iphignia939 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
iphignia939) wrote2012-08-02 11:55 pm
iphignia939) wrote2012-08-02 11:55 pm
ASM review: grizzly rage
Dear Teen Wolf fandom: let's talk about Grizzly Rage. PLEASE DEAR GOD let's talk about Grizzly Rage.
I'll revisit some of this later, because David DeCoteau is literally an entire Ambassador of Shitty Movies post all by himself, but Grizzly Rage was made as part of the Maneater series of films: basically, direct-to-DVD efforts about man-vs-nature that have, at one point or another, all aired on the SyFy Channel. (They may have actually been commissioned by SFC, but I honestly can't remember. They did air, though.) They include such classics as Eye of the Beast, Shark Swarm, and The Hive--and, of course, Grizzly Rage.
Grizzly Rage features Tyler Hoechlin. That is honestly the only reason to--
--well, no, as a TW fan that's the only reason to watch this movie; you should track down a copy anyway because it is fucking terrible.
See, David DeCoteau is well-known in horror and gay cinema circles for basically one thing: making twink bait. They're technically horror movies, in that there are evil witches or ghost pirates or giant killer bees or what-the-fuck-ever, but they mostly feature one not-quite-pretty girl and a bunch of shirtless dudes, engaging in extraordinarily homosocial behavior to the point of parody. No one is ever actually gay, but there is a lot of bro'ing out and wrestling and suggestive knife-licking. You will ask yourself, more than once, if you are actually seeing what's going on in the movie; the answer is always "yes". GR was made at the end of DD's "I actually leave the property I own" filmmaking period; nowadays he makes his movies almost exclusively on or around his properties in WeHo and Manitoba, Canada. Are we at that one house with a giant-ass pool? Then you're in WeHo. Are we doing a lot of walking around outside? Manitoba.
Have you ever seen The Brotherhood movies? He made those.
ANYWAY. GR is the story of four recent high school graduates--which, ahahahahahahahaha, no--who head off to hang out at the beach but end up deciding to trespass on government land, where they end up hitting a bear cub with their SUV. Now, this is bad enough, but it turns out that the bear's mom has seen the whole thing, and she? Is pissed.
And then it's basically Deep Blue Sea meets Jaws 4, only with half-naked dudes and a token girl. For not quite 90 minutes.
It's--granted, I know very little about bears, but I'm pretty sure they don't actually track people down for purposes of revenge. Do bears hold grudges? Because this bear hunts them down like it's in the second half of Death Proof, only without a car. And it is AMAZING.
-Hoechlin is in a ribbed tank, a thin plaid shirt (which he takes off to cradle the dead baby bear and GIVE IT A CHRISTIAN BURIAL), and board shorts, along with a thin necklace and those not-Birkenstocks guys in frats often wear. And a backwards baseball cap. The entire movie. Keep that in mind.
-The "baby bear" looks like a rug someone put a face on. And I don't mean a bearskin rug, either. Like, a rug.
-This movie features three men and a woman, all of whom are friends. There is no sexual tension between anyone; she is explicitly one of the guys. She is also not particularly sexualized, despite spending most of the movie in shorts and a tank top.
-Hoechlin checks the bear's pulse. You guys, even now I would not be a hundred percent on where the hell to check for a pulse on a bear, let alone having graduated high school like a week before.
-So obviously, the mama bear seeks revenge, and--okay. I do not know why anyone is worried, because clearly this bear is in a totally different movie than the one they're filming; I suspect it might actually be stock footage, because none of the shots are longer than ten seconds and that one of the bear roaring is used at least six different times. That's like asking if I'm going to drown if I am nowhere near water: all signs point to NO.
-It is implied that the bear has been made smart via some application of toxic waste in a nearby lake. No, seriously: GENIUS MURDERBEARS.
-There are three separate power montages featuring faux Nickelback-esque music, one of which involves winching an ATV up a hillside as it's tied to what appears to be a sapling. The other two involve guys walking through the woods. Not a joke! We use up about half an hour this way. This movie is only 85 minutes long.
-Hoechlin has--no shit--two entire speeches about how they brought this on ourselves, and as kids growing up in America "we've had it good for too long". Like, out of nowhere. The girl has a separate one about how, because she had two beers at a party once and drove back to her dorm and bumped someone else's car--someone else's car, okay, she didn't murder anyone--she totally has this coming. A BEAR IS TRYING TO KILL THEM.
-There's a fight between Hoechlin and the bear that actually made me laugh out loud.
-HE CHECKED A DEAD BEAR'S PULSE.
-Once night falls, the movie--okay. I get ambient lighting; I get "realism" in film, though to use it in this film in particular is laughable at best. But unless something's on fire--which happens twice--or you can see it through starlight or a cell phone screen, you cannot see a goddamn thing in the last twenty minutes of the movie, or close to it.
-The climax of the film involves A) finding out that the bear is unharmed by fire--NO, REALLY; B) Hoechlin taking off his blood-stained clothes and putting them at the base of a tree to hide in the branches and try to kill the bear with a lugnut wrench (no points for guessing whether or not it works); and C) Hoechlin and the girl trapping the bear in a lean-to before trying to walk back to the main road.
Let me explain: this is like putting a baby in a Lego jail cell and telling him to stay put. A human could push one of the walls over and just walk out, so a bear has really no problem at all. Aaaaaaaaaaand then it gets out and murders Hoechlin and the girl, and the movie just. Ends.
Did I mention that for the last ten minutes, Hoechlin is in sneakers and his underwear? They're longish boxers, but still.
I just--it's boring even for a DeCoteau movie, but as a terrible movie, it is fascinating. If you can find a copy, preferably for free, it's worth a look. Just...maybe not a long look. And you should maybe drink during the film itself.
I'll revisit some of this later, because David DeCoteau is literally an entire Ambassador of Shitty Movies post all by himself, but Grizzly Rage was made as part of the Maneater series of films: basically, direct-to-DVD efforts about man-vs-nature that have, at one point or another, all aired on the SyFy Channel. (They may have actually been commissioned by SFC, but I honestly can't remember. They did air, though.) They include such classics as Eye of the Beast, Shark Swarm, and The Hive--and, of course, Grizzly Rage.
Grizzly Rage features Tyler Hoechlin. That is honestly the only reason to--
--well, no, as a TW fan that's the only reason to watch this movie; you should track down a copy anyway because it is fucking terrible.
See, David DeCoteau is well-known in horror and gay cinema circles for basically one thing: making twink bait. They're technically horror movies, in that there are evil witches or ghost pirates or giant killer bees or what-the-fuck-ever, but they mostly feature one not-quite-pretty girl and a bunch of shirtless dudes, engaging in extraordinarily homosocial behavior to the point of parody. No one is ever actually gay, but there is a lot of bro'ing out and wrestling and suggestive knife-licking. You will ask yourself, more than once, if you are actually seeing what's going on in the movie; the answer is always "yes". GR was made at the end of DD's "I actually leave the property I own" filmmaking period; nowadays he makes his movies almost exclusively on or around his properties in WeHo and Manitoba, Canada. Are we at that one house with a giant-ass pool? Then you're in WeHo. Are we doing a lot of walking around outside? Manitoba.
Have you ever seen The Brotherhood movies? He made those.
ANYWAY. GR is the story of four recent high school graduates--which, ahahahahahahahaha, no--who head off to hang out at the beach but end up deciding to trespass on government land, where they end up hitting a bear cub with their SUV. Now, this is bad enough, but it turns out that the bear's mom has seen the whole thing, and she? Is pissed.
And then it's basically Deep Blue Sea meets Jaws 4, only with half-naked dudes and a token girl. For not quite 90 minutes.
It's--granted, I know very little about bears, but I'm pretty sure they don't actually track people down for purposes of revenge. Do bears hold grudges? Because this bear hunts them down like it's in the second half of Death Proof, only without a car. And it is AMAZING.
-Hoechlin is in a ribbed tank, a thin plaid shirt (which he takes off to cradle the dead baby bear and GIVE IT A CHRISTIAN BURIAL), and board shorts, along with a thin necklace and those not-Birkenstocks guys in frats often wear. And a backwards baseball cap. The entire movie. Keep that in mind.
-The "baby bear" looks like a rug someone put a face on. And I don't mean a bearskin rug, either. Like, a rug.
-This movie features three men and a woman, all of whom are friends. There is no sexual tension between anyone; she is explicitly one of the guys. She is also not particularly sexualized, despite spending most of the movie in shorts and a tank top.
-Hoechlin checks the bear's pulse. You guys, even now I would not be a hundred percent on where the hell to check for a pulse on a bear, let alone having graduated high school like a week before.
-So obviously, the mama bear seeks revenge, and--okay. I do not know why anyone is worried, because clearly this bear is in a totally different movie than the one they're filming; I suspect it might actually be stock footage, because none of the shots are longer than ten seconds and that one of the bear roaring is used at least six different times. That's like asking if I'm going to drown if I am nowhere near water: all signs point to NO.
-It is implied that the bear has been made smart via some application of toxic waste in a nearby lake. No, seriously: GENIUS MURDERBEARS.
-There are three separate power montages featuring faux Nickelback-esque music, one of which involves winching an ATV up a hillside as it's tied to what appears to be a sapling. The other two involve guys walking through the woods. Not a joke! We use up about half an hour this way. This movie is only 85 minutes long.
-Hoechlin has--no shit--two entire speeches about how they brought this on ourselves, and as kids growing up in America "we've had it good for too long". Like, out of nowhere. The girl has a separate one about how, because she had two beers at a party once and drove back to her dorm and bumped someone else's car--someone else's car, okay, she didn't murder anyone--she totally has this coming. A BEAR IS TRYING TO KILL THEM.
-There's a fight between Hoechlin and the bear that actually made me laugh out loud.
-HE CHECKED A DEAD BEAR'S PULSE.
-Once night falls, the movie--okay. I get ambient lighting; I get "realism" in film, though to use it in this film in particular is laughable at best. But unless something's on fire--which happens twice--or you can see it through starlight or a cell phone screen, you cannot see a goddamn thing in the last twenty minutes of the movie, or close to it.
-The climax of the film involves A) finding out that the bear is unharmed by fire--NO, REALLY; B) Hoechlin taking off his blood-stained clothes and putting them at the base of a tree to hide in the branches and try to kill the bear with a lugnut wrench (no points for guessing whether or not it works); and C) Hoechlin and the girl trapping the bear in a lean-to before trying to walk back to the main road.
Let me explain: this is like putting a baby in a Lego jail cell and telling him to stay put. A human could push one of the walls over and just walk out, so a bear has really no problem at all. Aaaaaaaaaaand then it gets out and murders Hoechlin and the girl, and the movie just. Ends.
Did I mention that for the last ten minutes, Hoechlin is in sneakers and his underwear? They're longish boxers, but still.
I just--it's boring even for a DeCoteau movie, but as a terrible movie, it is fascinating. If you can find a copy, preferably for free, it's worth a look. Just...maybe not a long look. And you should maybe drink during the film itself.