’s caterer was hired to work on the screenplay late in the game).  In its current state, it feels like three stories that were forced together (or two being forced together by a third, if you like).  You have the odious poachers (including Jack Starrett, Charles Cyphers, and Marc Alaimo) trying to catch the mama bear in order to sell her organs to aphrodisiac merchants in San Francisco’s Chinatown while stabbing (or shooting) each other in the back.  These guys really have trust issues.  The other facet, obviously, is the concert story, which involves Chrissy (Foreman) falling for the self-involved frontman of some synth-pop band.  Neither of these moves past what we’re shown the first time the storylines are introduced.  The bear never makes an appearance at the show until the very end of the film, which surprised me since I would have figured that it would have skulked around and picked off a few crew members here and there.  In fact, the bear seems to kill people almost randomly (in other words, with no build up, no payoff, and no sympathy generation), which may work in a real world plausibility way but kind of stinks if you’re making an Animal Attack film.  The element that is supposed to tie these two together is Nick, Sam, and Bouchard’s hunt for the Grizzly, but the only time that anyone from the search shows up at the concert is when Nick appears to fawn over Chrissy, his daughter, and then let her run off to gallivant with skanky music types, and any interaction with the poachers is coincidental.  The separation of the storylines bogs the whole thing down, though it’s intended to keep the pace hopping along.  

While the bear effects were reportedly problematic, I have to say that what I saw was not awful.  There are even some decent animatronic shots of the bear as it approaches the concert grounds.  Sure, you have some laughable shots of Rhys-Davies leaping onto and stabbing a large, hair-covered, formless something, and there’s a shot of a bear arm swatting a character that reminded me distinctly of the Wampa attack from The Empire Strikes Back (and  just a little bit of the Sasquatch attacks from Snowbeast), but all things being equal, I liked what I saw and would give my eye teeth (ha, ha, ha, not really) to get a decent look at the Grizzly’s final repose.  It looks over-the-top enough to match its cinematic predecessor’s demise and original enough to satisfy the sense of wonder you go into a film like this expecting to be satiated.  The malfunctioning creature effects, which helped augment Spielberg’s opus, were very likely used here as an excuse to overdo the bear POV shots.  I find that intriguing, considering the template for how to use disadvantages to a filmmaker’s advantage had already been laid out for Szöts and company.

None of this is to say that this film couldn’t have been pulled together into a workable (and more importantly to its investors, bankable) film.  Nonetheless, any enjoyment to be gleaned from what is out there now is going to rely more on nostalgia than anything else (aerobics/calisthenics workouts for the concert employees, great character actors sinking their choppers into their one-dimensional roles and letting the blood drip down their chins, the Eighties pop music, the classic man-versus-monster finale that made movies of this ilk such a pure source of joy both in my childhood and now).  However, what the rough cut of Grizzly 2 does rather well is it gives people interested in the process of filmmaking a look at a portion of how a movie can be shaped.  It’s like being able to watch Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa.  Okay, it’s more like watching a local starving artist paint a bowl of fruit, but I believe that we can learn from all the things we see, be they good, bad, or middling.  How we use that knowledge is what counts.

MVT:  As I said, I have a major weakness for the concert scenes and the feelings of nostalgia they give me.  I miss the Eighties.  There.  I said it.

Make or Break:  The finale, where the bear finally hits the concert works better than any other section of the film, even in this lumpy version.

Score:  5.5/10 as a viewing experience, 6.75/10 as a learning experience.          

Waxwork (1988)

In my hometown, there used to be two movie theaters (or there were way back when), the Hersker and the Church Hill Cinema.  The Church Hill had two screens, and the Hersker only had one, but it was huge, and it seated about six hundred people.  The theater opened in 1915, and even though it has undergone numerous changes (and is now a cinema and drafthouse, though it still just shows second run films rather than very many art or independent fare), it has remained in the same spot for all this time.  The Church Hill Cinema expanded into multiple smaller screens and eventually shut down.  The point of the history lesson is that I first encountered actor Zach Galligan at the Hersker.  If you guessed that the film in question was Joe Dante’s Gremlins, you would be right.  

Out in the theater’s lobby (and I also have to mention that I miss lobby cards [What are they?  Go look them up]) was a one sheet for the film, and I loved that thing.  It had the half-opened box with the big, bright mogwai eyes staring out of it; his chubby little hands, like a pair of furry weightlifting gloves with Vienna sausages sticking out of them.  What’s not to love?  So, of course I asked if I could have the poster when the film closed, and I was told that I could.  To make a long story short, through the caprices of fate I didn’t get the poster, and while I bear no malice toward anyone at the theater today (I’m pretty sure it’s under new ownership, anyway, so…), I was plenty peeved at the time.   I could even buy the damn poster now for about thirty bucks, but it just wouldn’t be the same thing or hold the same sort of significance to me anymore.  I think you understand what I’m saying.  Zach Galligan was in Gremlins.

Opening in the 30s, the Loftmore mansion is ransacked and its owner immolated while a cover of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” plays.  Cut to the present of 1988, and spoiled but likable rich kid Mark (Galligan), whose mom treats him like he’s still a child, has the hots for blond sexpot China (Michelle Johnson).  While walking to school (I want to say college, but it’s difficult to tell, because all the characters act like they’re still in high school), China and Sarah (Deborah Foreman) notice a waxworks, and it’s Wonka-imitating proprietor Lincoln (David Warner) invites them to a private showing at midnight but also states that their party cannot have more than six people in it.  That night, part of the group finds out the hard way that the displays (all horror-related) are not quite inanimate.

Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork is, at the start at least, a portmanteau film disguising itself as a Creature Feature.  There is a plot to be followed involving the museum as a story in and of itself, a framing device of sorts.  But each of the displays opens a gateway into a different scenario.  That these scenarios are not particularly original (in fact, they are entirely derivative) is part of their charm.  In a normal Horror anthology film, there is some attempt for each of the stories to have something unique about them, a twist which it’s hoped the viewer won’t see coming a mile off (but very rarely is this the case).  In the spirit of the EC Comics which inspired so many (or at the absolute minimum inspired most of the ones that came from Amicus Productions), these twists are typically either bleak and/or blackly comical and always ironic.  In this film, though, the isolated stories play out as if they are themselves merely scenes from standalone Horror Films.  In fact, they play the part of kill scenes from a Slasher Film, but instead of having the expectant victims being slowly stalked and dispatched by a lumbering, faceless hulk, they are killed by different monsters in their own distinctive style.

And here it must be noted that these individual styles, like the film itself, are really nothing more than Hickox’s paean to and personal take on the classic monster films of yore.  In this way, the film is a Monster Mash, like Universal’s House Of Frankenstein, Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, House Of Dracula, and so on.  What’s interesting is that the first time Mark and company visit the wax museum, all of the displays walked into are straight from the Universal vaults (Dracula, The Wolfman, etcetera).  The second night at the waxworks, the displays are far more modern (zombies, the Marquis de Sade).  The filmmakers separate traditional from neoteric horrors, and it feels as if we’re taking a walk through a history of cinematic Horror Films (well, a highlight reel, anyway).  But the director does put his own spin on these tales, with Dracula’s being both more gruesome and offbeat than the (traditionally libidinous) story is normally depicted, and I felt this was the strongest of the display tales.

Intriguingly, each display and the characters’ interaction with them (mostly) are meant as a mirror of that particular character’s inner self.  For example, China eats human flesh, feeling that this is what mature adults do, and she wants more than anything to find romance with a mature man.  Sarah is sexually repressed, but the thought of a bit of S&M literally makes her wet at several points in the film (it’s sweat, but still).  As an extension of the sinister Lincoln’s id, and the ids of the characters, they share a desire, each opening up to the other, but where the fulfillment of Lincoln’s id takes him towards his ultimate goal of immortality, the fulfillment of the other characters’ ids lead to death.  Had the filmmakers stuck to this idea, and played by the rules which they themselves set up, the film could have been an early version of The Cabin In The Woods.  But since there are obvious concessions to plot and marketability over thematic concerns, the stronger ideas of the film don’t hold up.  This is most readily evidenced in the melee (replete with a modern day gang of “angry villagers,” again invoking the Universal movies) which climaxes the film.  There are bits given here and there to individual characters, but by and large, it’s little more than flailing around until the end credits roll.  Granted, the lead up to this donnybrook is both fun and entertaining, but part of me wishes that Hickox would have put a little more effort into refining some of his base ideas.  I think it would have been well worth the trouble.

MVT:  The concept of the Universal monsters with a modern, more gore-centric spin is compelling, and they come off quite well for the most part.  It’s sort of like what Paul Naschy was doing with his Spanish films back in the 70s, and it has its own charms, to be sure.

Make Or Break:  The Dracula scene Made the film for me.  This Dracula is sexual without being overwrought, and the level of splatter and violence is noteworthy.  Plus, there are some truly funny moments (involving China’s display-world fiancé) that also manage to be ghastly on a certain transgressive level.  Nothing too offputting, mind you, but still pretty gross.

Score:  6.75/10

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