Jaws Ep. 03 - Grizzly / Day of the Animals - Get Me Another

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
you oh
Hello and welcome to Get Me Another, a podcast where we explore those movies that followedin the wake of blockbuster hits and attempted to replicate their success.
My name is Chris Ayanacone, and with me are my co-hosts Rob Lemorgis.

(00:23):
Well, let me tell you something, Chris.
While you've been sitting around here on your fat ass, I've made this forest part of me.
Oh, well that's...
Honestly, I'm content to sit on my fat ass.
That is a harsh indictment.
Oh
Lord look as you know these movies are aggro.
I can't help There was nothing nice to choose.

(00:44):
I had to attack you
And Justin Beam!
Chris, you're not the big mocker anymore.
Mocker.
The, the, the, what does that mean?
What does that mean?
Like the guy says to him like, what does that mean?
The Mocker.
He's the, you know, he's not the leader anymore.

(01:06):
You know, I'm the leader.
I'm Leslie Nielsen and I'm the leader.
That's right.
Hot shot.
I never thought I'd hot shot so many.
So many times
Hot shots so angrily, it's amazing.
Today's episode three in our Get Me Another Jaws series and we've had two weeks on thewater being menaced by creatures of the sea and we're ready to dry off and instead be

(01:32):
menaced by creatures of the land.
Because the Jaws model can apply to any manner of animal, not just those in the water, aslong as that animal can mess you up.
So this week, we'll be looking at two films from director William Gerdler, who made anumber of fascinating 70s exploitation films.
This is the first time his work is appearing on our podcast, but I can assure you, itwon't be the last.

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So we kick off today with 1976's Grizzly.
A motion picture is coming that does not cater to fantasy.
You will see nature's most savage man eating animals.
By its size alone, it can overpower and devour.

(02:22):
18 feet tall, over 2,000 pounds.
The largest carnivorous ground beast in the world.
You
come in here they leave food well this is different this bumps eating his victims

(03:09):
The deadliest jaws on land belong to Grizzly.
I mean, that trailer just sums it up right there.
The deadliest jaws on land.
At least they're dressing it up so it's not clearly a Jaws ripoff.
Despite the fact it has all the beats.
What I love is it's as if someone said, well, what if we remade Jaws on land with a bearexcept everyone is Quint?

(03:40):
I think that's everyone is Quint in this one.
Yes, absolutely true.
Grisly originated with producer Harvey Flaxman, who co-wrote the script with David Sheltonafter encountering a bear on a family camping trip and presumably going with his family

(04:00):
afterwards to see Jaws.
it follows the beats, it's Jaws on land, and it makes no bones about it.
And frankly, it did very well, as we'll talk about in a little bit.
Not just at the box office, but with us.
no, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.
my goodness.
I enjoyed both of these.

(04:20):
I have to confess, before we get into this, Grizzly is for some reason one of my comfortfilms.
It began years ago, maybe 10 years ago.
This became something that just gets put in on days when I'm just working, when I'm doingsomething in the background.
So I've almost heard it more than I've watched it over time at this point.

(04:42):
But there's something about, cause you know, I love mountains and we're gonna get a lot ofthat today.
And from that opening,
that we'll get to in a moment here on through.
just absolutely adore this movie.
It's so much fun.
It is a ton of fun.
The film was produced by Edward L.
Montoro, the founder of Film Ventures International, an independent production anddistribution company.

(05:03):
Now, Montoro was behind, had a big success with the US distribution of the Italian filmBeyond the Door, a movie that borrows very heavily from The Exorcist.
have you seen Beyond the Door
I've never seen the third, I know there is a Beyond the Door 3, I've never seen it.
Okay, we need to do that at some point.

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I don't know what would lead us there at all, but it has some of the best worst miniaturetrain action in it.
oh It's got mannequins.
They clearly didn't have special effects budget.
So they just like put mannequins out and they knocked the head off a mannequin at onepoint.
It is absolutely majestic.
will have to find, we definitely have Beyond the Door on our eventual Get Me AnotherExorcist series, as well as a movie directed by William Gerdler.

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William Gerdler, who directed this film, was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and hebegan making independent films after serving in the Air Force.
Among the films he directed was 1974's Abbey, which is kind of a blaxploitation take onthe exorcist and will also definitely be in our Get Me Another Exorcist film.

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And his later exorcist trend movie, Manitou.
Yes, his film that he did after the two today that we'll talk about today, The Man of Twois also going to be in our Get Me Another Exorcist series.
So there's more William Gerdler to come.
And I'm thrilled about that because I thought these movies were a whole lot of fun.
Tragically, unfortunately, The Man of Two would be Gerdler's last film because he died in1978 at the age of just 30 when he was scouting locations in the Philippines and his

(06:40):
helicopter crash.
And it's tragic.
I mean, not only because of Life Lost Young, but I mean, I would love to have seen thefilms he would have continued to make as you go into the 80s.
You cannot convince me that he wouldn't have directed Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He totally would have, and he would have made an absolutely incredible Rambo-esque actionmovie in the 80s, I'm certain of it.

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sure.
Grizzly was filmed in the area of Clayton, Georgia, which is the same vicinity thatDeliverance had been shot in a few years earlier.
And it's beautiful country, as we'll get to, despite the fact that grizzly bears don'treally live in that part of the country.
It's just...
Yeah, no, sorry.
That's the movie is happening.

(07:26):
What am I, you know, reality?
What am I talking about?
The film has a great theatrical poster with a bear and the image of the grizzly bear fromthe poster was done by legendary comic book artist Neil Adams.
There it is.
And there it is on a cup.
You have it on a cup.
That is fantastic.
I have a cup because I think it was Severin who kept keeps releasing these over and Yeah,have.

(07:52):
Yeah, yeah.
And the set that I got came with this cup and then when they put out Grizzly, it came withlike a rubber bear too.
is the proportions on it are awful and it's the most hilarious looking thing.
But I'm going to dearly hold on to both.
Absolutely.
This is my everyday cup, this one here.

(08:13):
That's fantastic.
That's fantastic.
Grizzly stars Christopher George, Andrew Prine and Richard Jekyll of Spencer for Hirealong with Joan McCall and Teddy as the Grizzly.
Teddy was a Kodiak bear and at 11 feet tall Teddy was the largest bear in captivity at thetime.

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And I'll talk a little bit about some of how they got Teddy to perform as we go on becauseI have some
some behind the scenes stuff on that and we'll get into that a little bit.
But we open with helicopter pilot Don Stober, played by Andrew Prine, giving a tour of anational park from above.
And guys, the scenery here is just absolutely beautiful.

(08:58):
Like, Don is talking about the virtue of national parks and it is, I am all in.
I assume you're referring by the scenery to his denim jacket, which is the same denimjacket and shirt underneath that he's wearing about 90 minutes later.
Yeah.
the film.
That's true.
That's a good point, Homer Simpson.
So they're flying over the forest and he's talking to this guy about what a forest is.

(09:20):
He's like, this is beautiful land.
Yeah, it's the same as how it was when the Indians were here.
That's right.
That's right.
And this guy's oh, this is interesting.
Where is this guy from?
And why is he in his helicopter with Don?
You get the, he calls him Senator.
Like you get the impression he's got like senators or congressmen that he's giving a tourto.
like.
and introducing a senator to what a forest is.

(09:43):
Well, you know, they have to pass legislation to protect our national parks.
Not like now, where, you know, apparently we're destroying them all.
And that's whole other thing.
But also worth noting here is the score by Robert Ragland, which is this big sweeping.
Yeah.
Or orchestral work of art.

(10:03):
I love it.
It's right from the start.
And there's that entrance where you're just seeing the forest.
It's very quiet.
And then you hear the boom of the helicopter coming right overhead.
And then you're into the film.
I think it's such a great entry.
Yeah.
that's great sound design too.
uh Yeah.
Especially for a movie of a, you know, lesser budget or whatever.
All of the technical stuff in this movie, I think is for a B movie, it is about as good asyou're going to get in the seventies.

(10:29):
Like everything is just so well done in this movie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone, everyone is good.
uh We're soon introduced to Christopher George's park ranger character, Michael Kelly.
And he is, he, you know, he's kind of, he's kind of Quint mixed with Chief Brody.
Like he's, he's, he's definitely the Chief Brody character, but he's, he's, he's crotchetyenough to be Quint.

(10:55):
That's not, it's not the word I was looking for, but it's close.
Like he's just kind of angry.
It's someone looked at Brody and said, huh, he's kind of a wimp and doesn't do enoughuntil the end.
What if we made him kind of a crotchety bad ass?
That's what you would
Now, also have to note everybody who is listening here that these two films have the samecast.

(11:17):
It's almost identical in terms of the lineup of people that are in these two movies andthey dress almost identically between the two movies as well.
Yeah.
Which is is pretty amusing.
But yeah, he is Christopher George.
So, you know, if Christopher George is in a film that it's that there's going to be sometough guy action at some point to.
Christopher George is a guy, and I like him, but he always, whenever I see him in a movie,he strikes me as, it's a role that Rick Dalton would have played really well.

(11:48):
The fictional character from Once Upon Time in Hollywood.
that's, Christopher George roles feel like Rick Dalton would have been in the mix forthose, including these two.
Yeah, and with Christopher George, and I think a lot of the other character actors in thismovie, uh, in prominent roles, they fall into the category for me of folks who kind of,

(12:11):
I'm not saying they were like this in real life, but it's, play a version of themselves,whatever their screen persona is, is what you're going to get.
Like, you know, definitely his character in Grizzly feels a whole lot like his characterin Day the Animals, but in a way that...
Not to compare them up one to one.
I've used this before, like Bogart was always Bogart in a book.

(12:32):
know, this is not someone who disappears into a role, but like that's why you get him.
Yeah, it's like Crispy Glover.
Cary Grant was the role.
then that role was in a whole bunch of different movies.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's nothing wrong with that.

(12:54):
That's how movie stars work.
Not everybody's going to be a chameleon.
Oh, a great modern day comparison to me, although there's more action would be JasonStatham.
Jason Statham is always Jason Statham.
I love it.
Give me more.
And it's in a similar space, I think of like that tough masculine.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.

(13:15):
These guys don't have the versatility of the rock.
No, they don't.
And what I like is early on, like Amity in Jaws, you get a sense of this national park asa tourist place.
there's a ton of people here, they're here on vacation, you know, they're dealing with,the park rangers are dealing with that.

(13:42):
And one of the things is we have this early interlude at this restaurant, which I just,it's got a 70s kind of dark.
wood rustic thing going on.
love, I absolutely love the vibe in this restaurant at the beginning.
I'm like, I just want to, I just want to have some meals there and stare out at the parkand the trees through the big window.

(14:05):
It reminds me of Bishop's Buffet from when we were kids, Remember Bishop's?
Oh do.
It was like you had to be over 80 to eat there and the food smelled like that.
I think everything came with Hollandaise sauce.
It's that kind of place.
Clearly the chef had a fetish.
But prior to getting into this beautiful restaurant, we learn as there is an absolute mobof tourists showing up to camp.

(14:31):
I mean, the volume of people that are pouring into this park, I understand why theseRangers are upset.
And what they say is that you guys, so the early crisis in this film is that there's toomany backpackers there.
They're not going to be able to keep up with them.
And so that's going to be a theme.
throughout the movie about the problem with too many backpackers.
Yes, absolutely.

(14:52):
You know, hey, that restaurant has good wine at reasonable prices and that bringscustomers back.
Yeah.
So that's where they're coming back.
Chris, I know this movie did well, ah so it may not totally fit, but this could be therestaurant at our theme park.
Just saying.
oh
no, could like, this could be the central area before you go into the different lands,like the middle.

(15:16):
Yeah.
this this theme park idea gets better all the time.
uh
We'll spring for the grizzly ride.
That'll be the one that costs the real money.
mean, honestly, both movies today, because the second movie was actually shot in NorthernCalifornia, but they have a vibe of the the Grizzly Peak area of Disney California

(15:38):
Adventure.
Like that's that whole vibe to me.
Like when the helicopters, we have these shots, these first person shots in thehelicopter, you know, going through the landscape, it reminded me of Soarin'.
oh Attraction at Disney where it's like a simulator thing.
And I'm like, oh, this has a grizzly peak vibe.

(16:13):
Constipatedly into helicopter at the end is amazing.
the grizzly with the big animatronic grizzly just going, like,
This grizzly is a heavy breather.
that's...
We'll get to that.
It must be related to the shark from Tintorette.
Terera.

(16:33):
That's right.
These weird pervert animals hang out and just breed heavy and watch people do stuff.
uh
The restaurant is owned by the father of Michael Kelly's love interest.
And I say that sort of question because I'm never quite sure.
Allison, who is a photographer.
And I'm not it's a funny thing.

(16:54):
I wasn't quite sure if they're in a relationship or they're just flirting or they'rethinking about getting in a relationship.
I'm not sure.
But we get a lot of time with the two of them in the early part of the movie.
It's like the one person he can talk to, you know, about about his troubles, you know.
Alison is there as a photographer and she needs to be out doing her photographing.

(17:15):
And so her dad's like, photographing and her dad's like, you need to be doing that.
And she's like, I only need 30 or 40 more photographs for what you don't know.
Alison needs 34 or 40 photographs for, but when, when she bumps into Kelly and they walkoutside together, there's definitely flirting going on.
And she says during that point that she's he says, oh, she says,

(17:39):
How long have you known me?
And he says a few weeks.
So she's been there for a few weeks taking photos, but we never see them really get beyondjust sort of the, like to talk really deeply with each other stage.
So maybe it's one of those relationships or friendships where they don't ever do anything,but they know everything about each other.
don't know.
It's interesting because I thought for sure that, she's going to be out there in danger inthe climax of the movie.

(18:05):
She's going to go out or get caught out there and be in jeopardy in the final act, but shejust vanishes from the movie about halfway through.
She's just like, oh, she's done.
This is actually a good time to bring up.
uh you know, this movie does owe a lot to jaws and I don't think anyone would uh denythat, but it doesn't like the beat that you just described is what one expects.

(18:33):
Like, Oh, she's going to take the role of like, you know, Brody's sons in danger, right?
That sort of thing.
You, you expect those sorts of things.
You know, for whatever the reason, Grizzly doesn't quite do them.
So for a movie that owes a big debt to another film, the first time you watch it, youstill you'll know what's going to happen, but you won't totally know what's going to

(18:54):
happen.
If that makes sense, it can still surprise you.
Oh, sometimes with its, you know, bat shit craziness, which I love.
no, it's fantastic.
And as we said, the park is dealing with a very heavy kind of uh influx of backpackers andcampers.

(19:15):
And two of those campers are Maggie and June, who very irresponsibly, guys, leave acampfire burning while they're out strolling around.
Like they come back from it and it's still burning.
And they're talking like they've been away from the campsite for a while.
But that fire is going.
What she literally says is we've walked at least 10 miles.

(19:39):
Yeah.
So 10 miles in the forest is no easy feat.
They aren't dirty and they have a lot of clothes hanging on a clothesline there, by theway.
And it's puzzling, but their relationship I appreciate because it seems like these twomight, they might be a couple.
like that.
I had a vibe of these two or a couple, it wasn't explicitly said.

(20:04):
That fire, they lit that fire while they're hiking for 10 miles?
forest fires?
Maybe they deserve to have a bad thing happen.
Well, you know, mean, maybe, maybe they're going to get a lesson from Smokey the Bear'sbuddy because uh he's coming up.
Actually, first what happens is young Ranger Tom, one of the young Rangers comes by onhorseback to tell them to be careful.

(20:28):
He should have given them a lecture on fire safety, but then we get the arrival of thebear.
And this movie has got some amazing first person bear cam.
Yeah.
It's extraordinary.
When the camera rises up as the, so you know the Grizzlies rising up on its hind legs.

(20:49):
We haven't even seen it, but it's just simulating that.
love it.
Yeah, there's no question.
Let's just be honest, Grizzly doesn't necessarily carry the same dramatic weight and deepcharacterization of Jaws, but anytime there's a bear attack, it is absolutely amazing.
It's great.
And there's a combination of elements of bear that are in play throughout it.

(21:12):
Like sometimes it's just a hand.
Sometimes it's just an arm or like the back of the head over the shoulder or somethinglike that.
They don't, they don't, these are quick cuts that work well enough that if the, whenyou're watching, you don't lose sight of the fact that it's a bear, doesn't feel like it's
a suit or prop or something like that.
And they do a nice job of blending the real bear footage in there with it.

(21:33):
absolutely.
And I didn't for a second, like I wasn't any time questioning the authenticity.
was just like, it's, it's, it's good.
I'm going with it.
It's awesome.
Like I, I, I was like, totally.
And I love the fact that you don't see the whole, a full shot of the bear until a whileinto the movie.
What, like the shark in jaws, they hold that card.

(21:53):
A lot of time it's the first person stuff or just a claw or an arm or, that kind of thing.
And, and
You know, here, when Maggie is just doing her thing around the campfire and the bear comesin and uh just with one slice of the bear's claw, Maggie's arm goes right off.
Like the bear is Obi-Wan Kenobi in a Tatooine Cantina.

(22:17):
Holy shit!
This movie goes hard pretty quick out of the gate here with these kills it because thisyou know, we said Jaws was the the a the a version of exploitation.
Well remember this is this one is exploitation.
And and so that that's why I think you get the park ranger warning these girls before theyget killed.

(22:37):
No one warned the swimmer in Jaws before she got killed right.
You because it's uh
different beast.
It's not pure exploitation, pure B movie like this one is.
And so if you are a fan of that sort of thing, like I am, it is fun to see those elementsnot shied away from, just like they're in here.

(22:58):
ah and dare I say a little, a little three little pigs is about to happen.
Something that's going to happen.
Oh my goodness.
Like Maggie, Maggie gets mauled and then June, she comes back, she sees what's happened.
She runs off and she takes shelter in this small like abandoned cabin for a second.

(23:20):
And it reminded me of like, and I can't remember which Friday the 13th it was.
reminded me of a Friday the 13th where she sees the cabin.
It's like, oh, I'm safe.
And then she gets in there and she's in there by herself.
And then the grizzly just rips that cabin up.
Like it.
It messes that cabin up and just claws her to death.

(23:41):
So it's like that thing, I feel like there's some Friday the 13th where somebody findslike a, is it two with Jason Schaick where someone thinks they're safe and then of course,
you know.
Amy Steele at the end of two.
That's it.
That's what she puts on the mom's sweater and all that.
Yeah.
And to your point, Rob, about how they established the bear in without seeing it.
When the bear crashes through this cabin, comes through the roof first.

(24:04):
yeah.
It doesn't come in through the side of the cabin.
It actually smashes down above her and then it attacks her and takes, takes a good punch.
yeah.
And, then, and then her head goes flying off.
my god, like it's-
slow motion ahead across the screen is what you get as you hear her scream twice.

(24:25):
m
screaming and the crossfade on the scream into the next scene is held for a long time.
It's really, really good.
uh Michael Kelly, Park Ranger Michael Kelly and Allison, they're looking for the missinggirls.
They get word that there's two hikers are missing.

(24:46):
They come across the cabin, which from the side there on looks fine.
The bear only messed up that one side.
But from the side there, it's like, they're OK.
They go in, and then they see what's happened.
And they discover the body.
And what I love, this bear, this bear's amazing, because he perfectly positioned the bodyso it would fall from the ceiling right in front of Kelly at the perfect moment.

(25:13):
Speaking of Friday the 13th, I mean, this bear is Michael Myers or James.
Absolutely.
And when you first see uh Kelly there, as Allison approaches, she's taking a picture ofhim real quickly and he's smoking.
And this is going to be a theme throughout this film.
Almost, I'd say a decent portion of the scenes that begin with a shot of Kelly, he'ssmoking and he's in the forest and he's a ranger.

(25:41):
So I don't think, so I don't think the, young horse bound ranger earlier who told thegirls to stay out of trouble.
I don't think he really cared about the campfire.
Cause it seems no one here is concerned about.
All they care about is backpackers, which apparently are swarming the area.
And then Allison like literally stumbles into the second body when she finds like theremains of the of the first girl of Maggie like buried in a shallow gray and her hand like

(26:09):
she kind of falls down she breaks her fall with her hand and her hand goes right intowhat's left of the body and and We're establishing that bears do sometimes bury the things
they kill to save for later And that will that will come back later in the movie
It's Chekov's Bearsberry food.
uh

(26:30):
And bears circling, because that comes in too.
And prior to this attack on the girls, there's a pretty good amount of time that we'rejust seeing the bear POV as he struggles with branches on trees.
But he's watching them from afar and kind of, I don't know if it's really circling, butthat is brought up later on that it takes a while and then it attacks.
This bear's amazing.
This bear is just amazing.

(26:51):
The coroner thinks that it must have been a mother defending her cub.
It seems to me the girls came across a cub, got too close, and the mother attacked.
didn't find any sign of cub.
Fine, we didn't find any sign of a bear anywhere.
What she eat?
We the rest of her meal for later.
Why would she come down?

(27:12):
Well, she came down for food.
Oh shit, we hauled them up to the high country last season.
There's more than enough food and fish for them up there.
That's maybe not enough fish.
Hang on to your sick humor, Doc.
It's not
She was hungry enough to eat two women.
Bears don't eat people.
Bears don't eat people.
Well this one did.
was going to say in this corner scene, it struck me here.

(27:35):
And I think it's true throughout that, look, this is a, again, I love saying it, a Bpicture.
They didn't have the budget.
The jaws did right.
Sure.
Although I do think they did very well with the money they did.
And so, you know, this movie throughout, while it may not have, they may have had to domore setups per day and it, and that does show, but like it has cool visuals throughout

(27:57):
it.
So even this coroner scene, right.
the point where you come in, the camera is looking straight kind of up, maybe slight angleat the ceiling.
And you've got the circular coroner's light is there with like the weird metal arm of itcoming off at this angle.
And it's, you know, they almost look a little like geometric shapes.

(28:18):
I mean, you can tell, you know, once it fully uh fades in, you know, what, where you'reat, but it's just, it's just cool.
You come in with those visuals and then the face comes in.
to that.
And it's those little touches that do, think, make this for me just a lot moreentertaining and fun to watch.

(28:38):
I don't care about your tomato rating.
ah This is a good one.
This is a good one.
they like they do good work in it.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
agree.
We're introduced to the park supervisor, Kittredge, who fills somewhat of a similar roleto the mayor in Jaws.
But here's the thing.
Whereas the mayor and Brody in Jaws have very clear points of view based on the thingsthey want.

(29:06):
Brody wants to protect people.
The mayor wants Amity open for business.
Here, we have a lot of tension between Kittredge and Kelly, but we...
They don't really know what, the dudes just kinda seem not to like each other.
It really comes down to that, cause they're not even arguing over what course of action totake, at least not early on.

(29:28):
They really just seem to be arguing about who's gonna get the blame for all of
It's jurisdiction.
It's dick swinging.
Whose mountain is this?
I think.
mountain
Whose mountain is this?
And apparently before the season started, Kelly and bear expert Arthur Scott moved thebears to the high country, which they talk about a lot.

(29:50):
Arthur Scott, played by Richard Jekyll, he's a dude who hangs out in the woods and wears abear skin tracking animals.
He is kind of like, what if we made Hooper and Quint the same character?
Like, he dresses like Hooper.
But, he is the wild man like Quentin 30 % crazier than either of them.

(30:14):
No, and he's and he's grizzly man.
He is.
That when we first see him, he's straight up angry about being bothered and he comes outwearing like a deer pelt on his back, which is only on his back, like a cape, by the way.
So for everyone out there, if you want to go really immerse yourself with deer, which someof you probably do.

(30:36):
Sure.
Wear more than just the deer skin on your back.
Pulled your c*** from your local
something.
It's a really half-assed.
Come on, Scott.
But he's yelling in his radio like, ruined it.
I've been hanging out with these deer.
he's like, I've been living them.
So this was enough of a disguise to convince deer that your smelly sandwich eating ass isa deer as well.

(31:03):
And by the way, he's eating sandwiches the entire duration of this film.
His whole mo- at one point, I think Kelly has to tell him, go eat your sandwich outside.
He does.
And sandwiches play prominently in the next movie as well.
Well, yeah.
So anyway, but yeah, this is sandwich heavy Scott action park.
Ranger sandwiches is a classic trope of the genre.

(31:26):
No, thankfully no frog stories in this.
It's like the black gloves in Giallo's.
It did remind, like I kept watching this movie and thinking of the prey, which we didduring our Friday the 13th series.
the landscape is similar.
the focus on park rangers is similar.
Like I definitely had vibes of the prey.

(31:50):
But the tone is more fun than the prey.
The prey is such a heavy movie.
I put the prey in the same category as orca.
Yeah.
Movies that you want to watch when you're really depressed.
Yes, Kelly has a conversation with Allison where we get a little of his backstory aboutlike his situation with his former wife and I have to admit I found it confusing.

(32:14):
oh
plan to claim your fortune.
So what happened?
I tried a shortcut.
See, I married this beautiful lady who just by chance happened to be filthy rich.
Trouble was we were both mercenaries.
After a while, I just wanted out.
I couldn't hack it anymore.
You left.

(32:36):
Well, I was a little more subtle than that.
I may believe I was having an affair, but that turned around.
So I sold all my holdings, gave it to the Salvation Army, became a Ranger.
That turned her off.
You're lying, aren't you?
What do you think?
I really don't care.
Like the whole exchange is odd.

(32:57):
Like it just, is this supposed to make me like him more?
It's like, he's not willing to, you know, he tries to get out of the relationship by doingthese things and it only the wife, she likes it more.
And it ends, the whole thing is so odd because it ends with Alison just looking at him andsaying, I really don't care.
oh What's the takeaway?

(33:18):
And he describes his relationship with his wife, he says that it didn't work because theywere both mercenaries.
What does that mean in the framework of a relationship?
mean, unless they were both mercenaries, like they were both- Mercenaries.
Yeah, that's why he's like a Mr.
and Mrs.
Smith situation.
We have a little bit of sexual tension between two of the younger park rangers who wereout looking for the bear.

(33:41):
There's a guy and a girl, and the female ranger, she decides she's gonna- Gale.
Gale, you're right, it is Gale.
And she's going to soak her feet in the stream.
And in order to do that, she has to strip down to her bra and panties.
And I literally wrote down, I'm making notes on this video, I'm like, you're taking yourclothes off now?
You're looking for a bear.

(34:02):
Like, what do you, like, you don't need to be Criswell to know what's gonna happen next.
Because that bear's a perv.
This is where, yeah, I was just going to say this is where we firmly establish what apervert the bear is.
Yeah.
Because it waits a long time to ride.
It's how she's walking under the water and all that.
He's watching her walk across.

(34:23):
He's waiting for his moment, but he seems with his heavy breathing to be really enjoyingit too.
Yes.
And the bear seems to get a little more excited as the scene goes on, like the huffing andpuffing starts to crescendo a little bit there.
And you're like, whoa.
and then before long what happens?
see the bear strikes, we just see the arm, like the arm comes off and the blood in therushing water of the waterfall.

(34:48):
we hear a chime, which is from those books we used to listen to the records with when wewere kids, it's like booloolooloo, like turn the page now, this murder is done.
And look, I didn't care, but this bear arm is probably, this attack was probably thefakest looking to me in the movie.
I think just cause it felt like an arm on a stick that they just.

(35:11):
wasn't talking about Rob, I was watching a
I know.
even hit it behind water, you could tell that they were trying to find a way.
uh
of their damn dust.
This is not our best bear arm we
It's like that mask with the yellow, with the blonde hair in Halloween four.
They're like after the, yeah, fuck.
Okay.
We got to use this anyway, guys.
I don't know what else to do here.

(35:32):
There's no way around this.
And I couldn't believe when I would eat commentary on that with director Dwight Little,we're watching the movie together and the mask comes up.
say, Dwight, the world needs to know how this mask ended up even on a truck in this, inrelation to this set.
And he goes, what?
Oh.
And I was like, wait a minute, Dwight, you didn't notice the blonde hair until like now,today?

(35:56):
And he's like, Justin, I hadn't ever noticed that.
So if you listen to your Halloween four commentary on Blu-ray or 4K or whatever, you willhear the moment where Dwight Little discovers the thing that fans have been talking about
since the day that movie came out and wondering how did this possibly happen?
And this bear arm is that equivalent.
Hey, like I remember when we went, they had a Halloween for maze and Halloween horrornights here in at Universal in Los Angeles.

(36:20):
And in the Halloween for maze, one of the Michael Myers, cause obviously there are manywas the blonde haired Michael Myers that.
Fantastic.
So, uh, we don't see the discovery of Gail's body.
We just, you know, we just cut to, uh, the, restaurant where, where, where Kelly is, he's,you know,

(36:41):
He's having a hard time with it.
He's upset about it.
talking to Alison.
You he knows that, that she was found.
Um, and you know,
He's smoking.
This is another scene where we run into him first smoking,
And he's telling, you know, he's talking to Alison about all this and, and he's getting,he's like, he's clearly upset about this.
And he says, you know, there's something I'm not doing.

(37:02):
Like he's, he's really searching and she just comes back with sure.
You're not killing the bear.
Wow.
Lady like, holy like this guy's clearly having a tough time.
He's, he's lost an employee, let alone two, you know, campers, you know, like, you don'thave to lay it.

(37:22):
that hard?
Like, come on.
The next day, Kelly goes up with Dawn in the helicopter to find the bear and they thinkthey've spotted it and they land.
Kelly pulls out the rifle and he nearly shoots Scott, who is wearing bears.
This is some bullshit.
It's the same hair cape that he had on earlier.

(37:43):
His, his, it's, it's a back merkin and he's, and these guys saw that from a helicopter,however many hundreds of feet up in the air, man in a back merkin.
it's a bear.
Let's land immediately, which they do very quickly and simply in a very clear opening, bythe way.
Yeah.
And then he's angry.
Scotty's angry once again.
always, always, because Scott is Hooper's meets Quint.

(38:08):
is Brody meets Quint.
And then Don is just the guy in denim who flies the helicopter and provides the weapons,as we'll see later.
He's the weapons guy.
I have questions about that.
But Scott tells him that the bear is not a brown bear, but a grizzly.
And Don says that grizzlies aren't supposed to be around there.

(38:31):
Honestly guys, I looked it up.
Brown bears aren't really found in that area either.
You know what is found in that area?
What?
Another sandwich in Scott's hand.
He's always eating.
It's like Brad Pitt in the Ocean's movies.
He's constantly eating, except it's always a sandwich.

(38:51):
And we learned that the grizzly is 15 feet tall and weighs over 2,000 pounds.
Like Scott can tell by the depth of the prints.
that he's some sort of prehistoric grizzly from the Pleistocene era a million years ago.
You

(39:11):
Basically, he's the Megalodon of bears.
bought it completely.
I'm in saying I'm in with me in Dominus Grizzly.
at some point something's something's head's gonna be knocked off.
I'm in.
uh This is I'm in.
That night, the super bear ventures down to the lower camp, which is just packed withpeople, including a horny couple, because we haven't had our chance to have a horny couple

(39:39):
get mauled.
Okay, okay.
Let's talk about this couple.
First of all, I want to talk about the dolly shot along through this campground.
I think it's magnificent.
yeah.
There's a long continuous dolly shot that establishes all these different little partiesof people.
There's some kids sitting around a campfire singing.
It's giving you the lay of the land in one continuous shot.

(40:02):
And I thought that that was really
It was.
Too many backpackers.
So many people here my god
But the best people are the and it's not even the horny couple It's the guy and there's amoment in this that is straight out of candid camera or something where he where she's
like I'm gonna go into the tent and burp there and then very The very yellow tent and thenhe looks down and has this look on his face like he just saw a Playboy for the first time

(40:33):
and he was 12 or something.
He is overjoyed
with this opportunity to spend time with his woman.
Presumably they just met.
I don't know because he's way too excited.
Yeah, the reaction shots here for both of them are fantastic.
Amazing.
He's drinking Schlitz.
So you know, he's ready to go.
As one does.
one does.

(40:55):
And then, but she goes into her very yellow tent and that claw comes straight through.
Like, we don't really see much of the bear, but he's swinging her around.
Like, this bear doesn't even want to eat her.
He just wants to kill her.
He does that a few times in the movie.
And this reminded me a little bit of Jason X.
Do you guys remember that scene to another Friday the 13th connection where there's the,those who might not have seen the movie in a while, there's this VR sequence in the phone

(41:23):
where the kid encounters two girls.
Hey, you want to have a promiscuous sex and do drugs?
And then all of a sudden Jason walks in, they get in there in their sleeping bag.
Jason walks in, grabs a sleeping bag and slams them up against a tree.
over and over again.
That's a classic.
It's truly an amazing sequence.
And if you would like to see a grizzly bear do the same thing, grizzly because yeah, Imean, he lifts her out of the tent.

(41:53):
At least it feels like he just like bear paw.
It's amazing.
And like afterwards, like this all happens and like the Rangers are sending people back totheir camps.
They're like, go back.
There's nothing to see here.
I'm like, go back to your campsite.
I'd be going home.
Like this is not the deep woods.
Like this was in a well populated area.
Like it looks like it's, you know, basically like the lawn behind the restaurant where youhave all these tents.

(42:19):
And I'm just like, I'm out.
like, as soon as I witness a bear serial kill a woman in a tent.
I'm out.
That's it.
Going home.
I don't know.
They already paid for the permits.
Yeah.
We don't oh

(42:44):
Yeah
This is a movie where again, everyone like no one has, no one really wants to close themountain.
No.
Like eventually that comes up, but not until way later
Like a murder would probably be enough to rope off an area.
Wait, Brody is making the signs to close the beach after the first girl is found.

(43:05):
Here, they're not even talking about it.
uh
No, because they're just gonna go out and kill it, because they're all Quint.
Get a bunch of amateur hunters going out after the grizzly, which again reminded me of thescene on Jaws where they're all going out on the water, except here they're not on boats.
uh
Yeah, well my notes say gunmen getting ready with guns gunmen in the woods gunmen by theroad It's like everywhere you look there's guys in camouflage with guns

(43:35):
Yeah, they're all in camera with guns.
One of the hunters is menaced by the bear and we almost get our first good look at it likethe camera pans up and then it stops right before the head.
It's kind of an odd cut and the hunter is chased but he falls into a river and escapes.
Odd, our grisly serial killer has only killed women up to this point.

(43:58):
That will change, but at least for the time being, he's only successfully killed women.
Don't forget though, this hunter guy pulled a sweet Batman move down that tree.
He jumped out and it was like the bat pole as he slid down and then he slipped a littlebit, fell in the water.
and the whole time, by the way, that he's running from the bear, there's this voiceoverand he's going, God, my God.

(44:35):
And then he jumps and slides down the tree, slips down an embankment, lands in the water.
And then you hear the bear and it's with as little energy as this bear could possibly notmuster in this film.
goes, huh?
Like it's just disappointed that the guy survived.
With that voice over his head, I'm like, I'm hearing Ryan O'Neill in Tough Guys Don'tDance.

(44:59):
God.
Oh man.
God.
It's like.
He is a survivor.
is a survivor.
Allison wants to go out looking for the bear, but Kelly tells her no.
And then she's gone from the movie.
Like, thought, she's going to sneak out there and Kelly has to rescue her, but nope.

(45:22):
Like she'll show up for one more scene later, but with no dialogue.
It's like we're about halfway through and she just kind of like, she's like Kaiser Soze.
Well, she got her 30 photos.
I guess so.
guess and she's she's fixed the the that her father's paying too much for the wine or notcharging enough for the wine.
Honestly, with that, in all seriousness, I actually stopped and thought this is a touristplace.

(45:47):
You should take these people.
This is not like a local restaurant where you're to get the same people coming back overand over again and you want a good wine at reasonable prices.
know, like honestly, this is where you should charge a little bit more, pal.
Well, and this guy clearly doesn't have it together, her dad.
Well, yeah, first of all, there's that.
So in second, when she's bringing up this wine situation with him, I think she's trying tobe helpful, but all he tells her to do is get back out there and take your photos, i.e.

(46:16):
go wander around in the woods by yourself with nothing on you but a camera.
Right, Well, presumably they haven't had this bear problem before.
I mean, this is a new thing here.
This is, think all part a little bit.
get the feeling that dad doesn't think she should be meddling in his business.
Both of the movies today have very odd versions of seventies feminism that clearly camefrom men.

(46:42):
Um, very much so.
And in this one, it's, you get a little bit of that, like, you know, some of the dialoguefeels like they're trying to do a seventies version of like his girl Friday or something
almost.
Um, but it is.
very odd and incomplete characterization for uh any of those things.

(47:05):
I don't know which stage feminism that is.
I believe it's 35 millimeter.
But we do see a bear approaching three hunters.
We see the face of the bear approach, yes, we see the face of the bear approaching thesethree hunters, but it's a red herring because it turns out to just be a cub.

(47:27):
And it's well done the way they do it because you get a close up on the bear's face andyou think this is the first time you're seeing the bear's face, but in actuality, it's a
cub.
And then the hunters, do the, unbelievable.
They think.
What any hunter would do with a bear cubs.
Anyone would do.

(47:47):
They think the cub belongs to the murderous Grizzly, so they decide to use it for bait.
Okay.
So here, this guy is Pat.
That's his name.
They identify it in the next scene.
His name is Pat, the guy who wakes up and you think it's a dream.
it a dream?
Is it whatever it is?
And Pat, by the way, is the same guy who plays like the deputy ranger or whatever in theother movie that we're going to watch.

(48:10):
And he wears a very ill fitting hat throughout that film, which is something that I foundvery alarming.
But in this one, Pat wakes up and he immediately starts cuddling with this bear.
It's like under his arm and he's petting it and his friends are like,
You might want to let that back in the forest, buddy.
Everyone just grab a bear and hold on to it like that.

(48:31):
I don't know.
Or maybe it's just Pat.
It's just like, and, of course, like they haven't, so they have this whole plan to usethis bear's bait and they don't even get that right because they're just kind of looking
in the other way when the grizzly comes here and eats the cub.
Like it's not like they just kind of, oh, well, oh shit, missed it.

(48:53):
there we go.
So first of all, it's a cannibal bear to boot.
So it's not just the Michael Myers or bear or the Jason Voorhees, it's the Hannibal Lecterof bears.
Yeah.
And it could be listening to them right now.
Someone at One-Eleven, I can't remember who it says.
They're like, I think it's, oh, it's Scott.

(49:14):
It's like, it could be listening to us right now.
It's got its tap.
The base, amazing.
I was disappointed.
It's too early, I think, in film history to hear anyone say, it's getting smarter, but itfeels like that's what this is.
It's learning.
um They eventually decide Young Ranger Tom, who we saw earlier, whose lady friend gotkilled, um they send him up to the fire watch tower to keep a lookout and hopefully keep

(49:49):
the Young Ranger safe.
But guys, it's not going to go well for Young Ranger Tom.
This is the centerpiece of the film.
sequence.
It's absolutely outstanding.
And by the way, Tom doesn't seem at all affected that this, that is paramour or whatevershe was, had her got attacked and murdered and all that.
He's all right.
I'll head up there.

(50:10):
Like there's no, there's nothing in him.
It's like, you know what?
I want to get vengeance for her.
That would, we'd commonly see in this kind of a character.
He's like, go up in that tower.
Okay.
Sure, I'll go.
But it's kind of like Brody trying to send his kid to the pond.
He's like, oh, we're going to send this guy to the place that you think is the most safe.
And that's where the creature attacks.

(50:31):
And the bear just takes apart this watchtower.
First of all, this is where we really get our first full look at the bear.
And it's amazing.
And it's just.
It is incredible.
As you say, I think it's the centerpiece of the movie is the bear just dismantling thiswatchtower.
It is incredible.

(50:52):
But it starts off with the bear just like running into it.
It's like when, uh, I don't know, like Andre the giant would fight guys who are smallerthan him and they would run into him and then get frustrated, run back to the ropes, run
back and try again.
The bears just bumping into this tower over and over.
And the guy up there is like, Whoa, oh Whoa, Whoa.

(51:13):
And then finally the bears like, all right, fuck it.
And again, this is where we start to get really great shots of the bear.
Now, the bear, Teddy, was the largest bear in captivity at the time, and it was from agame branch in Washington State, where it was kept behind an electric fence.
Now, on the set, the cast and crew were protected by a piece of green string and a tickingkitchen timer, which the bear...

(51:45):
interpreted as an electric fence.
So you can imagine making this movie.
Can you imagine making this movie and be like, you're fine.
The bear's not going to hurt you as long as you stay on this side of a piece of greenstring.
Like, no, no, no, don't worry.
We're tricking the bear.
You're like, oh, that's our protection.

(52:06):
Got a wily coyote this.
Yeah.
No.
it's.
Alright, so here's the bear didn't actually roar, but here's how they achieved thateffect.
They would feed the bear marshmallows and then they'd hold the final one back in front ofits face and it would make a motion like it was roaring, reaching for the marshmallow.

(52:30):
And then they would add the sound in, in post-production.
It's when you see Teddy roaring, it's really, the bear's really reaching for themarshmallow.
Yeah, but young Ranger Tom, he takes a couple shots at that bear, but to no avail, and hegoes down with the tower.

(52:52):
And as more and more attacks happen, reporters have now started to send on the park.
And Kelly...
Ugh, these nosy journalists.
Uh.
He's not happy about those reporters.
There's one reporter with this amazing mustache who gives off like a 70s Trent Krimm, theindependent, vibe.
Like it's just, it's amazing.

(53:14):
Yeah, the reporters are the problem, not the bad.
You're leading into that Reagan era of uh all the problem or the reporters trying toreport on things.
Thankfully we've moved past this in the country.
And also I think in the midst of here, didn't we have our Grizzlies great version of theUSS Indianapolis story?

(53:34):
Yes.
It's so weird.
Well, let me tell you a little story, boy.
A long time ago, there was tribal Indians up here in these woods.
They was all laying down with the pox.
Something I can't remember.
Anyway, this herd of grizzlies smelled them out.

(53:55):
They come in and they ate him.
They told them all, little children, sick ones, everybody.
There's a few braves that was healthy enough to go out on a hunt.
They came back, and the Christmas turned on them.

(54:17):
So there you had a little situation.
A whole herd of man-eating grizzlies.
You just ran around, tearing up Indians.
It's pretty hard to believe.
Unless you happen to be one of them Indians.
Yeah.

(54:38):
It's a weird story because he tells it like it's like, yeah, a number of years ago therewas a group of Indians and a group of of bears that the grizzly bears that came along and
ate them.
And that's like the whole story.
Like it wasn't that he was there.
No, it's not that he was there, but then it's just a very weird kind of, that's one whereyou feel like they're shoehorning in a jaws beat, which I honestly, for the rest of it, I

(55:04):
don't quite feel it the same way.
mean, you recognize stuff.
It's clear as day.
I mean, there's a, there's a, there's a beat at the end where you really get to it, butwe'll, we'll get there.
know, but, know, and that's, it's like, and, they argue some kinder edge and Kelly arguemore Kelly wants to close the park and kinder edge refuses.

(55:24):
But I mean, honestly, at this point, five people have been killed.
Who's staying in this park?
uh Well, yes.
and this is the moment and this is the moment where Scott gets gets in trouble for thesandwich.
Get out of my office with that sandwich.
I'm sorry.

(55:46):
It's just, this argument of should we close the park or not comes so late.
It feels like this should have been early on.
And Kelly goes on this whole harangue about how Kittredge just wants a job in Washington,D.C.
Which is never come up before that i remember it was.
But something's gonna happen to change Kittredge's mind.

(56:08):
Because not far away, our serial killer bear encounters a woman and her son in thebackyard of their home.
This sequence is another amazing one.
First of all, this kid is petting an enormous rabbit, by the way.
just, it is a gigantic, like, a gigantic rabbit.

(56:28):
And given the size of the grizzly, it makes me think that there's something about thisarea producing giant sized animals.
Oh, they did testing for the Manhattan Project here.
Like it's like what?
Like, but the bear is stalking the kid.
And I swear to God, this bear, this bear is a ninja on top of everything else because thekid literally doesn't notice the bear until he's right on top of him.

(56:54):
He's right there.
I'm of the belief that throughout this film, the bear is kind of like, it's like the movieMay, or it's like Dr.
Frankenstein, where the bear is just picking parts of people off of them, because itdoesn't eat her.
It didn't eat Tom after the tower, but it knocked a head off earlier.

(57:15):
We got an arm at one point.
And what happens to this poor child, is that its leg is punched off.
It's just a leg.
is punched off the chair.
The kid, kid, the leg comes off and then the bear, the mom rushes out and the bear dropsthe kid, sans leg and then goes for the mom and we zoom in on the bears.

(57:39):
Like we have this sort of, you know, camera goes into the bear's mouth kind of freezeframe or it's maybe reaching for a marshmallow, one, one or the other.
And then, the mom's dead.
The kid is, the kid is very badly injured.
and Kitteridge agrees to close the park.
But guys, here's the thing.
The mother and her kid were in the backyard of their house.

(58:02):
So presumably they would have still been there if they closed the park.
Like there's no like, like where's the guilt?
Like it's not like, if we had closed the park, we could have saved these people.
It's not like Jaws where it's like, if you closed the beaches after the first girl died,you could have saved lives.
These people presumably would have been menaced by the bear no matter what.

(58:24):
Like they're living in bear country apparently.
And we never have any real resolution to to peg leg kid or whatever.
Like how is he hobbling around now?
We don't even know how we, if he got saved and while it was being, while the kid was beingattacked, the mom just stood there and screamed.
Yeah, I mean save that the kid with one leg for the grizzly to the legacy seat

(58:47):
By the way, that exists.
Is this a good point to talk about this?
Let's talk about it.
Yes.
I didn't realize there was a guy, you know, I didn't look it up.
How could I?
What am I doing?
Oh my God, you guys.
Okay.
So here's the story.
Grizzly to the revenge.
my god, that's perfect!
This is a movie, the short synopsis is, all hell breaks loose when a giant grizzlyreacting to the slaughter of grizzlies by poachers attacks a massive big rock festival in

(59:18):
a national park.
Listen to this lineup of actors.
Brace yourselves, gentlemen.
George Clooney.
What?
Laura Dern.
What?
Charlie Sheen.
Oh.
Louise Fletcher.
And it goes on and on.
Deborah Foreman.
my god!
Right!
The sheriff!

(59:38):
No, he's the sheriff, yeah.
Yeah.
And Halloween and Grizzly too was started, but it was never finished.
Well, it wasn't finished.
They began filming it back, I think in like 1981 or something like that.
And it ran out of funding.
but they had shot enough with it.
It was being shot in Hungary, by the way.
And the whole concept of it was that this festival, wasn't like a rock and roll festival.

(01:00:04):
was a disco festival that they were, that this whole thing was taking place at.
So it was a bear.
attacking people at a disco festival.
So what happened was years later, and I have to confess, I don't remember the whole storyabout how this came to be.
Someone got their hands on this and finished the film.

(01:00:26):
And by finished the film, I mean like shot nature footage and inserted it throughout themovie.
Like the beginning of it is clearly a drone shot, a modern, it's like stock footage of abear and its cub, the bears climbing the tree.
And you see through binoculars like you do in movies and then you hear a gun go off andthat baby being killed is what triggers all the stuff in the rest of this movie.

(01:00:46):
But they had already shot some things with Clooney, Dern, Sheen, Fletcher on and on tohave this amazing cast.
And somebody got the rights, finished the movie and released it.
This is probably two or three years ago.
I have the disc and it is 1000 % incredible.

(01:01:06):
and you guys really need to track this thing down.
The bear in it is the worst.
We are, we are definitely doing a bonus episode at some point, get me another grizzlywhere we will talk about grizzly too.
we have to.
When they went back in to finish fleshing, pun intended, fleshing this thing out, theyended up bringing it to a whopping 74 minutes in length.

(01:01:32):
It's worth every minute though.
So Grizzly 2 does exist,
That is absolutely amazing.
Wow.
I, I, I'm, I gotta wrap my head around that.
Like, but we, we still have to get to the climax of grizzly one first before we can dothat.
And you kind of figure at this point, you know, the three guys are going to go after thebear, like in much as in Jaws, you have the three guys going after the shark.

(01:01:59):
That would make sense, but it's not what happens.
Don and Kelly go out on the.
Like in the helicopter, they go out after the grizzly and Scott goes out separately onhorseback.
And they're kind of communicating with radios, but they kind of are doing their own thing.
And Don provides a whole cache of weapons that he has left over from the Vietnam War,including a bazooka.

(01:02:28):
Guys, does the army just let you keep that stuff?
Like, like Rick Dalton's flamethrower?
it's like...
What about any of these characters makes you think that he had that or with permission?
He's a mad man.
One of the most interesting lines is actually said by Kelly when they're loading up thehelicopter and he's talking about like his time in Vietnam and Kelly says almost

(01:02:56):
offhandedly, we'll get them this time.
It's like, Ooh, that is, that is a thing.
That is a thing to say in a very offhanded manner going after the bear.
so they, they, they set up, they get a deer carcass.
set up a deer carcass hanging from a tree as bait for the bear.
But the grizzly, because this grizzly is a ninja, is able to get the deer without themcatching him.

(01:03:23):
On his own, Scott is sleeping out in the woods, which feels like a bad idea.
That's like if in Jaws they decided to take naps on an inflatable raft, just to be like,why not?
But apparently the night passes without incident.
And the next day, Scott comes across the remains of the deer that the other guys used.

(01:03:46):
And he starts dragging along behind his horse trying to attract the bear, which he does.
And, but of course he doesn't see that ninja bear until it's too late.
The bear slices off the horse's head, presumably to put in the bed of a movie producerlater.
It punches it

(01:04:07):
He it off, know, just like, And then he attacks Scott and bury, like he, he fucks up Scottand then he buries him to eat later.
So you have this sequence, like, like, like it's not long afterwards, Scott like kind ofwakes up half buried just in time for the bear to finish him off.

(01:04:28):
And it's just like, that is, that would be traumatic, I would think.
My goodness.
mean, this guy's been out looking for this bear the whole time.
Like he's...
You know what?
He's not fooling anybody dressed as a...
No, he certainly didn't fool the grizzly.
No, not one bit.
Don and Kelly find the body which still hasn't really been eaten and you know and Kelly atone point says to Don that you know you and Scott were a lot alike which isn't really true

(01:04:58):
at all.
And at last they so they go in the helicopter they they're they're looking for the bearthey find the bear who's headed back to the site of the first kill as serial killers often
do.
They land they they before they can get out even before they can get out there right
and Chris, that is the Chekov's circling back to play at the end.

(01:05:22):
And, but before they could even get out their rifles, the bear attacks the helicopter onthe ground.
Again, it's kind of like Jaws, but in Jaws, the boat's always on the water.
Whereas this helicopter is really only vulnerable to bear attack once it's landed.
But this sequence, again, is amazing.

(01:05:44):
like the bear spins the helicopter around, Don goes flying out of it.
He gets off a couple of shots before he runs out of ammo and he's just there holding thebutt of the gun like I'm gonna hit the bear.
I'm like that ain't gonna work man.
And the bear comes and he gives him a bear hug and the blood comes out of Don's mouth, youknow, very much like Quint and the bear drops dead.

(01:06:08):
And then, you know, that bear's coming for Kelly and he, that bear, you know, Kelly grabsthe bazooka and I mean, you guys know where this is going.
You know, the bear's coming, he's trying to load the bazooka and it's just, he fires thatand that bear blows to smithereens.
And honestly, Ranger Kelly's hair isn't even that messed up by the end.

(01:06:29):
Like he done it.
He killed the bear, blew that thing up and you know, and then we're at
So when did the bear swallow the oxygen tank or something?
What was inside that thing?
It was like a rocket launcher thing, a brazuca thing, guess that would be, it's supposedto blow up things, right?

(01:06:53):
I I've never used one, but you know, it is amazing.
It is amazing, both in its similarity to Jaws, but also in just, it is an incrediblyentertaining movie.
Like I really liked Grizzly.
For all of its B-movie, you know, B-moviness, I just really liked it.

(01:07:17):
It is so unhinged, but plays it straight.
Yeah.
And that's a combo that this guy likes.
It is.
And it was a successful combo because this was one of the first sort of Jaws-esque moviesto hit theaters.
It came out in May of 1976.
So less than a year after Jaws.

(01:07:37):
And producer Edward L.
Montoro, he took an 11-minute preview.
This was while they were shooting the picture.
They took some of the footage they had to Columbia Pictures, and they were able to sellthe global distribution rights for $1.5 million, which enabled
his company, Film Ventures International, to pay for a wide domestic release.

(01:08:00):
you know, this was a time, you have to remember Jaws was the first movie to come out in400 theaters only less than a year earlier for a movie of this budget, for essentially a B
movie to have a wide saturation release.
That was a big deal.
And ultimately this movie made around $39 million off a $750,000 budget.

(01:08:22):
And it's kind of amazing.
And very soon, the same team of William Gerdler, Edward Montoro, and much of the same castembarked on making another movie.
Not a sequel, but kind of a spiritual successor that poses the question, what if it justwasn't one bear out for blood, but every animal in the forest?

(01:08:48):
Come on.
uh
This is Day of the Animals.

(01:09:25):
The of Grizzly present the most startling motion...
Leslie Nielsen, Linda Day George, Richard Jekyll, Michael Ansara, and Ruth Roman.

(01:09:54):
is coming and there is no place to hide.
Day of the Animals was written by William and Eleanor Norton from a story by EdwardMontoro.
uh Returning from Grizzly are Christopher George and Richard Jekyll, this time joined byGeorge's wife Linda Day George, as well as Michael Ansara, Ruth Roman, and Leslie Nielsen.

(01:10:22):
Leslie Nielsen had starred in Girdler's earlier film, Project Kill, which I do want towatch.
I haven't had a
I did watch and you know, it is not as good as Day of the Animals, but I would say it hasits charms.
And like everything B movie, you can catch it on to be currently, at least if you'restateside.

(01:10:47):
I can't imagine this movie isn't streaming for free somewhere all over this this grandglobe of ours.
It's an amazing, it's amazing that these things are available now.
It's, fun because project kill, just to say one thing is Girdler utilizing Leslie Nielsenin, uh, one of his three modes, which is heroic noble guide, right?

(01:11:09):
The forbidden planet mode of Leslie Nielsen day, the animals utilizes more of the, canhold my breath a very long time.
Leslie Nielsen asshole.
It's so good.
So good.
And then what many people, you know, I grew up watching Leslie Nielsen in the eighties.

(01:11:29):
By that point, his career had turned to comedy in movies like Airplane and the Naked Gunmovies.
And he's brilliant there, too.
And but what people have to remember is that that was a late career turn towards comedyfor Leslie Nielsen.
He spent most of his career as a serious actor, whether whether the role was heroic orvillainous.

(01:11:51):
And that is why he was used to such great effect in the parody films of the 1980s.
It's why casting Liam Neeson as the new Frank Drebin actually makes perfect sense.
Because he's like that, you know, he's been doing the kind of heroic roles or villainousroles his whole career and doing the comedy at the end is a turn.

(01:12:15):
Day of the Animals starts with an opening crawl that tells us the following.
In June,
1974, Doctors F.
Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California startled the scientificworld with their finding that fluorocarbon gases used in aerosol spray cans are seriously

(01:12:39):
damaging the Earth's protective ozone layer.
Thus, dangerous amounts
of ultraviolet rays are reaching the surface of the planet, adversely affecting all livingthings.
This motion picture dramatizes what could happen in the near future if we continue to donothing to stop this damage to nature's protective shield for life on this planet.

(01:13:12):
So guys, the ozone layer is wearing out because we're putting on too much hairspray andmaking the animals and maybe the people at least above a certain elevation go nuts.
That is day of the.
And two things here.
Number one, the hairspray is being put to very good use in this film, but number two, isthat watching day of the animals now and look, we fixed the ozone problem for the most

(01:13:39):
part.
It was a great example.
a example of human action.
Yes.
But what I find funny is extrapolating the horrors of the time when they're telling youabout it and what's going to happen.
It does really feel like watching Hollywood movies now about runaway AI, where I just go,I don't know what the dangers are.

(01:14:02):
I don't know what may or may not happen in the future, but I'm almost positive it's notgoing to be what's in this movie.
And yes.
It won't be the entity from Mission Impossible.
uh Yeah, so it's so the potential for for the Oso layer thinning ultraviolet radiationcoming to Earth and making everybody go crazy.

(01:14:29):
That is the premise of Day of the Animals.
But when I say it that way, it does sound a little silly.
This movie is great.
Like I liked Grizzly.
I loved Day of the Animals.
And one of the things that struck me early on, you had mentioned that it's an incrediblescore for Grizzly and it does have a great score.

(01:14:49):
This movie has an even more incredible score from Lalo Schifrin.
It is so ominous and it's so, like it reminds me of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet ofthe Apes.
It carries a lot of the early parts of this movie, this incredible score.
So that's two, I should say that's two Mission Impossible connections for this movie,because Lalo Schifrin wrote the Mission Impossible theme and Linda Day George was a cast

(01:15:17):
member for the last two seasons of the series.
Folks, you may not remember this, but Mission Impossible was a TV series before it turnedinto a movie series featuring Tom Cruise risking his life for our entertainment.
And if Grizzly was structured like a slasher movie, Day of the Animals feels

(01:15:37):
like a disaster movie.
Like that to me is how this movie kind of functions.
You have a, you assemble a group of people, a mix of personalities, and then somethingoccurs that they have to survive.
Cause it is much more of a group hero and make no mistake, you know, Steve played byChristopher George is the hero.

(01:15:58):
He's number one on the call sheet, but you do, you get a lot more with the group like youwould in Poseidon adventure or something like that.
Powering Inferno.
Exactly.
So you have this group that are going on a long hike in the wilderness of NorthernCalifornia.
Steve, played by Christopher George, is the tour group leader.

(01:16:21):
You have Leslie Nielsen as Jensen, the advertising executive.
just, this guy is the biggest jerk around.
Right from the beginning, like things will escalate, but he starts out, he's just kind ofthe biggest jerk around.
You have a young couple there.
You have a slightly older couple whose marriage is kind of on the rocks.
You have a mother and her son.

(01:16:42):
You have a former football player, a female news reporter.
Richard Jekyll plays a professor and a Native American played by Michael and Sarah, who Iremember on both the original Star Trek and as well as on Buck Rogers in the 25th century,
as well as many, many other teeth.
This whole thing seems like a terrible idea
Yeah, what?

(01:17:03):
It's not a good group.
What an awful vacation idea.
And what is he even offering as their guide?
It's just taking a blob of people through the woods, through the mountains.
It's not like there's adventures to be had and whitewater rafting and we're gonna, at thispoint there's a beautiful bridge for us to go across or anything.
It's just, we're gonna walk through the woods together guys.

(01:17:24):
And by the way, make sure to wear lots of denim and layers, wear jackets, dress nicely,and don't bring any supplies.
The weird thing is you do to the, is he doing as a guide?
It is a little puzzling because he keeps talking about the, you know, the, the forest willgive us all the food that we need.
And I kept waiting for the moments where they were going to, and there is one fishingscene, but I kept seeing like, he's going to tell them to like, we're going to get the

(01:17:51):
berry picking scene and all this stuff.
But then it just turns out that there are going to be boxes of food delivered.
This is not what I thought at all.
Like the duration of the hike was a point of confusion for me because like it's clearly amulti-day hike because like it just takes them that long.
It's not like, this is an afternoon.

(01:18:12):
They get flown up the mountain on helicopters and Steve talks about like, there's a fooddrop if we need it, but he hopes they won't need it.
Well, that would indicate that it's not that long.
Like they're carrying food and that would be okay.
But then he's talking to Tucker, the forest ranger.
And he says, I'll see you in two weeks.

(01:18:32):
And I'm like, this does not feel like a camping trip for two weeks.
Like, I'd hope you have more plan for a two week trip.
Oh, like it's, but like that they, we hope we won't need the food.
Like if it's two weeks, you're not carrying two weeks of provisions.
Like they did, they have like one backpack apiece.
This movie does not take two weeks long.

(01:18:54):
when I feel like when people start freaking out and they're like, we haven't had food insix hours.
Just like, like, you know, like two days more hike.
What are you talking about?
Hot shot.
We need food.
And I'm, just going to my mind.
I'm like, it would take so many days to starve.
Like, would not, I wouldn't be happy, but I'd be more concerned about the water.

(01:19:17):
Maybe I know you can dehydrate faster.
sure
There's plenty of water in on the mountain.
uh The timing is very inconclusive and yeah, I had no clue.
And you get like little snippets of interaction between the characters just to kind ofgive you like a thumbnail of who like the you get the wife and the husband like saying and

(01:19:40):
the wife tells the husband they wouldn't need this trip if he didn't work so much.
And the professor says, oh, I'm a I like taking pictures of birds, you know, and, youknow, so you get little things telling you kind of who these people are.
And then a lot of of Jensen, the ad exec making racist comments to Santy, the NativeAmerican.

(01:20:01):
Oh my god.
So much.
oh
Like he's just, this dude from the start is just the biggest a-hole around.
And we haven't talked much about the animals yet here, fellas, but throughout they willcut once in a while to just a nice little shot of a bird chirping or a hawk landing on

(01:20:22):
something vultures just looking around.
It's like these, these nothing menacing is happening yet, but they're keeping us remindedthat this is a movie about animals.
Ultimately.
Right.
There's a lot of shots of animals just kind of there.
And you know, like there were a couple of times they did closeups of spiders, which I didnot enjoy, especially because there was no spider attack.

(01:20:44):
I mean, not that I want one, like, well, then why do we need that?
Cause it's like, don't like it.
ah They fly up to the mat.
get again, some spectacular wilderness scenes as they fly up and then they are hiking downand,
And Santi starts to get a bad feeling.
At one point he observes, you can't hear any animals, like no birds or anything.

(01:21:08):
And there's a moment where they're all kind of standing around, like listening to nothing.
And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, all the birds start screeching.
It's very like, oh, they knew they were being listened to or their absence was beinglistened to.
And they do a good job of sort of, especially in this early part of the film, because thismovie is a little slow out of the gate, but

(01:21:30):
those shots of the animals watching, there's a menace to it.
again, it carried me through the early part.
And there's one shot where you see a vulture kind of fly toward them, fly at them a littlebit, and you can clearly see the leash on its leg, like the little string that a hater
would hold onto.

(01:21:50):
Yeah, maybe my...
wow!
Maybe I had like my Blu-ray look better than whatever you saw on streaming or something,but...
Yeah, you can- from Severin too!
You can clearly see it.
It's like when you watch Uncle Sam and you see the zip line when the explosion happens atthe end for anyone who's seen Uncle Sam.
That's another one where they didn't even bother to cut the damn thing out.
They just figured, it's a video, who cares?
But now we're watching it in like 1080 and there it is clear as day.

(01:22:15):
man, the 4k will be, will be insane when, cause everything goes to 4k.
It's amazing to me, the things they put out on 4k now.
back in town, Tucker, the Ranger, he goes to the local watering hole where the news istalking about findings about dangerous UV radiation at high altitudes.
And of course the townsfolk don't believe this ozone layer crap.

(01:22:41):
Nah, what's all this going on?
If they compare it to Orson Well's War of the Worlds panic from 1938.
And this old guy, there's these old fellas at the country store or whatever playing cardsand one of them says, Oh, God sent the plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no
good fellers.
And they're all like, yeah, we really are.

(01:23:04):
But none of them notice the dog outside the window just sitting there watching.
It reminded me of Night of the Living Dead, scene, because you have the radio, the TVreport, the audio sounds very much like the broadcast throughout that film.
And everyone, it's like some are paying attention.
Most of them are like acting a little bit concerned.

(01:23:25):
They don't know, they don't really know what to make out of it.
And, but that drone in the background, there's something really unsettling about hearingalmost like an AM audio sound for radio broadcasts about bad news.
And they use that.
very well here before the sheriff in his extreme concern about everything says he needssome pie.

(01:23:48):
Yeah, he does.
But it's interesting you bring up Night of the Living Dead because I think this film, youdo feel the 70s-ness more on the social side in this one.
And you you get a different version of the feminism, uh you know, with like uh when whatuh Terry Marsh uh corrects anchor woman of the news, you obviously get a lot of uh the 70s

(01:24:13):
American, you know, re-examining the Western myths and what happened.
with American Westward expansion and the genocide of.
the indigenous population.
Yeah.
And then this connects with the, the slower start where you're getting all of thecharacters, because all of these characters, much like in night of the living dead, they
will not be able to combat what the troubles are going to be because of all of theinfighting.

(01:24:40):
And I find that this one's a little more interesting in that way than grizzly because, youknow, there are characters that you might think of as better people than others, but this
is a movie where.
for the most part, everyone is responding incorrectly.
Even our quote unquote good guys don't really actually have the answer because no one isjumping to the conclusion that the UV rays are making every animal attack us.

(01:25:09):
so along with the infighting is everyone's kind of wrong and you're pulling thesedifferent directions and neither direction would actually be correct.
But the fact that they're fighting makes it
infinitely worse than if they just picked one of the bad responses.
Right, right.
It does get to the point where it reminds me of the Babadook, which is an almostunbearable film for me because the kid is just constantly screaming throughout the runtime

(01:25:35):
of that movie.
And it's so stressful to be in that kind of environment for that extended amount of time.
And this film does creep into that territory a few times where there's just so much chaosand arguing and fighting and eventually violence among the people.
Man is the ultimate.
monster kind of a thing.
I mean it does get a little bit heavy.

(01:25:58):
Clearly the people are being affected by the UV radiation as well.
Like that's the implication is that it's, you're, and, know, I mean, it's, it's not goingto take a normal guy and make him a murderer.
It's going to take a normal guy and make him irritable, but it's going to take someone whois a big jerk and make him into a, you know, the worst.

(01:26:20):
Super jerk.
Super jerk.
my God.
You know, they, they camp for the night.
They, there's some.
They sing some campfire song, Santi tells Steve that he's concerned that something feelswrong.
It's funny, this is a movie that it is, the guy making native comments that are likemocking Native Americans and in Native American stereotypes is clearly a jerk.

(01:26:50):
Like he is clearly, you know.
a bad dude, but at the same time, they're also leaning into, you know, that he's moreconnected to the land and is more aware of nature and that kind of thing.
And I'm like, well, you know, I mean, that can be true, but it's not necessarily, youknow, it's.
greater concern though, guys, is that when they happen upon this, okay.

(01:27:10):
So they get to this point where they encounter a tent and it's clear that someone has beenthere because much like in grizzly, there's a campfire burning and they're thinking, my,
why would someone just leave this here?
And while this is happening, birds continue to land on things.
And there's this lady saying how crazy it is to walk around the mountain and just leave acampfire like that.

(01:27:32):
I'm like, you are.
walking around a mountain for presumably weeks here with no supplies.
Who are you to say it's crazy?
But the most egregious crime committed here is when we see them after they encounter thistent, we're now at this campfire where they're singing, someone's playing a harmonica,
which no thanks.
And they just assume that this tent was theirs to enjoy.

(01:27:54):
Because that tent, that is now rolled into their encampment and getting in that tent thathas
very clearly recently been used.
You don't know what has happened in there.
You don't.
It's like getting into a hotel room that hasn't been cleaned and climbing right into bedafter you use the wet towel in the bathroom to wipe your hands.
Yes.

(01:28:14):
Someone left a towel on the floor for housekeeping and you've just used it to wipe yourface.
And someone in this group is just going to move in into that, you know, assume it like ahermit crab or spirit Halloween and just move right into that tent as though they have
rights to it.
And then that's being uh underscored by all this racist talk about Santi as it's happeninguntil McGregor steps up as the adult and says, well, everyone it's bedtime.

(01:28:42):
Yeah.
We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.
And then Paul Jansen, uh Jansen, Leslie Nielsen's character.
He just puts his sleeping bag on the dirt and decides he's gonna sleep out there.
And behind him is some other lady who's sleeping in the dirt.
And I wonder which one is gonna get attacked.
Yes.
Yes, the other lady, she is part of the bickering couple of Mandy and Frank.

(01:29:07):
Mandy is very angry about how much time Frank spends with his law books, which, you know,presumably he does need, you know, if he's attempting a career as a lawyer, studying is
going to be part of it, maybe cut him a little slack.
uh And that night a wolf attacks Mandy as they are sleeping.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, now again, you're, leaping over things here.

(01:29:31):
And I, and I want to note that night, once everyone sort of settled down, I had thesubtitles on as I was watching it just to make sure to catch things for my notes.
And as you're seeing the people there resting on that, bottom, just said dreadful music,which I thought did the person doing the subs hate this score that much?

(01:29:51):
Man, if I was Lalo Schiffer and I would have said something, my Yeah, right?
I love this score.
And you missed the conversation where Steve goes hot and heavy trying to pitch his quote,advanced woodlore course.
did, I did, I did leave out the advanced wood lore.
He's trying to, the lady news reporter, he he's into her.

(01:30:13):
I mean, you know, they were obviously husband and wife in real life, but he is trying toget her to take his advanced wood lore.
I'll take that course.
don't know what that would entail.
oh
what it would entail.
I have an idea.
And then we, there's an owl that we keep cutting to and no, no, play central to somethinghere.

(01:30:38):
They're watching and one of them has a bell because there's a point where they should justshow the owl and we hear a bell toll like in the distance.
Where is there a bell in the fort?
It sounds like a church bell or something that goes off to help transition that scene.
And then we see the wolf approaching and then.
It's like the film strip ding in the, Grizzly.

(01:31:01):
Yeah, yeah.
Then the wolf leaps on sleeping bag on the dirt lady and all heck breaks loose.
And Mandy is played by Susan Backline, who also played Chrissy, the girl killed in theopening of Jaws.
So in both of those movies, she is the first one attacked.
the next day, so Mandy and Frank, they decide they're going to head back to the rangerstation.

(01:31:24):
They're going to take the most direct route to get to the ranger station.
It still sounds like it's going to take them more than a day to get there because they'readvised that they should sleep in caves.
I'm not sure that's a great idea, cause you know, sometimes shit lives in caves.
and sleep sitting up, which they don't do.
As he, you know, spoiler alert, he may live a little longer than her, but when he istracking down the whole time, he'd never sleeps sitting up.

(01:31:51):
That's true.
And it's as though these people signed up for this thing.
Like it was an improv, an improv moment of, guys, we should all just go to the mountainsand wander around.
There's, there's no like guides in their hands about safety or what to do if you strayfrom the pack.
Like everyone seems clueless about what to do when they're among trees.
It sense if it were like an afternoon.

(01:32:13):
Oh, like they're at a thing and they go, it's an afternoon nature walk.
Okay, sure.
You're not necessarily for something, this is planned to be two, three hours.
It's not, you're not gonna necessarily like, but if it is two weeks, like he says, I'll beback in two weeks, have a beer ready for, I'm like, what?
Like this is not, does not feel like they are ready for two weeks.

(01:32:36):
And after two weeks, you're gonna want more than one beer.
I honestly, I'd want to, I'd be like the animals.
I'd want to kill all these people.
oh
There is a lot of really hot footage of hawks shaking their tail feathers throughout this.
It keeps cutting to that.
And I kept thinking that was going to be something like in Birdemic where they like poopacid on people or whatever, but no, it never happened.

(01:33:03):
The shaking of the tail.
Oh my God.
So the main group continues onward and Jensen, I mean, he is just, he is the absoluteworst.
He says some really offensive stuff and he does that thing that, that real jerks do wherethe, know, when someone starts to be like, Hey, that's not, you can't say that.

(01:33:24):
And he's like, I'm only kidding.
Can't you take a joke?
And it's just like, it's something, it's obviously not a new thing, but it's something yousee a lot.
in particular in certain political spheres today and social media where people want to beoffensive and then it's just retreat behind the veil of, can't you take a joke?

(01:33:45):
this guy, like Jensen would fit right in with the discourse today.
yeah.
And just to touch on the uh male written feminism in the movie that we've had uh up tothis point, which feels very much for show, but in this post wolf attack area of the
movie, in the main group, you also get two of the women uh talking and they were mostconcerned they were that Mandy's pretty face wasn't scarred.

(01:34:12):
Do you think that Mandy will be all right?
Oh yeah.
I think she was more frightened than anything else.
She's so pretty.
I hope she won't be scarred for life.
No, I think that's part of the reason that Steve let them go back down so that she couldget proper medical attention and there wouldn't be any scar.
So don't worry.

(01:34:32):
know, because literally if she had a scarred face, then she, she wouldn't, she would beless pretty.
It feels like a movie POV rather than differentiating characters.
ah Like Jensen's stuff that he says is clearly that character, not the film.
This just feels like stuff that they were saying stuff that they didn't think that theywere aware of that they were saying.

(01:34:57):
So it's, you know, it's a it's it's not always laser focused on things.
But, uh you know, it's it's interesting to see all of this stuff in the mix, though,because this one, I think, you know, if you touched on it, it feels more like a social 70s
movie in that way, whereas Grizzly doesn't touch on really any of anything.

(01:35:20):
It's just how many tourists should be up in the park.
That's really it.
Like uh here, there's dynamics at play.
And meanwhile, you have Mandy and Frank.
They've split off from the main group trying to take a more direct room there.
They're menaced by hawks who surround them in a very disconcerting way.

(01:35:41):
And the two of them, who are at the beginning, they're in a difficult relationship, startto grow more and more aggressive.
with each other, like they're arguing and it's, you know, clearly this ultraviolet, likethis radiation is affecting people as well.
And soon the birds attack Mandy.

(01:36:02):
And this is just, this was an amazing scene as these birds just fly right in her head.
Like, wow.
What's amazing is after.
oh
The optical shot of her death is worth.
It's my favorite.
I think it's my favorite death in the movie.
It's amazing.

(01:36:22):
So like the birds mess her up and she's uh pecking at her and clawing at her and theycause her to fall to her death into a ravine.
And as she's going down, you have that like obvious kind of blue screen drop.
it's like, as she and the birds are plummeting into this ravine.
it's amazing.

(01:36:44):
It is just amazing.
In the main group, Mrs.
Goodwin gets pushy with her son.
gets a little handsy like she's there because he's the only one who has a radio and ofcourse she's kind of grabbing at it and it sends the radio going into the water so that
the radio is done and but before that they hear a little bit about the ozone layer andradiation so they're establishing that the group kind of but like not enough information

(01:37:10):
to make any kind of informed choices we not really
This is where I think to the being the day of the animals, he'd said it's not just a bearthis time.
It make it does make it harder for the characters to figure out what's going on in a waythat's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause if it was a single animal doing it, you would know.
Realistically, if you were out there and animals start to freak out, you wouldn't thinkultraviolet radiation

(01:37:34):
Or you wouldn't think that all the animals are in concert with each other.
that everywhere you went was going to be a danger.
It's like, there's a bear.
Let's go left instead of right.
No, anywhere you go, there's going to be a problem here.
I wanna talk
little bit about Frank because Frank is a character that has not been, he just lost hiswife Mandy.
And in the early parts of the movie, Frank is not the most sort of central character.

(01:37:59):
You spend a lot more time with Christopher George and Leslie Nielsen and Michael Ansaraand even the mother and the kid.
uh Frank is kind of in the background, but once Mandy is killed, Frank...
goes on an odyssey that honestly might be the most compelling story thread in the film.

(01:38:22):
Like it is fascinating and I was absolutely kind of like taken by that.
This character who's kind of more background early on becomes very central because shortlyafter Mandy dies, Frank, he goes down to the stream and he encounters a little girl.
and the girl is alone and there's no sign of parents or family or anything.

(01:38:45):
And she's just standing there and she doesn't say anything.
He tries giving her some food, but a bird swoops in and takes it.
And ultimately, rather than leaving this girl alone, Frank takes the girl with him on hisjourney.

(01:39:08):
And we will continually kind of cut.
back to them and they have like they become kind of one of the key story threads and Ijust thought like the relationship with Frank and the girl is fascinating.
Yeah, and I noted maybe cynically so.
I don't know who's doing this, but it's Frank who was all over Mandy who kept talking backto him.

(01:39:32):
So she got increasingly more belligerent, deserved to be flown off of a cliff by birds todie her death.
So Frank finally gets.
Pan-yidu doesn't say anything?
Correct.
And she is totally worth saving.
That's great.
Goodness.
uh Yeah, I didn't think of it that way.
My goodness.

(01:39:53):
Wow.
The main group, they finally reached the food drop that has been talked about only to findthat it's been ripped apart by animals or presumably by animals.
I don't see it happen, but I mean, it was animals.
uh And there's disagreement in the group about what to do.
Steve wants to go on and continue forward and head

(01:40:16):
basically head down the mountain to civilization.
Jensen suggests they wait there for the helicopter to return, and ultimately they decideto camp there for the night before continuing on.
And meanwhile, we have this small cutaway scene where Tucker the Ranger gets a call in thenight saying he's needed to assist with the evacuation, because everybody above the

(01:40:41):
elevation of 5,000 feet is being evacuated.
So Ranger Tucker, he gets this phone call.
Yeah.
He's roused from his sleep in the middle of the night.
deputies is on the other end.
And by this is the guy who played Pat, who had the bear, the baby bear in grizzly that wasgoing to use it as bait.

(01:41:02):
but here that act, I can't remember the character's name, but like I'll just the deputyguy, his cowboy hat is so small compared to his head.
And I don't understand.
why Ranger Tucker is sleeping and gets angry for being stirred.
Because if you're in charge of security in this mountain or whatever, he's like, don'tcall me after midnight.

(01:41:26):
And I'm thinking, does wilderness crime have a nine to five kind of normal schedule thatit's on?
Why would he think that it was not a problem if he got a call in the middle of the night?
You'd be like, man, this must mean something.
What's going on?
But he's like, rah rah.
He's just really upset.
there's, that.
Howell is outside of his window, Michael Meierzing as well.

(01:41:47):
He makes this comment, he goes, that moon is damn peculiar.
And he's taking his time with everything he's doing throughout this whole sequence.
I was gonna say, because he gets up, he does ultimately get out of bed and he hears anoise in his kitchen and he goes to check it out and he owes in the kitchen, the noise

(01:42:11):
stops.
So rather than looking around further for what, like I have a noise in the house, I willfigure out, I will find what it is before I just say, well, you know, was something
outside.
No, he just, he decides to get some food out of the refrigerator.
Like this giant plate of food.
And he goes to make a sandwich.

(01:42:32):
This is, this is Girdler's sandwich is what this is.
Same as in Grizzly.
my God.
So, but then he turns back around, he's going to get like the sandwich stuff.
He turns back around and the food that he's left on the counter, like literally for likefive seconds, is covered in a pile of rats.

(01:42:53):
Not just rats, but squealing rats.
Yeah.
And then he throws his bread at them.
Well, yeah, he does.
I I don't know.
I thank God I never had that happen.
would honestly, I'd leave my house and I'd nuke it from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
Ha
Little did he know that these ninjas are very special rats.

(01:43:19):
They're flying rats.
Yeah, because they attack him and and lunge across the kitchen.
And he hits.
One with something and it sounds like a cartoon punch when he hits this tiny little ratwith something like a stick or something like that.
And then the thing goes flying, but they are the loudest rats in the world.

(01:43:40):
my God.
Didn't hear them until he saw them.
So he must have some kind of visual auto.
them.
Then they vanished.
They knew he was coming in.
God, it's terrifying.
Like, it's and then he has an encounter with an angry dog and flees the house with hiswife.

(01:44:00):
We have some images of the town being evacuated.
It reminded me a little bit of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which came out the sameyear.
ah And so we know that like the government is doing something and we'll come back to thatlater.
That night at the campsite Jensen, our big jerk, nods off while he's on watch and thegroup is attacked by mountain lions.

(01:44:22):
uh It honestly is amazing how close these actors seem to be to these animals.
Like it is, like there's him in the mountain lion.
It's like, holy shit, that's terrible.
Before we get to that though, when after we move away from the scene in the house withRanger Tucker and his sandwich, he you get a POV of him going up the stairs.

(01:44:43):
So now he's grizzly.
Now he's the Baron Grizzly running up the stairs.
There's not POV for everybody, but you get it for him.
And I get it because it was a very exciting scene of him going to his bedroom to talk tohis sleeping wife and he yells at her.
The rats have gone crazy and she gets right up and ready to get out of there.
Like, okay.
We've been waiting for this day.
And then they cut to this post-apocalyptic scene of this hectic, very wet street ofcampers leaving.

(01:45:10):
When did it rain?
We don't know.
We didn't see rain.
And everyone is sort of just ambling along the street.
Like they're the undead in Zombie 2, Fulci's Zombie.
And there's no rush.
At the bottom of my screen with the subtitles, it said, car honking intensifies.
Well, I've done

(01:45:31):
As these cars slowly moving out and then we see that the Rangers in the car with his wife,he has to go do his duty and he has this like Maxi pad taped to his face and he hops out
of the car and goes about his business.
And he says, I always thought something bad would happen.
Well, is that why you went to bed and then got angry at deputy small hat when he calledyou when something bad happened?

(01:45:53):
I don't understand this Ranger guy at all.
And then the lions attack.
The Rage Guy is, it's a strange interlude in, and we don't see much of it.
It's not like, we're going to come back.
Like, I think this is the end of his part of the movie.
It is.
Like it's just to establish the government is doing something which will have importancelater.
And then.
The attack is great.

(01:46:16):
And for some reason in the midst of it, as all hell is breaking loose, the kid runs out ofthe tent toward the attacks.
Like what is the child going to do as these people are being mauled?
Yeah, no, it's, it's, it is something and, they're able to drive the, have fire, they'reable to drive the mountain lines off, but people are hurt and, stead.

(01:46:39):
And it feels like things are coming apart, like, you know, at the, at the seams, althoughit's interesting because the next scene is the next day it's daylight and they're in like,
they're in a stream or a small river and they're fishing and everybody kind of seems tohave.
of gotten back together.
It's like everything seems like, oh, we're kind of repairing this, you know, and of courseJensen is not around, but it struck me.

(01:47:07):
It's an interesting thing because one of the things about this movie that rings true isthat kind of most people in this group, and I think most people in general, are pretty
okay.
They're not necessarily bright, but they're pretty okay.
But what happens is you have this asshole
who comes in, and sometimes it can be more than one, and they sort of take advantage ofdoubts and fears and they fuck everything up.

(01:47:35):
If Jensen hadn't been there, things would not have gone as badly for this group.
Absolutely.
And this, this scene that you're talking about here, this is more of what you would haveexpected if you were booking the tour up the mountain and down.
We're gonna go push in and do it.
We're gonna do a thing, you know.

(01:47:55):
Yeah, we're gonna cook them or something.
But that's not gonna last because they are soon back at each other.
And Jensen decides he's had enough of Steve, of hot shot Steve.
He keeps calling him hot shot and he calls him hot shot enough.
It's interesting.
Like Jensen is the asshole here, but Steve's the one to throw the first punch.

(01:48:17):
Like he's had enough and he hits him.
And he's the one to actually have the first sort of physical thing.
This is where he says, where Paul Jensen says, you're not the big mocker anymore.
And then he says, I use my head all the time.
A lot of people use their butts.

(01:48:37):
That should have been on the poster.
What does he use his butt for then?
I don't know, he's advertising.
Is he insinuating he doesn't use his butt for anything?
It's like, it was the 70s, so somehow that's the worst thing you could be was inadvertising.
Like there's a reason why he's, you know, it's like, oh, you know, advertising.

(01:48:59):
There is this part of me that feels that this is alternate timeline Don Draper, but we'lljust stay.
Don Draper was never that much of a jerk.
He was never that much of a jerk
Give him five more years of alcoholism and we'll see what happens.
You know, he'd like to buy the

(01:49:19):
Honestly, no, it's, what's the character, the other character, the other, the gray hair.
Oh, sugar.
can't write.
What?
You're sterling.
Oh yeah.
Maybe it is Roger.
Yeah.
Maybe that is, it's an angry Roger Sterling.

(01:49:39):
And Jensen decides he's going to head for the ranger station.
The young couple, Bob and Beth, as well as Mrs.
Goodwin and her son decide to go with him.
And that leaves Steve Santy, the professor and Mary Ann and the football, sorry, Terry,the professor and Terry and the football player in the main group.

(01:50:00):
And there's a line and I love this line.
You can't save fools from themselves.
And I'm like, that's another one that hits home today.
Looking at the state of America, I'm like, wow, you can't save fools from themselves.
And as we're getting in the home stretch here, it, what I find most interesting of thedifferent pieces of other things that kind of find their way into day of the animals is

(01:50:25):
that somehow they, go Brian's song with their football player, um, which was the TV movie,you know, real life of, of Brian Piccolo, uh, who was a bears football player who got
stricken with terminal cancer.
And I can only imagine that that is at least
partly why they had a football player with cancer in this thing.

(01:50:47):
would have, it was like five, six years earlier, but it doesn't necessarily fit with theday of the animals stuff, but it's, it's there.
It is, it is.
And now, so they've split up.
So now we have, we have one group, is Frank continuing his journey with a little girl.
come across an abandoned campsite with no signs of people.

(01:51:09):
uh Jensen at this point, or Jensen has gone full crazy.
my God, Leslie Nielsen is amazing.
Cause you see him, cut back, you see him leading his little group.
He's walking around without a shirt on.
He's literally manhandling Mrs.
Goodwin and her son, and he is really terrified.

(01:51:32):
And he's saying horrible things.
Horrible things.
He's like Miss Beverly Hills, bitch.
And then he starts hitting on her.
And I mean hitting her, not hitting on her.
hitting Mrs.
Goodwin and the kid.
Yeah, and there's a storm brewing, but you only hear it, you don't see it.
just this moment of intensity that is only going to continue to escalate with him and hisviolence toward other people.

(01:51:59):
He was scary before now, but it was mostly, it was all verbal.
Just a jerk, you know?
And here, now he's talking about openly, he's openly talking about wanting to rape back.
And then he eh in the mud, he pushes her down in this attack.
It's just awful.
then her husband, Bob, tries to step in and he stabs Bob through the gut with a sharpenedstick.

(01:52:23):
And it's just like, what?
he is absolutely, and Leslie Nielsen, absolutely terrifying in this part.
Like the other group, Steve and his group take shelter in a cave, you know, during thisrainstorm.
There's, you know, there's a little bit of character stuff here.
Steve is still trying to get with Terry, the news reporter.

(01:52:46):
You know, get here to take his woodworking class, whatever.
wood lore core.
And Professor McGregor delights the fans with explaining that, well, 155,000 years ago,there were no animals.
Everyone's like,
Is that true?
It feels like it's not true.

(01:53:07):
they all pressure Roy on his cancer in a very strange moment where they're just like, youjust got to accept it.
then they cut to uh McGregor and he's like, accept it.
And then Roy, they cut to Roy and he's like, what is happening?
What are you people are monsters.
What are you talking about?
It's such a weird thing.

(01:53:29):
It is so weird, but they're not as big of a monster as Jensen who now he is out there inthe in the rain Like it's and and he has this whole rant Pray If there's a god left up
there to believe in

(01:53:50):
My father who art in heaven, you made a jackass out of me for years.
It's never been you for me.
Millville's God, that's a God I believe in.
You see what you want?
You take it!
You take it!
And I'm gonna do it.

(01:54:13):
Honestly, might be Leslie Nielsen's, like, one of his most compelling moments as an actor.
My God.
Like, he is really good in this movie.
Yeah.
And it's, um, you know, it really does give the second half of this movie a differentstage in of the rocket to hit where, you know, if it had just been, um, you know,

(01:54:37):
differing animal attacks only, cause grizzly, it's weird.
It had almost like some investigative elements cause they're out trying to track it down.
here you're just stuck in the woods, right.
And being attacked.
So,
This does kind of give it its own little second insanity to go with it as they fall apartthemselves.

(01:54:58):
But you kind of forget about the animals at this point because of the intensity ofNielsen's character Jensen.
It's so centered around his violence and his horror at this point.
This is the point where he actually does attempt to rape her, pushes her down in the mud.
And this is also finally where our hero shows up in the bears.

(01:55:22):
Yes, well, Mrs.
Goodwin, she's for a moment, she's picked up a rock and looks like she's gonna hit him inhead with it, but she can't do it.
And she and her son flee and the bear shows up.
Guys, this is a movie with Leslie Nielsen wrestling a bear to death.
It's like old time carnival wrestling of a bear and it looks like it like they're justcuddling.

(01:55:47):
There's nothing terrifying at all about what the bears are doing with him.
It's like kind of just hugging at the time.
And there's this wide shot where the bear just absolutely looks playful with him and it'sgreat.
then you.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
It's just, it's cinema right there.
Like it's just, uh, yeah, it, it, it, Rob, you, you're right.

(01:56:09):
Like this movie does kind of function like a two stage rocket because early on I wasfounding it a little bit.
It's like, it's a little slow out of the gate, but then as it just goes on and on and onand at second stage ignites, like it starts to get really tense and really compelling.

(01:56:29):
Yeah, Frank and the little girl, they make it back to town, but everywhere they go isabandoned and they are menaced by animals, snakes, dogs, everything.
And you could see that Frank is breaking down, but he's also trying to hold it togetherfor this little girl that he does not know.
And again, I found this super compelling, this whole story.

(01:56:51):
Frank is played by John Cedar, who was also in Foxy Brown.
He was in the Manitou.
And he is absolutely great here.
They finally take refuge in a truck and the truck won't start.
And Frank sees his own car parked down the street.
So they've come back full circle to the town.
And he's like, I said I wouldn't leave you, but I'm going to try and I got to get to mycar and try and I can get it started.

(01:57:18):
And he's like, you stay here no matter what.
And
He gets to the car, but then he's attacked by a dog and then he opens the door and likethe car is just filled with snakes.
uh And you watch him die.
Like the little girl is watching from the window of the truck and it is absolutely heartwrenching.

(01:57:40):
It really is.
This movie is gets to a much darker and bleaker place than Grizzly does.
Yes, Grizzly.
It kind of all stays somehow in that adventure tone.
I wouldn't even be shocked if a similar number of people didn't die.
They're obviously horribly mauled and, know, you even have children threatened in both.

(01:58:02):
ah So it's it's not anything that you can point to like that.
And look, again, as we said, it's not like this has the deepest characterization you'reever going to see in a movie, but somehow the elements here do combine to make it, um you
know, more, I hesitate to say weighty, but more impactful.

(01:58:23):
I'll just put it that way.
It absolutely is.
And when I was watching it through, was making notes, was watching some scenes for asecond, and I found the same thing in the second time as I was watching through.
And again, to me, it's structured like a disaster movie where, your characters are all,because you have so many characters, they are all kind of sort of thumbnail sketches, but

(01:58:45):
the further you go, the deeper you get, the more you just become involved, become investedin the
fight for survival.
And that's what it is.
again, this movie kind of snuck up on me in a way that Grizzly I liked, but Grizzly kindof stays on a certain tone through the whole thing.

(01:59:09):
This movie escalates in a way that I didn't see coming.
We'll take a stab.
Mrs.
Goodwin and her son and Beth, they're able to take shelter in a downed helicopter, barelyescaping from wild dogs.
Steven's group also meets, a pack of dogs in an abandoned group of cabins and the dogs arekind of outside and soon they bust in and just to get inside and Roy, the football player

(01:59:35):
and the professor, they're both killed.
Steve, Santi and Terry, they are able to escape and they run down to the river wherethey're able to basically like break off the dock into like a makeshift raft.
And the last we see they're kind of,
heading down, but couple of dogs have gotten on the raft.
So it sort of fades out as they're going down the river and you don't know what happens tothem.

(01:59:58):
And then sometime later, Mrs.
Goodwin, her son and Beth, awaken in the helicopter to find all the dogs that had beenmenacing have all died.
And there's a helicopter approaching and they're like, we're saved.
And there's a very surreal scene with army personnel in hazmat suits.
But it has Matt suit.

(02:00:19):
That's like the silver version of what Marty wears in Back to the Future when he lands onthat farm.
Yes, yes, exactly.
It reminded me uh of the crazies.
Sure.
And just like, it appears here on the radio that like animals above 75,000 feet, 75,000feet would be in outer space.

(02:00:40):
5,000 feet have died, but humans appear to be immune.
Soldiers find the little girl in the truck and they take her with them.
And then Steve, Santian and April, uh they float down the river.
They're floating down the river on the raft and they come across like army guys on abridge and uh they are apparently saved too.

(02:01:05):
And then the final shot is like a bird flying at the camera.
Is it over or is it not?
uh I mean, the thing about Day of the Animals is it's just, it is something of a slowburn, but once it grabs you by the throat, it does not let go.
And it really, it really affected me, this movie.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
The survival stories are really compelling.

(02:01:26):
The characters, even if they're stereotypical, are compelling.
You have great performances, particularly from Leslie Nielsen and John Cedar.
uh And honestly, it feels more relevant than even maybe when it came out.
uh It's interesting.
uh Christopher George and Linda Day George eventually became strong advocates at the timeof this movie for the protection of the ozone layer.

(02:01:51):
And here's the thing, Rob, you mentioned this at the beginning.
Obviously this situation didn't happen, but with all the concern over environmental issuesand climate change, the ozone layer is like our one success story.
Like CFCs were banned in 1989 and the ozone layer has begun to repair itself.
It is now projected to be completely restored by 2045.

(02:02:15):
And it's one of those things when
People talk about environmental issues and they kind of say, well, it's such a big thing,it's out of our hands.
Even if there is climate change, there's nothing we can do.
That's bullshit because we fixed the ozone layer and the day of the animals neverhappened.
Yeah.
Although it does make me think, as you said, with the being, uh, it does feel like youcould remake this thing now and you could just plug in extra heat from climate change,

(02:02:44):
making the animals go crazy in, in, the UV rays.
And you could have yourself a animal attack.
man, could do it with all with CGI.
would be a, you'd be, could do anything.
my God.
You can have all sorts of animals.
You'd never see the string cause you could take it out digitally.
yeah, I, I liked both of these movies.

(02:03:05):
yeah, Grizzly was the more commercially successful of the two and I kind of understand whyparticularly at the time, but, Dave, the animals really knocked me out.
Like, wow.
And, you know, now that this is our third episode, um, it is interesting to see whilethese movies are, you know, pure exploitation B movies.

(02:03:25):
So they have a few differences from jaws.
In addition to just the animal attacking, there are some just themes and larger beats thatdo feel like that they are, are becoming central to this genre, which is, um,
that in Jaws you had the competing human interests about what is real about the attack andwhat do you do about it?

(02:03:50):
And that definitely seems to be solidified here in this wave of films post Jaws.
Tinturera accepted.
That's its own thing.
It is the David S.
Pumpkins, as you say, of the trend so far.

(02:04:10):
And the threesome is part.
And this one has multiple animals, which we're not going to run into very often.
It's usually one thing or one species that has a, well, we'll get into everything elsedown the road here, but it's, think a unique movie in that regard.
You hit it on the head earlier where you're like, you can avoid the sharks by just stayingout of the water.

(02:04:35):
With this, you have no information and literally every living thing around you is comingat you.
And
that presents a very different situation that we'll run into.
So in this one, there isn't, like you said, Chris, early on, that person with the answersreally isn't there here.
I think it was you, or Rob.
And that is also a bit of an anomaly with Day of the Animals, but otherwise those tropesare definitely in play in both of these films.

(02:05:01):
For sure.
And of course, the sad thing here is that William Gerdler would only make one more filmafter the two we've talked about today, and that's The Manitou, before his very untimely
death.
It's a shame, not just because he passed away for so young.
That is a tragedy in and of itself, but also the possibility of other films he would havemade, because I think he would have gone on.

(02:05:25):
He could have had a great career.
Because even at these lower budget efforts, he shows a lot of inventiveness and again, Ireally like both of these.
I do want to end with a word about Edward L.
Montoro, who produced both of today's films, as well as a movie we'll talk about later inthis series, The Last Shark, AKA Great White, which his company handled the American

(02:05:51):
release for, a release that was ultimately truncated by a lawsuit from Universal.
Montoro,
early in his life was a counterfeiter and went to jail for that.
He did a stretch for counterfeiting.
Wow.
And he eventually got into movie distribution in the late sixties.
His first big hit was the US release of Behind the Door.

(02:06:13):
In addition to the two movies we talked about today, he also produced and or distributedmovies like 1979's The Visitor, as well as 1982's slasher film Pieces.
In 1984,
with Film Ventures International in serious financial trouble, Montero took more than amillion dollars out of the company's accounts and vanished.

(02:06:38):
And to this day, his whereabouts remain unknown.
Maybe, maybe.
But just an interesting, interesting story and an interesting character in Ed Montero.
uh I think that's a place to stop for today.
Please make sure you come back next week, because we are going to be joined by our goodfriend, Jen Howell of Every Romcom.

(02:07:03):
uh We always like having Jen on the show.
She's going to be here to talk about one of the most popular films, I think, that we'lldiscuss in this series, aside from obviously Jaws itself, produced by Roger Corman,
written by John Sayles, and directed by Joe Dante.
Next week, we go swimming with Piranha.

(02:07:24):
So we, again, we're your hosts, Chris Iannico and Rob Lamorgus and Justin Beam.
If you've enjoyed our show, please consider subscribing and following us on Blue Sky,Instagram, threads and Twitter at Get Me Another Pod.
In addition, check out the Justin Beam Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
And you can find Justin's book, Roadside Memories at Justin Beam or wherever books aresold.

(02:07:47):
If you've liked the show, tell your friends about it.
Tell your enemies about it.
Tell Edmontoro about it if you can find him.
And join us next time as we continue to explore what happens when Hollywood says, get meanother.
you uh

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Jaws Ep. 03 - Grizzly / Day of the Animals

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jaws Ep. 03 - Grizzly / Day of the Animals