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Grisly Rage

Michael J. Tresca | Fairfield, CT USA | 08/09/2010

(1 out of 5 stars)

"After watching too many Syfy channel movies in a row (my Xbox is inaccessible these days), I've come to a startling conclusion. When a group of teens get in a vehicle and the idiot boyfriend tells the clueless girlfriend that she is not allowed in the passenger seat next to him, we - the actors, the characters, and the viewers - are all doomed.



I get why the writers do this - they have a limited amount of time to get the characters into a vehicle so they can promptly start dying at their monster-infested destination, and there are only so many ways you can show a frat boy being a real jerk to his girlfriend.



One way to do this is by kicking her out of the front seat. I repeat: ONE WAY. There are other ways. But shlock horror filmmakers apparently don't know any other way because this exact sequence happened in Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpent. And yet Lockjaw was better than this movie.



Instead of clipping some guy's wife with a SUV like in Lockjaw, the collected idiots in Grizzly Rage run over a bear cub. This happens because they 1) decide to take an out-of-the-way path, 2) are driving like idiots while hooting and hollering, and 3) aren't paying attention to the road. Said idiots then dither uselessly trying to figure out what to do about the bear cub, knowing that mama grizzly is surely on her way for revenge. Thus the title.



There are no special effects to speak of in this film. There's no CGI, because there's nothing to animate. It's just spliced bear footage, a guy in a bear suit, actors screaming at things off camera, and unbelievably boring sequences in which the four cast members climb, walk, jog, run, and otherwise waste 80 minutes of your life you will never get back.



There is a moment in Grizzly Rage where the two remaining survivors commiserate about their plight. And, with a straight face, the female lead shares that the grizzly is hunting them as a form of punishment because she hit a parked car once and never fessed up to it. It's pretty clear that was script writer Arne Olsen's car.



Grizzly Rage has pulled off an amazing feat by convincing many reviewers that the film is about a "normal" grizzly. This is a sure sign that the reviewer didn't actually watch the film. Grizzly Rage has two different sequences involving a peculiar abandoned shack with bear traps, collars, chains, beakers, tubes, and what looks like a mutated bear claw. It's all the trappings of a mad scientist experiment except for the pink neon sign flashing "This is a Mad Scientist's Experiment." In other words, this mama grizzly, who certainly has better things to do than expend so much energy chasing people miles across the wilderness, is in fact A MUTATED BEAR. Grizzly Rage is NOT original, it is not that different, it is in fact a pedestrian mutant monster film lacking the slightest shred of originality...



Except for the abrupt ending. The ending is either a real genre-breaker or the producers ran out of money. Your opinion of Grizzly Rage's ending will probably depend on your state of inebriation. I was unfortunately sober at the time so...yeah, I'm filled with grisly rage about it.

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