Consider the Grizzly

A wild grizzly starts eating people but has cute cubs in 1999's Wild Grizzly, an unmistakably made-for-TV movie set in a beautiful mountain town and featuring Daniel Baldwin in a minor role. It's exactly what you'd expect but there's something oddly sincere I found engrossing about it.

So the grizzly eats a guy's leg one night and it's tranqed by a guy inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones (as a fedora wearer myself, I shouldn't laugh). There's a town hall meeting about having the bear with her cubs displayed in the middle of town. Daniel Baldwin and the mayor (John O'Hurley, J. Peterman from Seinfeld), being villains, oppose this idea. With a grin of malevolent satisfaction, Baldwin plots to kill the bears so that he and the mayor can get rich . . . somehow. The nature of their scheme is never remotely clear.

Rachel (Michele Greene) and her moody teenage son, Josh (Riley Smith), move to the small town from L.A. When Josh accidentally breaks the windshield on a sheriff's car, the sheriff (Fred Dryer) drafts Josh to help take care of the grizzly and her cubs. Naturally, Josh is framed when they escape. In his attempts to capture the bear, which he alone realises is suffering from a toothache, he's joined by a plucky blonde with a captivating rack (Courtney Peldon). The writers give her a lot of stuff that's supposed to be endearing and quirky but come of as psychotic. When Josh is sneaking around the woods looking for the animal, she sneaks up on him with a recording of a bear roar and a bear claw glove to grab him on the shoulder. This is after the bear has killed someone.

Sometimes I thought the movie might be intentionally bad, like someone was aiming for "it's so bad it's good." Whenever a filmmaker claims this about their own film, I tend to doubt their sincerity (to be clear, I don't know if this filmmaker has done so). But there are shots that are so flagrantly lazy that I wonder. In the first attack scene, the man's little boy sneaks out of the safety of the car, ironically to retrieve his teddy bear. We get a shot of the teddy bear and the boy runs into frame, picks up the item with a blank expression, then turns to look off camera with an expression that clearly says, "Okay, I hit my mark. Now what?"

But the weirdest bits were when the grizzly ate people. There are these long, slow shots of people writhing in stage blood and guts and shots of the actual bear and shots of the dummy bear head being shoved in the fake gore. There's something so peculiarly detached about the tone of these shots, I can't explain it. It's like the filmmaker had no instinct for composing violent sequences but decided to just linger anyway hoping inspiration would eventually strike. As though he were gently contemplating his inability to express any feelings in the shots. It's sort of like listening to a tone deaf person sing "Ave Maria" with a total lack of self-consciousness. I guess that sums up the movie.