Claws

Since William Girdler's "Grizzly" supposedly was a shameless rip-off of "Jaws" (at least according to a lot of reviewers disliking the movie), then I guess this is an even more shameless rip-off of an already shameless rip-off and thus the ultimate rip-off of "Jaws"? Whatever! Let them say what they want. I usually enjoy these typically 70's and enormously cheesy "animals revolting" movies very much and even found a handful of redeeming elements in "Claws"! That certainly wasn't an easy thing to do, as this film is really poor and amateurishly put together. Basically speaking, a killer animal flick doesn't need a brilliant or flawless scenario in order to be entertaining, but it looks as if the makers deliberately tried to sabotage their own film with their continuous and inappropriate use of pointless flashbacks, dreadful clichés and irrelevant vendettas between dull main characters. There's an ordinary grizzly bear – perhaps a little bit over-sized, but still a normal bear – on the rampage deep in the Alaskan woods, but for some reason the plot insists to convince us it's not just a bear but a malignant Indian spirit known as the "Quistica". Consequently one of the supportive characters is an old Indian mumbling inaudible stuff all the time and having kooky hallucinations, whereas the story should be focusing on savage grizzly bear attacks instead! During the fairly good and atmospherically shot opening sequences, we witness how a trio of hunters illegally wound a gigantic bear but fail to put him down completely. The raged animal promptly attacks woodchopper Jason Monroe and terrorizes the woods for the following five years. When the bear beastly interrupts a boy scout camping party attended by Jason's son and his ex-wife's new fiancée, he decides to put together a hunting party to destroy the bear once and for all. Although nobody is likely to care or even sympathize with any of the lead characters, the film obtrudes their love lives to us through insufferable flashbacks. Worst of all is that these flashbacks serve absolutely no purpose and merely just count as filler and to make us care for the familial situation of the characters. That is called Emo(tion)-TV and really doesn't mix well with horror. The hunter has flashbacks about how he fell in love with his wife and then lost her, the wife has a flashback how she left her husband, the new lover has a flashback how he gradually stole the wife's heart and the annoying kid has a flashback of the time his parents were still happily together. I swear, at a certain point I was afraid that even the bear would have a flashback about the times he was carelessly swooping fish out of the river, or something. During the second half of the film, the lousy flashbacks are slowly being replaced with lousy gibberish about Indian mythology and brotherhood speeches. The bear attacks are okay, but not as virulent and exploitative as in the aforementioned "Grizzly" and the wildlife tableaux are occasionally enchanting to look at. The climax is exciting but unfortunately not exciting enough to make you forget the overall dullness of the script and the atrocity of the dialogs. Furthermore, "Claws" also suffers from terrible performances and inept direction, so unless you have an incredibly high level of tolerance for 70's eco-horror/killer-animal flicks, you probably shouldn't search for this puppy.

This movie is not a good killer grizzly movie. I just don't know why they also call it Devil Bear because it is not scary enough to be called that. The movie is very dark. Sometimes you can't see certain things and the sound in the movie is bad. Most of all, the movie is boring. 2.5 stars out of 5 for my rating.

Its pretty obvious where this one got its inspiration from - Claws even sounds like Jaws. After Spielberg's big fish classic became one of the ultimate blockbusters, many films followed in its wake, with tales about animals going on the rampage. This is one of the ones involving a grizzly bear. In it, a massive bear is shot by illegal hunters, instead of going off to die it instead goes completely radge and becomes a local menace for several years. This leads to a group of hunters going out to track it down - you know the drill. This one is a bit scrappy in some ways but benefits quite a bit from its on-location shooting in the Alaskan wilds.

A lot of people confuse this movie with "Grizzly". "Grizzly" has Christopher George AND Andrew Prine AND Richard Jaekl AND a female park ranger who decides to take time out from hunting an 18-foot killer grizzly bear to strip off all her clothes and take an impromptu shower in a waterfall (guess what happens?). "Claws" has none of these things, just a lot of travelogue footage of the Alaskan wilderness and some Native American nonsense about a "spirit bear". Neither movie is particularly scary. They both contain a lot shots of a disembodied bear paw flying through air, lopping off heads and limbs edited together with close-ups of the face of a real bear who looks only mildly annoyed. There is one pretty good scene where the bear menaces a boy scout camp, but it's only good because it's dark and you can't really see the bear. Actually, you can't see a lot of things in the very murky existing prints of this hard-to-find movie. It probably doesn't merit a DVD resurrection, however, because I have a feeling that what you can't see would still suck. "Grizzly" is so bad it's good; "Claws" is just bad.

CLAWS is another grizzly bear attack horror film, packed with footage of a grizzly going on the rampage and butchering a number of innocent folk. It was recently shown on TV here in the UK to tie in to the cinema release of THE REVENANT, along with NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLY. This low budget effort is the worse film of the two, thanks to a very undistinguished execution. There's virtually no characterisation, no attempts at suspense, just a lot of repetitive scenes instead.

The whole film feels sluggish and rather dull despite the proliferation of outdoor nature footage (the movie was shot in Alaska). I appreciate that a real bear was used for many of the shots, but the whole thing is directed in such a matter-of-fact way that it gets rather boring very quickly. The one point at which things do get exciting is at the over-the-top climax, but by then it's too little, too late.