Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 1, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
In the opening scene of Grizzly Park, escaped serial killer Butch Latham (Jeff Watson) happens upon a bus that has broken down, and whose driver informs him that he’s on his way to pick up a bunch of convicted youth criminals and take them to a community service stint. Butch, of course, kills the poor guy, steals his uniform—and then pilots the bus right to its appointed destination. If you can buy the idea that Butch, instead of hightailing it to the nearest state line, would practically deliver himself right into the hands of the authorities he should, by all rights, be fleeing, you might be able to swallow the rest of Grizzly Park without gagging. And even then, it may be a close call.
There are hints throughout the movie that writer/director Tom Skull doesn’t intend it all to be taken seriously, but if he’s attempting a self-parody here, he falls way too far over This is Spinal Tap’s celebrated line between clever and stupid. Among the many moments that are funny peculiar instead of funny ha-ha is the introduction of the young offenders before and during their boarding of Butch’s bus. Rather than giving them any meaningful introductory dialogue, Skull overlays the soundtrack with an old children’s rhyming song about encountering a bear in the woods.
Then the kids start talking, and you start getting wistful for the moments when they weren’t. This bunch is so egregiously vapid that the designated Dumb Girl, Bebe (Emily Foxler, the sexy demon from Robert Englund’s Killer Pad), has to act really dumb just so her dumbness will stand out. How dumb is she? So dumb that in the midst of their hike up into the trees on their litter-collecting expedition, she leads a skunk back to the rest of the gang, thinking it’s a “forest cat.” The resulting spray does provide an excuse for all the good-looking youths to doff their clothes for the requisite bathing-in-the-lake break, though the fact that nobody strips past their underwear makes you wonder where Skull’s exploitation-film priorities are.
Perhaps this scene is staged so that Michael, a.k.a. Scab (Randy Wayne), can have another chance to reveal the “White Power” tattoo on his torso, and thus remind the audience that he is, in fact, supposed to be a white supremacist. Certainly nothing else about his behavior suggests as much; he’s never even especially hostile toward the group’s one black member, Ty (Shedrack Anderson). (The fact that Michael’s last name is White and Ty’s last name is Brown gives you an idea of the level the script operates on.) Throughout it all, veteran actor Glenn Morshower, who has done fine work on TV’s 24 and elsewhere, soldiers through his role as chaperoning “Ranger Bob” with all the stoicism of a good thespian trying to make the best of an inane assignment and collect his paycheck.
Where does the grizzly fit into all this, you might ask? Well, for a good stretch of the running time, it doesn’t, aside from a few growling point-of-view shots. In fact, it’s Butch who seems to be the potential threat for quite a while—until he gets taken out by the bear at about the halfway point in the one well-staged attack setpiece (i.e. the only one in which ursine star “Brody” and his victim actually appear to be sharing the scene). The fact that Butch is given so much screen time and yet is dispatched before he can directly menace the youths seems to be a private joke only Skull understands.
Eventually, somewhere past the hour mark, the grizzly finally catches up to the kids once each has had a chance to explain what got them into the community-service stint in the first place. The most drawn-out fate is reserved for a guy who, just to make sure we know he deserves it, goes on at eye-rollingly on-the-nose length about how easy it is to con old people, and the girl to whom he explains this seals her own doom by opining, “Old people are creepy.” At one point, this dude also brings up the homily about a tree falling in the forest, but doesn’t get around to the rhetorical question about whether a bear poops in the woods, perhaps because someone involved realized that it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring up the words “bear” and “poop” together in the context of this film.
As one of the characters starts running around in a Halloween bear costume and headpiece that couldn’t possibly have fit in his pack, and someone else falls victim to the old “It’s quiet—he must have gone” trick, any seasoned viewer of cheesy nature-on-the-rampage flicks may well start amusing themselves imagining the ridiculous ways the story might pay off. We’ve all done it, and I’ll admit that, as I have on several similar occasions, I spent some of this film’s copious down time speculating about the silliest possible ending it could all lead to. Grizzly Park, however, marked the first time that I was right.
