Into the Grizzly Maze

I am seriously torn between opinions on this one. I'm actually somewhat of a fan of animal horror movies. I still think Jaws is one of the best horror films out there. I even somehow liked the Orca Rip-off. Seriously, the animal horror genre occupies a major part of the most fun B movies ever (strangely, the ones that come to mind are mostly shark focused....Deep Blue Sea, Ghost Shark, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon...). From my childhood I remember being really scared of titles like Tarantula, Kingdom of Spiders, Frogs, Razorback, Cujo and so on. Well, times change and I know just enjoy some dumb fun. And I really don't know if Grizzly actually fits my bill here.

I admit I was predominantly drawn to this movie by its cast - 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, they would have confidence in the movie and some budget associated with it. And again, I am not sure...

So the actors actually do their job pretty well. Their performance is probably one of the reasons why the movie is sometimes quite gripping and tense. The setting is quite nice - foggy gritty cold forest. The plot is pretty much what you expect...and even if you have low expectations it is kind of a lackluster.

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.

There is just not enough real interaction or shots with the bear and people together convincingly to make this movie really good. As mentioned, the effects are good and bad at the same time - CGI was avoided most of time, and when it was used, it was OK. But generally, it has just this extreme cheap TV movie feel. It is also not over the top, which could have saved it. If there is humor in this movie, it is extreme subtle...to the extend that I'm not sure if I noticed it.

So in sum, really, I have no idea what to make of it. I do not recommend it. That's for sure. But I also do not hate it. I somehow do not really care (despite this long review...). And oh yeah, and the ending is really cheap.

Review: I really didn't have high expectations for this film because it seemed like one of those typical, cheap straight to DVD movies but it actually wasn't that bad. The director spent some time giving the individual characters a background, so it didn't seem like a bunch of people in the woods running away from a massive bear. Anyway, the films about a guy called Rowan (James Marsden) who returns to his town to look for his friend who is missing in the woods. On his first night there, he picks up a girl in a bar and he takes her back to his hotel but the girl turns out to be a prostitute so he turfs her out and she ends up getting in trouble with her pimp. After saving her from a beating, he ends up in a fight on the street with the pimp so the police are called out to stop the brawl. His brother Beckett (Thomas Jane) happens to be the town sheriff so he picks him up at the incident and he questions him to find out why he has come back after such a long time. After spending the night with his brother, dead bodies turn up in the woods so Beckett goes to investigate while Rowan starts his journey to find his missing friend. As Becketts wife is in the woods taking pictures, he decides to go and find her because it's been reported that there is a killer bear on the loose. Rowan ends up saving Becketts wife from the killer bear and they all end up trapped in the wilderness. The only path home is through the Grizzly Maze but they have to tackle the angry beast to get back to safe ground. There is some intensity through the movie which I found quite enjoyable. The acting was pretty good from the whole cast, which made there situation feel believable, especially as the director chose to use a real bear. There are other elements that kept the movie interesting, like the poachers who were killing bears for money and Billy Bob Thorntons character who was a top class hunter, so there is some depth to the storyline. The action scenes at the end were also well put together and very intense so I don't know why this movie didn't make it to the cinema. There are some decent actors in the film like Billy Bob Thornton, Thomas Jane and James Marsden who seems to be in loads of movies nowadays, so I'm surprised that it went straight to DVD. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the movie and the fact that the director chose to use a real bear made it a joy to watch. Watchable!

Round-Up: James Marsden, 42, seems to be covering every genre in his career by starring in movies like the X-Men as Cyclops, Superman Returns, Hairspray, Enchanted, 27 Dresses, The Box with Cameron Diaz, The Butler, 2 Guns with Denzel Washington, Anchorman 2 and Unfinished Business so he really has covered every spectrum of acting. He very rarely takes the lead in movies, but he definitely makes his presence known with his unique acting style and dashing smile, which is mentioned in Anchorman 2. Thomas Jane, 46, who plays his brother in this film, has struggled to make it as an A list actor but he has starred in some decent movies like Face Off, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Scott Pilgrim and Hustlers with the late Paul Walker but he's never played the lead in any of those movie. The one big disappointment of his career has to be the awful Punisher reboot which really didn't do his career any good. That was mainly due to the director who really failed to reboot the franchise but he hasn't been able to star in a big screen movie ever since. This movie was directed by David Hackl who also directed Saw V. He hasn't got that much experience behind the camera but I think that he done a decent job with this movie. He had some professional actors to work with, which included a bear and the storyline was well written so he must be happy with his achievements, especially as it's his only his second film.

Budget: $10million Worldwide Gross: N/A

I recommend this movie to people who are into their action/horror/thrillers about a group of people in the wilderness trying to escape from a killer bear. 5/10

When I read the storyline I thought I would like this movie especially when I saw some positive reviews. Plus there were some good actors in the cast. So, nature shots, good actors, all the ingredients for a good movie. But what a disappointment this was. It's one of the worst nature movies I saw in a long time. I just give it three stars because of some nature shots. The storyline is just awful. The actors were just doing their job, but when you have such a bad storyline it doesn't matter if you are a good actor or not. It's not going to save the movie. The movie is full of clichés that made me almost barf. Add to that the stupid idea that the bear is going to hunt everybody down in one night is too ridiculous for words. A bear that huge that it doesn't fit in your bedroom, professional hunters, poachers, and sheriffs, a lot of shooting, and never a hit. Those must be the lousiest shooters in history. Don't believe any positive review because it's a terribly bad movie.

This movie is not The Edge which in my opinion is one of the better movies ever made. Into the Grizzly Maze is definitely a B movie.

I put this movie on while my girlfriend had some friends over. They continually commented on how terrible it was, but with huge smiles on their faces. They were 100% maximum entertained. Some couldn't handle the gore, some couldn't look away in utter fascination.

The movie is just pure entertainment. The plot is very thin, the actors well known and the bear is menacing. At the end of the day it's better than most B movies.

Survival horror films will rarely crack the A Movie list, as The Edge did, but this is one of the more fun movies I've watched in a long time.

That said, it is not cinematic gold. It is perfectly executed for what it is supposed to be, a B movie with people getting slaughtered by a grizzly. What more do you want? What more can you expect?

When bodies start showing up in an Alaskan forest a local sheriff and his estranged brother go about find the bear before a seasoned hunter does.

It's hard not to draw comparison to other persons versus nature films, to it's credit it has a seasoned studded cast in what could have been the Jaws (1975) or Moby Dick of Bear movies. The location scenery and setting is fantastic, and there's some grizzly scenes (no pun intended) of hard to watch dead bear cubs, body dismemberment and so on. There's an abundance of kills in the forest, lodge attacks and in cars. Even with Saw V director David Hackl and with writers Guy Moshe and J.R. Reher it oddly feels only as special as AVP Requiem's brotherly love and forest scenes mixed with Abominable (2006).

Veteran Scott Glenn, excellent James Marsden, Thomas Jane as a hunter character turned conservationist who butts heads with Billy Bob Thornton's hardened hunter can't fix the lack of tension or continuity. Neither can the fine looking actors distract the fact that there's a TV air about the whole affair. The score is however great coupled with some fine cinematography and the star, bear Bart, possibly related to the late Bart the Bear and his mother from Grizzly (1976) steals the show.

It's nowhere near executed as well as The Edge (1997) or Ghost in the Darkness (1997), nor does it say more about conservation than The Bear (1988). What could have been Jaws, is more Orca - The Killer Whale.

As a killer bear film on revenge it's up in the top ten, but how many murderous bear films are there?