This ‘epic’ follows four students who decide to go on a road trip after recently graduating. They trespass into a gated off park for some off road fun but early into their adventure things start to go wrong as they crash their Jeep into a tree accidentally hitting a bear cub in the process.
Now as we all know grizzly bears tend to stick close by to their cubs and so it is not long before momma bear shows up and starts hunting them down (in your standard bear with a blood vendetta scenario) as they flee the scene of the crime. And just to make it all that better, this is no ordinary bear, O no, but rather a mutated super grizzly bear from all the toxic waste that has been dumped into the lake nearby.
The acting is poor with weak performances not doing much for the script that would have needed some world class Hollywood stars to make me even think about evoking some emotions. The award for the best performance has to go to the bear who most of the time did look genuinely p*ssed off, as would I if I had to take part in this movie.
I wouldn’t say it was a redeeming feature by a long shot but the cinematography isn’t half as bad as it could have been (for one of the scenes at least) when compared to what the rest of the movie was offering.
Even better though is the fact that the movie is trying to take itself seriously but fails on every level to do so. Call me cold hearted but I was laughing all the way through the ‘horrifying bear scenes’ as the graduates were outsmarted again and again. It doesn’t take long before you end up siding with the bear and are egging it on to get the next one. I was going to give you the trailer but this is so much better…
Quote from video- “When you see the animal roar, he’s smiling. He wants marshmallows” If only our poor students had known!
Whoever thought that a grizzly would make for a good terrifying enemy in a movie certainly didn’t think long and hard about it- being a massive and potentially dangerous animal in real life, there is not one point in the entire movie when bear and actor are in the same shot. This leads to some quite appalling and certainly comical scenes where the film makers use obviously fake props, stock footage and shockingly bad blood CGI (I’m talking PlayStation 1 standard here) to bring the bear to life. My favourite scene had to be the guy in a bear costume; and you could tell, jumping on their Jeep while they are trapped inside!
Apart from those moments of unintentional comic brilliance I would rather take my chances in the movie along with the bear as then I would one, not have to watch it and two, could hope to be killed off nice and early so I didn’t have to ever think about this again. Why not a zero rating you ask? I’ve seen worse.
