Into The Grizzly Maze aka Grizzly (2015) Review!!

Synopsis – Two estranged brothers reunite at their childhood home in the Alaskan wild. They set out on a two-day hike and are stalked by an unrelenting grizzly bear.

My Take – Who doesn’t love animal attack movies? Well of course people who cant indulge in gore (I am usually one of them, but exceptions can be made) cant handle limbs being torn off from other people. I still think Jaws (1975) & Ghost in the Darkness (1997) are one of the best horror films out there. Honestly, I think the the animal horror genre occupies a major part of the most fun B movies ever (thanks to Syfy now days). With no information whatsoever about this film, other than the obvious title & the known star cast comprising of James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Billy Bob Thornton, and Piper Perabo (which I haven’t seen for a long time). So my guess was that with such a pretty well known cast, their would be some kind of budget associated with the film resulting in a fun movie. Boy! Was I wrong! Well don’t get me wrong its still fun, but more like in a Sharknado kind of way (for people who didn’t get a the reference – the film is so bad its gets laudable). The story follows two estranged brothers Rowan (James Marsden) & Beckett (Thomas Jane) with a spotty past. After Rowan (Marsden) found himself thrown in jail for killing a man, Sheriff Beckett was forced to deal with the family drama it caused, which makes their reunion less than loving.

Rowan claims he’s returned to his Alaskan home to pay proper respect to his deceased father, but Beckett suspects there’s more to his sibling’s motivation. He doesn’t have time to deal with any shady business though, because a murderous bear sends the locals into a tizzy when dead bodies start turning up. Beckett demands his commanding officer let him capture the bear alive, but after running into the woods to first locate his deaf & mute wife Michelle (Piper Perabo), a local tracker named Douglas (Billy Bob Thorton) is called upon to take down the bear for good. But this ain’t your average cuddly bear, as the cast soon find out. The story is not too original to be honest. Reuniting and forgiving through desperate circumstances so they can work together? Plus the bear is apparently killing people and other bears because it is mad about deforestation. Really? I think the biggest gripe I have is with the bear “effects” and associated with it the cinematography and editing. I am quite astonished how they managed to actually make the bear feel real and menacing and at the same time weirdly harmless. Sometimes the bear appears huge and some of the attacks are really grippy. Other times you feel that the bear is just prancing around like a nice little teddy. They used real bear footage for the most part, which is nice, but somehow feels fake at the same time. No idea how they did that. There is quite an amount of gore as well. And some of the attacks were quite hard to watch – although the victims showed some questionable defense behavior. At the same time, there are a lot of cheap off-screen deaths. This is not similar to Jaws, where it’s done tastefully and suspenseful – here it just seems very cheap – like in the average low budget TV movie. That transgresses to a general problem here – the editing. A lot of the scenes are like this: Bear growling – people looking in fear – bear standing – people deciding to run away – bear prancing towards them – people actually running away scared of their life (and that quite authentically) – bear catching up with one of them – people shooting at the bear and missing – bear turning around and running towards the shooter – shooter looking dumb and shooting and missing again – bear closing in on shooter – other people shooting and missing – bear turning towards other people, you catch the drift.

Add to this the bear just ambles about looking like he’s taking a stroll down the aisle of a supermarket. There’s a scene where the protagonists have to run from the marauding bear. This is meant to be tense and you see the fear in their eyes but whenever the film cuts to the bear, he’s ambling along on all fours and a good 20 yards away. We never see the bear run or rise up on 2 legs and tower over the cast. In short, we never get any sense of danger or that the bear is this pi55ed-off killer that Billy Bob Thornton keeps telling us he is. All we get is a sense that they filmed a live bear mooching around and just cut his scenes in. I’m surprised this cost $10 million. I would’ve said $1 million. There’s no budget on screen and to be honest, the whole thing plays out like an American TV movie: kills off-screen, no decent action scenes, no tension, no horror, no spectacle. You have a nice ensemble of actors involved here, which is almost strange for a movie like this. Not all of them get the time to shine, but at least there is more depth to some of the characters that you might expect. James Marsden is fine. Thomas Jane is laughable. Piper Perabo seemed confused. No idea why Billy Bob Thornton was in this movie! Its hard to believe David Hackl (SAW V) is the man behind the camera, the idea has all the hallmarks of the 80s glory days of VHS, when straight-to-video wasn’t a derogatory term and many a title had decent budgets and cast. On the whole, ‘Into the Grizzly Maze’ or ‘Red Machine’, ‘Endangered’ and just ‘Grizzly’ could have been a good film, and it was slightly entertaining, but ultimately, the direction of the film drove it into the ground too deep for a cast that could care less to redeem. The film just isn’t worth the time.