Dentro do Labirinto Cinzento

"Even grizzlies can get lost down there." Rowan (Marsden) has finally come back home after being gone too long. He wants to head into the dangerous grizzly maze for hiking. His brother, Beckett (Jane) doesn't want him to go due to the recent attacks. Reluctantly Beckett heads in to protect Rowan, find his wife, and and find the bear before it attacks again. This is a movie that you pretty much know what your going to get. Action and tenseness. The cast is pretty amazing for a movie like this. The movie is exciting and entertaining but some of the actual story gets lost in between the action. That isn't a bad thing but when you watch this you watch it for one reason. This is the type of movie where you can almost predict whats going to happen and there aren't any real surprises, but that said it is entertaining and well worth your time. Overall, not as good as The Edge, but still exciting and the cast makes it better than it actually is. I give this a B.

When bodies start showing up in an Alaskan forest a local sheriff and his estranged brother go about find the bear before a seasoned hunter does.

It's hard not to draw comparison to other persons versus nature films, to it's credit it has a seasoned studded cast in what could have been the Jaws (1975) or Moby Dick of Bear movies. The location scenery and setting is fantastic, and there's some grizzly scenes (no pun intended) of hard to watch dead bear cubs, body dismemberment and so on. There's an abundance of kills in the forest, lodge attacks and in cars. Even with Saw V director David Hackl and with writers Guy Moshe and J.R. Reher it oddly feels only as special as AVP Requiem's brotherly love and forest scenes mixed with Abominable (2006).

Veteran Scott Glenn, excellent James Marsden, Thomas Jane as a hunter character turned conservationist who butts heads with Billy Bob Thornton's hardened hunter can't fix the lack of tension or continuity. Neither can the fine looking actors distract the fact that there's a TV air about the whole affair. The score is however great coupled with some fine cinematography and the star, bear Bart, possibly related to the late Bart the Bear and his mother from Grizzly (1976) steals the show.

It's nowhere near executed as well as The Edge (1997) or Ghost in the Darkness (1997), nor does it say more about conservation than The Bear (1988). What could have been Jaws, is more Orca - The Killer Whale.

As a killer bear film on revenge it's up in the top ten, but how many murderous bear films are there?

This movie is not The Edge which in my opinion is one of the better movies ever made. Into the Grizzly Maze is definitely a B movie.

I put this movie on while my girlfriend had some friends over. They continually commented on how terrible it was, but with huge smiles on their faces. They were 100% maximum entertained. Some couldn't handle the gore, some couldn't look away in utter fascination.

The movie is just pure entertainment. The plot is very thin, the actors well known and the bear is menacing. At the end of the day it's better than most B movies.

Survival horror films will rarely crack the A Movie list, as The Edge did, but this is one of the more fun movies I've watched in a long time.

That said, it is not cinematic gold. It is perfectly executed for what it is supposed to be, a B movie with people getting slaughtered by a grizzly. What more do you want? What more can you expect?

I have recently watched this movie and i have to say i was pleasantly surprised as its not usually my type of movie. There obviously have been previous movies of the same genre, but my opinion this is by far the better option, you cannot go into movie like this and expect Oscar winning performances, but saying that James Marsden ( whose very under rated as an actor ) plays a great role, as do they all. He has a strong supporting cast in the very attractive Piper Perabo, Michaela McManus, Thomas Jane,and of course the great Scott Glenn and Billy Bob Thornton.......Just sit back and relax its a great film, there are worse things to do with your time for ninety minutes.....

I am seriously torn between opinions on this one. I'm actually somewhat of a fan of animal horror movies. I still think Jaws is one of the best horror films out there. I even somehow liked the Orca Rip-off. Seriously, the animal horror genre occupies a major part of the most fun B movies ever (strangely, the ones that come to mind are mostly shark focused....Deep Blue Sea, Ghost Shark, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon...). From my childhood I remember being really scared of titles like Tarantula, Kingdom of Spiders, Frogs, Razorback, Cujo and so on. Well, times change and I know just enjoy some dumb fun. And I really don't know if Grizzly actually fits my bill here.

I admit I was predominantly drawn to this movie by its cast - James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Billy Bob Thornton, and Piper Perabo (which I haven't seen for a long time). So my guess was that with such a pretty well known cast, they would have confidence in the movie and some budget associated with it. And again, I am not sure...

So the actors actually do their job pretty well. Their performance is probably one of the reasons why the movie is sometimes quite gripping and tense. The setting is quite nice - foggy gritty cold forest. The plot is pretty much what you expect...and even if you have low expectations it is kind of a lackluster.

I think the biggest gripe I have is with the bear "effects" and associated with it the cinematography and editing. I am quite astonished how they managed to actually make the bear feel real and menacing and at the same time weirdly harmless. Sometimes the bear appears huge and some of the attacks are really grippy. Other times you feel that the bear is just prancing around like a nice little teddy. They used real bear footage for the most part, which is nice, but somehow feels fake at the same time. No idea how they did that. There is quite an amount of gore as well. And some of the attacks were quite hard to watch - although the victims showed some questionable defense behavior. At the same time, there are a lot of cheap off-screen deaths. This is not similar to Jaws, where it's done tastefully and suspenseful - here it just seems very cheap - like in the average low budget TV movie. That transgresses to a general problem here - the editing. A lot of the scenes are like this: Bear growling - people looking in fear - bear standing - people deciding to run away - bear prancing towards them - people actually running away scared of their life (and that quite authentically) - bear catching up with one of them - people shooting at the bear and missing - bear turning around and running towards the shooter - shooter looking dumb and shooting and missing again - bear closing in on shooter - other people shooting and missing - bear turning towards other people...you catch the drift.

There is just not enough real interaction or shots with the bear and people together convincingly to make this movie really good. As mentioned, the effects are good and bad at the same time - CGI was avoided most of time, and when it was used, it was OK. But generally, it has just this extreme cheap TV movie feel. It is also not over the top, which could have saved it. If there is humor in this movie, it is extreme subtle...to the extend that I'm not sure if I noticed it.

So in sum, really, I have no idea what to make of it. I do not recommend it. That's for sure. But I also do not hate it. I somehow do not really care (despite this long review...). And oh yeah, and the ending is really cheap.