Originally set for release in 1983 the production of Grizzly II: The Predator (now renamed Revenge) is quite frankly more interesting than the film itself. The film was never completed but now with new footage it has been pieced together to resemble something of a feature film.
Producer Suzanne C. Nagy has remastered the original footage and added in stock footage to try to fill in the blanks, which makes it more of a freak than a cohesive experience.
While you admire the commitment to putting out the film, it is such a jarring experience to watch that you can’t help but wonder what could have been.
The basic plot follows a mother grizzly who wants to avenge her cub being shot by poachers and works her way through woodlands, all the way to a concert of 80,000 in a national park.
We get brief cameos from young Charlie Sheen, George Clooney and Laura Dern but the film’s best performance comes from a suitably unhinged John Rhys Davies as Bouchard.
After his family was killed by a grizzly he now resides in the forests and has become a bizarre and pretty crazy individual who talks about himself in the third person.
The concert element of the plot does include future classic ‘Milk from the Coconut’ plus plenty of stock footage that doesn’t fit the music playing.
Another humorous plot thread is a bunch of poachers, headed by Charles Cyphers who spend one scene chasing each other around grabbing each other’s bums – seriously.
The basis of Grizzly II: Revenge is promising but even with the new footage it is an incohesive mess which barely features any on-screen grizzly attacks; which is kind of the point of the film.
A third film has been muted, but hopefully on this evidence it will be a stand-alone film and not a direct sequel to this.
Bloody Flicks 