Grizzly 1976 Written by Harvey Flaxman and David Shelton, directed by William Girdler and David Shelton. The poster says the bear is 18 feet, in the movie the bear is said to be 15 feet tall, the bear in the film is called Teddy and he's 11 feet tall. Still massive, they don't call them Ursus arctos horribilis for nothing. Teddy, Christopher George and and Richard Jaeckel were in the 1977 film Day Of The Animals together. It's a similar story to this film.
Christopher George is a park ranger where the grizzly decides to pick up lunch. There aren't supposed to be any grizzlies in the area, they were all wiped out by the locals a long while ago. Andrew Prine is a helicopter pilot who had a bad time in Vietnam. Richard Jaeckel is a naturist who studies the forest and provides the park staff with bear info. The local black bears aren't much of a problem but they like to know where they are and what they're up to anyway.
The grizzly starts slaughtering from the get go and he's eating the victims. He chomps on a smorgasbord of campers, hikers and hunters, man, woman and child. Christopher wants more help to hunt the bear. Rather than get more rangers or qualified help his boss lets the press in for a look around. He doesn't close the park right away. Then he lets a gaggle of hunters in, hoping they'll get the bear. That doesn't work out so well, many more are killed.
There's a lot of forest activity, it was filmed in Georgia and the area seems nice enough. I wouldn't care to go camping but I'd drive thought if I was nearby and younger. The campers there seem to like it, until the bear ravages them in their campsite. There's a fair body count and a lot of blood being splashed around. The gore makeup is of mixed quality, often fairly decent. Some of the grizzly interaction scenes aren't that well shot but the mechanical bear looked fairly good. Sadly the bears paws change from black to brown on occasion.
Despite the weaknesses the film did fairly well at the box office. The $750,000 cost turned a nice $39 million. It was the most financially successful Indy film of the year. I enjoyed it but only gave it a 5 on the IMDb where it has a 5.2 average. I watched it on YouTube, it's a fairly decent copy, here's the link.
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