BADass SINema Unearthed - Blu-ray 4K UHD Review

Movie Review

When bears attack. That’s a thing, right? Because that’s EXACTLY what this movie is selling. But it’s not just any bear. No. The killer at the center of this horror film is a hungry 15-foot grizzly bear that is damn deadly with his paws and its attitude. Thankfully, we have female park rangers who “go soak their feet in a stream” by letting their hair down and taking their tops off to distract us from the hunt.  

Two thousand pounds of angry muscle are coming to get you!

Director William Girdler has got balls. I’ll give him that. Grizzly, a blatant knockoff of Jaws, trades the ocean for an unnamed national park somewhere in America and attempts to do, albeit without Spielberg in the director’s chair, what that film did for oceans in the woods. Fake it until you make it, right? That’s Grizzly’s modus operandi and, honestly, when it comes to movies about giant killer bears, well, things could have been a lot worse.

The charm in this flick is the fact that it knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to do anything more than that. Of course, we do get a John Williams-like attempt to create the mood of a stalking bear and, yes, we often get the all important POV shot from the bear as he gets thwacked time and time again by the limbs in the trees. N Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

And then he strikes, knocking off limbs, and slinging bodies around until they are lifeless and bloodied. Try not to laugh at the first attack, though. That arm shoots off like a tossed football. And the second kill, seeing the bear charge through the door of a shack, is not much better. The attack screams of bear. Unfortunately, no one knows just how big it is until it is too late.

Mike Kelly (Christopher George), a forest ranger, knows that something is up. He’s on a mission to save the guests at the park and that means that this damn bear has to go. Park Supervisor Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey) wants to keep these attacks hidden from the public. That’s going to be really hard with the amount of blood flowing from the wounds this mauling bear causes.

Co-starring Richard Jaeckel, this B-movie flick doesn’t dare preach to its audience about how nature is turning against us due to our destructive ways but it does try to align itself with nature’s mysterious ways as more and more park rangers join in on the hunt for a bear that only wants to eat and eat and eat again.

My absolute favorite attack is the surprise ripping of the tent as the bear crashes through a woman’s tent, snatching her and then swinging her back and forth until she dies. It’s bizarrely shot and quite eerie as you see the expression on her face from pleasure and then to pain before she is launched into the air and slams onto the ground, bloody and very dead.

Nature conservation gets beheaded with one powerful swipe of a big, bad, and hairy arm in Grizzly, a fun b-movie that has been mastered in HD from the original interpositive. Jaws with paws? Sign me up.

Film Details

MPAA Rating: PG.
Runtime: 98 mins
Director: William Girdler
Writer: Harvey Flaxman, David Sheldon
Cast: Christopher George, Andrew Prine, Richard Jaeckel
Genre: Horror | Adventure
Tagline: 18 feet of gut-crunching, man-eating terror
Memorable Movie Quote: "Bears don't eat people!"
Theatrical Distributor: Film Ventures International
Official Site: 
Release Date: May 21, 1976
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: September 15, 2015
Synopsis: A fifteen-foot grizzly bear figures out that humans make for a tasty treat. As a park ranger tries rallying his men to bring about the bear’s capture or destruction, his efforts are thwarted by the introduction of dozens of drunken hunters into the area.

Blu-ray Review

Home Video Distributor: Scorpion Releasing
Available on Blu-ray - September 25, 2015
Screen Formats: 2.40:1
Subtitles: None
Audio: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0; English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1; Music: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
Discs: Blu-ray Disc; single disc
Region Encoding: Locked to Region A

The brand new 2K scan of the original Interpositive looks great. Framed in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio and featuring a crisp new 5.1 surround track, Grizzly has never looked and sounded better than with this release. The 1080p transfer is all sorts of saturated and pristine as the forest – whether at night or in natural light – comes to life in front of our eyes. The leafy greens are impeccable and the black levels show some differences; the film looks and sounds pretty solid. It is filled with fine grain textures as a few pops appear here and there. Overall, this is as satisfying brand new HD widescreen master from Scorpion Releasing.

Supplements:

Commentary:

None.

Special Features:

Limited to 3000 copies, this release from Scorpion Releasing is quite good in the supplemental department. First we get some bonus time with Katarina Leigh Waters as she wrestles a stuffed bear. Then there is the official making of the movie that was put together in 2006. Following that is a Q&A Session and a theatrical trailer.

Katarina's Fun Facts and Trivia (8 min)

Jaws with Claws (37 min)

Q&A at the New Beverly (12 min)

Theatrical Trailer