Claws (1977)
1/2 (out of 4)
Even Alaska decided to jump in on the JAWS craze with this rip-off, which features a killer grizzly. Just the previous year director William Girdler made GRIZZLY and wouldn't you know it, this low-budget film would be released as GRIZZLY II in some parts just to try and cash in. The story is pretty simple as a couple hunters come across two large grizzly bears fighting. They decide they'll look good on their wall so they start firing but one of the bears is just hit and runs off. At the same time a logger is walking through the woods and gets attacked. Through a text on the screen we learn that in the next five years this bear attacks and kills countless people and becomes known as the devil bear. Then our film kicks back and we see a group of men going after the bear. I'm a major sucker for these "nature attack" movies but this one here is just downright horrible. This is an incredibly cheap production and it really doesn't help when the bear is never in the same frame of the actors. Yes, many low-budget movies used editing to fool the viewer but this film isn't fooling anyone and what's even worse is how dragged out everything is. Not much makes sense in this movie including the fact that the "events" take place five years after the opening. As I previous said, we're give some text to explain what the bear has been doing but why not just show this stuff and forget this incredibly stretched out sequences that we wind up getting? The majority of the 100-minute running time has a bunch of idiots in the wood trying to track down the bear with the help of a Native American magic man. All of the scenes in the woods are just way too long and you can't help but feel as if this thing was just meant to be some sort of travelogue for Alaska and at the last second they decided to add a killer bear. The attack scenes are extremely weak with the viewer really not getting to see much. Everything usually so dark that you can't see or they just have the actors fighting with a fake bear arm coming down on them. I guess the one highlight in the film is a rather silly sequence where the bear attacks some boy scouts out camping. The performances are all rather bland and forgettable but then again so is pretty much everything else in this film. Stick with GRIZZLY instead.
1/2 (out of 4)
Even Alaska decided to jump in on the JAWS craze with this rip-off, which features a killer grizzly. Just the previous year director William Girdler made GRIZZLY and wouldn't you know it, this low-budget film would be released as GRIZZLY II in some parts just to try and cash in. The story is pretty simple as a couple hunters come across two large grizzly bears fighting. They decide they'll look good on their wall so they start firing but one of the bears is just hit and runs off. At the same time a logger is walking through the woods and gets attacked. Through a text on the screen we learn that in the next five years this bear attacks and kills countless people and becomes known as the devil bear. Then our film kicks back and we see a group of men going after the bear. I'm a major sucker for these "nature attack" movies but this one here is just downright horrible. This is an incredibly cheap production and it really doesn't help when the bear is never in the same frame of the actors. Yes, many low-budget movies used editing to fool the viewer but this film isn't fooling anyone and what's even worse is how dragged out everything is. Not much makes sense in this movie including the fact that the "events" take place five years after the opening. As I previous said, we're give some text to explain what the bear has been doing but why not just show this stuff and forget this incredibly stretched out sequences that we wind up getting? The majority of the 100-minute running time has a bunch of idiots in the wood trying to track down the bear with the help of a Native American magic man. All of the scenes in the woods are just way too long and you can't help but feel as if this thing was just meant to be some sort of travelogue for Alaska and at the last second they decided to add a killer bear. The attack scenes are extremely weak with the viewer really not getting to see much. Everything usually so dark that you can't see or they just have the actors fighting with a fake bear arm coming down on them. I guess the one highlight in the film is a rather silly sequence where the bear attacks some boy scouts out camping. The performances are all rather bland and forgettable but then again so is pretty much everything else in this film. Stick with GRIZZLY instead.