Claws

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.

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.

Notable for it gratuitous use of flashbacks, even by 70's standards. This is a pure drive-in flick, the one your parents didn't want to stay awake for, so they drove home halfway through it. Right off the bat, you're introduced to bad stock footage, interesting color changes during scenes, and a so-called SATAN BEAR! Cheezy and vaguely energetic enough to be funny for awhile, halfway through it begins to lull the mind into a satisfying sleep. However, impressionable young minds might actually be frightened by this flick, since getting mauled by a rogue bear during a boy-scout outing is actually quite a plausable fear; as opposed to, say, getting mauled by Bigfoot...

But that's a different movie.

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.

If "Grizzly" was the B-grade answer to "Jaws", then "Claws" in my opinion, is the next generation answer to "Grizzly". Despite a top- notch cast (Evers, Aames, Caruso, Young & Healey), "Claws" lacks the technical expertise William Girdler displayed in conjuring his spin-off, the bear attacks and aftermath here, a lot less bloody and realistic.

The acting of the veterans isn't bad at all, though Evers does at times seem more than a little self-righteous as he mentally deteriorates years after being attacked by what has now become the local folklore of "Devil Bear". Estranged from his wife & son due to his obsession with locating and killing "Devil Bear", Evers teeters on the brink of insanity, until, "Devil Bear" appears again to wreak havoc and give Evers the chance to avenge the livelihood he lost when his hand was crippled years before (he was a lumberjack by trade, until "Devil Bear" tossed him around like a rag doll).

Clichéd and overly intense, "Claws" reminds me of "Snowbeast" both in terms of tone and production quality, it's a very distant standard to Girdler's "Grizzly" despite the obvious homage. Both Aames and Caruso have reasonably good dialogue and deliver earnest, watchable performances - I couldn't really say the same for Layton nor Sipes who both look decidedly amateurish by comparison. As aforesaid, I'm not sure who's more dangerous, "Devil Bear" or Jason Evers' maniacal stare.

The slow-motion climax was a bit absurd and Evers' supposedly crippled hand seems to make a miraculous resurrection, but otherwise, it's what you'd expect in a film of this genre, but firmly on the C-scale.