If you were asked which movie featuring three current and future Oscar winners is among the worst ever made, Grizzly II: Revenge would be a great response.  Why is a 1983 movie here among Recent Releases?  The project was abandoned post-production for lack of funds, largely forgotten until producer Suzanne Nagy finally oversaw its completion and distribution in 2020, a mere thirty-seven years later.  Filmed in Hungary, this is a sequel in name only to the 1976 production of Grizzly, a Jaws ripoff well known in the film industry as “Claws.”  Grizzly II: Revenge is making the rounds now on cable and streaming services, likely embarrassing its surprisingly good cast.

André Szöts’ film is set at an unnamed National Park, where the crazy park supervisor, Eileene Draygon (Louise Fletcher), is planning  a huge rock concert.  But a huge grizzly bear hunts down and kills several park visitors and threatens the concert itself.  Among those visitors are very young versions of George Clooney, Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern; the park rangers include Deborah Raffin and Steve Inwood; and the “Quint” character of a renegade bear hunter named Bouchard is played with relish by John Rhys-Davies.  Other familiar faces include Dick Anthony Williams, Deborah Foreman and Charles Cyphers.  I wonder how many of them keep this film title on their resumés.

There are three big problems with this movie.  The first is the plot.  Having a giant bear go on a rampage is fine, but the ostensible reason the bear rampages is shown as the credits begin, when its cub is (very phonily) killed.  It’s one thing for the giant bear go after hunters, but this thing goes after everyone, and prowls toward the rock concert, which would never happen.  That rock concert is the second big problem; the music acts are pathetic European acts playing 1980s electronica that was badly dated while the film was in production.  Sequences on stage and backstage are interminable, presumably because they didn’t have much footage of the giant animatronic bear, which didn’t work (just like the shark in Jaws) most of the time.  And the third big problem is the editing, which bounces around from the park rangers to the rock concert preparations to the giant bear’s perspective to a group of hunters trying to capture it for money to the rock concert rehearsals to lone victims being killed in the woods to helicopter shots of the forest to Bouchard lecturing about bears to, well, you get the picture.  The pace kills any building of suspense, and the story is completely deadened by all the boring concert preparations and footage.

Only one thing could have saved this movie in editing.  They should have changed the story to reflect the bear’s dissatisfaction with the rock concert being staged in his territory and had it attack the concert, being accompanied by all the other forest animals.  Nature battling back against bad rock music is a scenario I could certainly appreciate.  One last note — if you ever see this junk be sure to watch carefully when a certain hirsute being is electrocuted.  There are two very quick shots lifted from Jaws 2, closeups of the shark chomping down on the power line out of the water and burning to death.  I recognized the teeth.  ☆.  3 May 2021.

By the way, I had reason recently to watch the original Grizzly, produced seven years before this so-called sequel.  It’s not a very good movie either, and it has some of the same issues, but it is Sidney Sheldon (alas, not Shakespeare) compared to this junk.  ☆ ☆.  3 May 2021.