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.          

Dance Of The Dwarfs (1983)

For those of us who are avid readers, there are, as with anything else, books you count as favorites.  There are also books that affected you more than others from when you first got into reading.  Aside from Donald Glut’s Classic Movie Monsters, The entire series of monster books from Crestwood House (which I may or may not have written about previously on these hallowed pages), and Making A Monster by Al Taylor and Sue Roy (are you noticing a trend here?), one of the most enchanting I ever came across was Encyclopedia Of Legendary Creatures by Tom McGowen and, perhaps more importantly, illustrated by Victor Ambrus.  The text is as advertised, and it certainly introduced me to beasts I may never have heard of otherwise.  It was the artwork, however, that kept me coming back for more.  Go ahead and look Ambrus up on the interwebs.  You’ll see the attraction.  In fact, I loved these books so much that I bought them later in life, and still own them to this day (with the exception of the Crestwood books, which command a fairly high price these days from what I’ve seen).  But with the plethora of monsters described in McGowen’s tome, from the Abominable Snowman to the Vodyanoi, there was sadly no listing for the Duende, the titular creatures of (the former Mr. Goldie Hawn) Gus Trikonis’ Dance Of The Dwarfs (aka Jungle Heat aka Night Of The Dwarves).

Deep in the jungles of South America, a prisoner is pursued by horse-mounted police.  As the convict slips into the brush, the horses refuse to go any further, chucking their riders.  The convict’s face is swiftly removed from his skull by a reptilian claw.  End prologue.  Soon thereafter, straitlaced anthropologist Evelyn Howard (Deborah Raffin) meets not-so-cute with grizzled pilot (and owner of the Trans-Exec Helicopter Service) Harry Bediker (Peter Fonda), whom she has retained to fly her to a field station in the aforementioned jungle.  During the flight, our pair has to crash land after a bullet fired from the ground hits the hydraulic fluid line.  Once they make off into the jungle on foot, their situation does not improve.

The most interesting concept to be found in this film is in the juxtaposition of the Aristocrat/Intellectual and the Savage.  We’ve seen this innumerable times in the past.  You have Felix Unger and Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and David Addison and Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting, to name just two.  Also of note is the fact that the Aristocrat/Intellectual is typically female/feminine, while the Savage is typically male/masculine.  So, Felix does all the chores around the apartment, cooks, listens to opera, et cetera, and Maddie used to hang out in high society circles and was a glamorous celebrity model.  Conversely, Oscar, a sports writer, can barely find clean clothes in his room, and neither he nor Addison would likely scoff at the idea of starting their morning by cracking open a beer.  We get the same contrast in Dance Of The Dwarfs.  When Evelyn meets Harry, he is shacked up inside his helicopter (the Peerless Rita) with a hooker.  Every chance he gets, Bediker is inebriated or in the process of becoming inebriated.  His aircraft is rusty and hardly looks like it could lift off, let alone sustain flight.  Harry wears a ratty Hawaiian shirt, while Evelyn is always dressed in clean clothes.  She listens to opera on her walkman, while Harry is into rock.  Despite Harry’s desire to become “friendly” with her, Evelyn only refers to him as “Mr. Bediker” (one of the things I remember so strongly from watching this film in my youth, since it’s repeated so often).   Evelyn shoots up Harry’s liquor bottles because she claims to be saving him from himself (implying that she knows best for him, since he’s clearly beneath her socially and morally).  Regardless of how clichéd these traits may be in terms of perceived gender roles, the fact remains that they are easily recognizable to audiences, which is why they are used so often.  Second, they easily generate conflict to keep the audience interested in times of saggy pacing.  Third, they usually adhere to the adage that opposites attract, even in terms of friendship (hence, why actual consummation is unnecessary; the drive is actually in the buildup, not the payoff, which is more likely than not something of a letdown [especially with regards to serialized characters] because the tension in the relationship is now gone, or at the absolute least normalized).

Even more the Savage than Harry is Esteban (John Amos), a local “witch doctor” who, according to Harry, is also adept at curing the Clap.  Esteban skulks around ominously, his face painted white, a snake dangling about his neck.  But it is he who connects Evelyn with the Duende, because he lives in their proverbial backyard.  Harry may be a semi-reluctant expatriate (due to “back taxes and ex-wives”), but he still dwells relatively close to civilization.  He still needs contact with people (or maybe just hookers) now and again.  He uses modern technology to earn a meager living.  Esteban may trade with Harry for some goods, but it would take a lot of work for him to fit in civilized society (and even then, it may not work out).  This, of course, leads us to the Duende themselves.  They are the ultimate Savages because they are completely and utterly inhuman.  They could never pass for human in appearance, and they are animals in their behavior, though they do live in a supposed tribal structure (perhaps just a pack).  They are an untamed and untamable force of nature, a personification of the “Darkest Africa” and the like so regularly written about in pulp fiction.  They are irrational and primal.  They are the unknown (to quasi-steal a description from the film).  Consequently, they would be deadly no matter their environment, which is why the jungle suits them best.

Dance Of The Dwarfs is one of those movies which I want to love simply because it has one of the best titles anyone could likely dream up (well I love it, and, incidentally, it is also the title of the Geoffrey Household novel upon which this movie is based, and he was, by all accounts, no stranger to the pulpier side of writing).  But I just can’t.  The vast majority of the run time is eaten up with Evelyn and Howard’s journey into the jungle, and it’s not particularly exciting.  Trikonis pulls out some low budget tricks to shoot some of the action pieces (like rocking the helicopter to simulate flight and using sound effects alone for gunfire, though in fairness, there are some juicy gore bits involving the monsters), but for how staid the rest of the production is, these pieces mainly serve to be anticlimactic.  The film does pick up in the last thirty minutes or so, and the creatures are as cool as they could be, all things considered (though they vary wildly in appearance between the full body suits and the puppets used for closeups).  I just wish there was more going on in the rest of the film to better balance it out.  It’s a mildly enjoyable film, but outside of the title and the imprinting of “Mr. Bediker” on my brain, I suspect most people will take little else away from this one.  

MVT:  Since the monsters are shown so sparingly and are so inconsistent when they do pop up, I have to give the trophy to the rapport between Raffin and Fonda.  The two do as good a job as they can with the material, and they both have a natural charisma that works well onscreen.  It takes some of the sting out of the disappointment the film ultimately generates.                  

Make Or Break:  The Make is at the start of the third act.  Evelyn makes a discovery, and the film finally starts to pick up some momentum.  It loses some of this same steam fairly rapidly, but it does provide enough of a prod to remind you why you were watching in the first place.

Score:  6/10

Nightmare In Badham County (1976)

Imagine this, if you will.  You’re a monster kid (yes, you are, so shut up).  You’re cruising around the dial (back when televisions had dials and you had to sometimes adjust the signal manually [that means with your hands]) when you come upon it.  A permanently boggled schlub in a seersucker suit who looks like he would have fit right in at the press room in His Girl Friday leveling a crossbow at an elderly lady, warning her not to approach.  She, naturally, does, and the man looses a bolt.  As the arrow finds its target, the senior citizen transforms into a gruesome, hairy monster (a rakshasa, to be precise) just before dying.  And so was I introduced to the wild, wonderful world of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, arguably one of the most fun television series ever made and one of my all-time favorites (though, in all honesty, I can’t say it’s the highest quality in the world, but how much of what we hold closest to our hearts ever is?).  The show was dubbed Kolchak’s Monster Of The Week (I believe by “TV Guide”), and it was that, but this is what fed the hunger inside me and kids like me.  However, for how formulaic the show is, the television movie from which it sprang (The Night Stalker) is exceptional and often touted as one of the best films ever produced for the small screen.  That film was directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, the director of Nightmare In Badham County (aka Nightmare).  Make of that what you will.

Cathy (Deborah Raffin) and Diane (Lynne Moody) are a couple of students from UCLA on a little road trip through the American South (always a bad idea in exploitation fare).  When their tire blows out, they get a firsthand taste of the local constabulary’s asshole-ish-ness in the form of Sheriff Danen (Chuck Connors).  Later, after the Sheriff tries to make it up to the ladies by lecherously hitting on them and is rebuffed in public, the two women quickly understand exactly how close-knit this little community is.  They also learn that the Badham County Farm is only one step removed from Hell.

This is a WIP film, and it has all of the elements needed for the genre.  It has the prisoners being abused and forced to wear flimsy, easily removable clothes.  It has aggressively predatory lesbian guards.  It depicts slave-like conditions under which the characters toil.  It has vicious internal conflicts among the inmates.  And this last point is the specific reason why the leads are played by a white woman and a black woman.  You see, the tensions at the farm are only exacerbated by its being segregated.  Though both sets of prisoners are treated as slave labor, it is the black prisoners who are given the more menial tasks.  Even at the bottom of the ladder, they get a raw deal.  This segregation and the treatment of the different races come as a shock only to the two outsiders.  To the people indigenous to the area, it’s simply how things are.  By that same token, the women in the black barracks mostly get along with one another.  It’s the women in the white barracks that get into cat fights and generally want to kill each other.  This sense of solidarity among the blacks isn’t because they’re sager than the whites any more than the discord among the whites is because they’re less civilized than the blacks.  It’s more distressing than that.  The numb obedience of the black women comes from an innate sense of racial inferiority which has been institutionally reinforced over decades.  This idea enhances the film’s overall somber attitude.

This vile corruption is embodied by three men (four, actually, but one of them has very little to do in the narrative), representing the government (or more specifically one part of it).  Danen, the Judge (Ralph Bellamy), and Superintendent Dancer (Robert Reed) are supposed to be enforcers of the law.  These are the people whom we rely on to keep the bad guys away.  These are the people who are our protectors.  That they so readily twist and manipulate the system to suit their own base desires points to an endemic illness.  We have seen this sort of corruption of power countless times in film.  It is portrayed in communities both North and South (though I would venture a guess that there are more of them set in the South, just because of its old ties to slavery).  But the one constant in films like this is that these are small, clannish localities.  Big, metropolitan, corporate corruption is another facet in other movies, but that is usually typified by its dispassion.  In small areas, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone seems in on the scheme, it’s the familiarity that makes the evil done more insidious.  This isn’t a wide net spread over a large mass.  This is a tight glove wrapping itself around your throat.  It feels more intimate, as if the perpetrators have something personal against their victims.  But even the bodies of the subjugated are just meat to be used and discarded at a whim, still just a means to an end.  No matter how much these villains may enjoy what they do, they still do it with a sociopathic detachment, because these acts no longer offer pleasure.  This is merely what they do.

All WIP films are sleazy.  That’s one of their big appeals, and Nightmare In Badham County is no exception.  Women are demeaned and molested throughout.  A scene with guard Alice and prisoner Nancy nails this home.  Alice strips down to just her panties, sits on a couch with her crotch splayed, and states, “I didn’t keep you out of the fields today just so you could eat my lunch.”  It’s not just the situation or the double entendre of the dialogue.  It’s Alice’s open repose that amps the sleaze up.  Her nudity makes her menace (again) feel more intimate.  But beyond all this, the film is resolutely grim in tone.  Intriguingly, this is illustrated with Dancer’s skanky interactions with the women and how they customarily turn out, but it takes on a quasi-meta meaning due to Reed’s casting in the role.  This is not because of the actor’s well-documented sexual orientation but to his identification as one of America’s most beloved, moralistic fathers in recorded history (Mike Brady of The Brady Bunch, for those who don’t know).  To see a man who was held up as a moral compass for many years discard said morality and get down into the gutter makes it feel somehow more wrong and just a little shocking.  It’s at this point in the film when the viewer begins to understand the gravity of the situation and believe that truly this nightmare may not be one from which our protagonists may ever awake.

MVT:  The dour quality of the film sets it apart in my experience with this genre.  This is bleak, even angry, filmmaking, and despite its exploitation roots, it has something to say.  It just says it through gritted teeth.

Make Or Break:  The scene with Danen and the girls in the local lockup manages to be nasty and creepy without being explicit.  It also sets the timbre for the remainder of the film and reminds the audience that this is only the beginning.

Score:  6.5/10