5/13/11

Grizzly 2 (1983-ish)


So there are a lot of sought after and legendary pieces of media that aficionados discuss and speculate about, like the Beach Boy's Smile album or Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown cried, some of which have eventually surfaced or been released, and for my money, destroy the mystique and never live up to the built-up hype. Chinese Democracy, anyone?

Anyways, to a lesser degree I guess you could call Grizzly 2 one of those, only for the reason that it featured early appearances by George Clooney, Laura Dern, John Rhys-Davies and Charlie Sheen. I had read recently that a copy of the work print surfaced and through some digging, researching and haggling, I got a copy of it and also now have GoldenCasino.com tattoos in my arm pits.

Being a work print, it's very unfinished, so it's hard to say what level of awesome it could have wound up being. In its current state...it's pretty ridiculous. Awful sound, not much grizzly or any effects for that mater and a terribly incomplete finale are what we get. And I've actually seen finished movies that resemble this completeness, so I assume this could have been an awesome crazy Jaws-like huge animal rampage story.




The premise is that there's a huge concert going down in the woods, and nearby hunters kill the huge cub of a huger mama bear who decides that killing all peoples is her only recourse. Almost like Orca or Jaws 3. That's it. With finale pretty much unfinished, how it ends is a little mysterious, but what we do know is that this gigantic bear ends up with a front row seat to the show, and by that I mean tangled up in a wall speakers flailing around. The huge crowd loves it! Here's a fan edited version of the finale to try and make sense of it:





But the best part is the music! The (temporary?) soundtrack consists of two Michael Jackson songs on repeat and the groups playing concert are hilarious italo-disco bands like Toto Coelo and other euro-dudes with short shorts. There's some pretty awesome rehearsal scenes for fans of camp, which we are.

THE BURNING QUESTION: Clooney, Sheen and Dern all die at the hand of the bear POV camera, and their total combined screen time is maybe 5 minutes max. So there.






The production was shut down for now unknown reasons, though speculation has run from dried up financing, to being ousted by the Hungarian government over paying for permits to special effects problems with the grizzly. Nick Maley who did effects on the movie has said that wasn't an issue though, but I dunno, the little that was produced look butt junky. Who knows. There are a few articles and interviews online that discuss the production, but now that it's semi-available, I can't imagine anyone caring. The mystique is gone! The film is unfinished! I can't say it's worth the effort or money or emotional/physical sacrifice to track this down.

4 comments:

  1. Yes! Awesome post dude! I need to see this. Can you send my way?

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  2. Yes, but first I'll need photographic evidence that you tattooed MarshallCaruthersCasinos.com in at least 2 places on your person.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marshall,

    Nice posts. Reminds me of some of the Cryptopopolgy posts I've done on my blog.

    Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I included a link to this article in the latest "issue" of Spatter Analysis. Hope that's okay.

    Check it out!

    --J/Metro

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