I brought Grizzly home, along with 1990: Bronx Warriors and 2019: After the Fall of New York. The second and third movie are do in no small part to a weakness for Italian Post-Apocalyptic action films, ala Warrior of the Lost World. They aren't great; hell, most of the time they're barely coherent. 1990: Bronx Warriors at least has Fred "The Hammer" Williamson*, Vic "Helicopter Crash" Morrow**, and uh George "Porno Holocaust" Eastman.
Grizzly is inexplicably a two-disc affair, but I have to give some credit for shamelessly cashing in on the popularity of Jaws. Another entry in the "animals gone amok" genre, I probably would've ignored this entirely save for the back of the dvd box, which contains the following synopsis:
When an eighteen foot, two-thousand pound grizzly bear starts mauling campers and hikers at a state park.... (some character crap)... Meanwhile, the giant grizzly, not content with picnic baskets, continues to kill indiscrimintaley, leaving pools of blood and piles of body parts in its wake. Can the ranger and his cronies end the grizzly's reign of terror without resorting to excessively extreme measures? Absolutely not!
Fair enough. Like Day of the Animals and Prophecy, this has almost no chance of living up to that kind of hype, but if it's even half as amusing as either of the aforementioned flicks then it's worth the time I'll spend on it. Movies like this make watching garbage like Righteous Kill worthwhile.
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Speaking of worthwhile, I'm only a half an hour or so in, but The Exterminator has me jonesing to drop everything and fire the dvd player back up. It too is cashing in on a popular genre of the 1970s: the revenge film. What The Exterminator does is amp up the pointless violence, cut back on the plot, and string together the remains with inexplicably bad editing.
For example:
- the opening, set presumably in Vietnam and filled with explosions a little too close to the helicopter, is chock full of guys on fire, guys being shot to pieces, one dude getting his head chopped off, and more explosions. Seriously, more than one of them visibly knocks a helicopter off-course.
- how do you follow this excessively violent, credit-less intro? How about a very slow helicopter ride around New York City set to a country ballad about healing. Then re-introduce us to characters we couldn't recognize from the beginning, one of whom is the star of the movie.
- that star? Robert Ginty (Warrior of the Lost World, The Paper Chase), who has THIRD BILLING after Christopher George (Grizzly, Day of the Animals) and Samantha Eggar (The Brood, The Uncanny). Ginty's co-hero, Steve James (The Warriors, American Ninja 2&3) doesn't even make the opening credits.
- after Ginty and James thwart a beer robbery, some thugs cripple James with a garden hoe. This is immediately followed by Ginty telling the dude's wife in a playground, which is immediately followed by:
- some dude not involved in the robbery or the crippling tied up in an abandoned building. I guess he's in the same gang, so Ginty threatens him with a blowtorch and then leaves him to go find the bad guys, who are listening to "Disco Inferno".
I know what you're thinking, and so does The Exterminator. However, instead of "burn baby burn"-ing down their hideout with his blowtorch (that there's no explanation for in the first place.... did I mention his job is to load beer trucks?), he shoots one guy with a machine gun and knocks two others out, transports them to another abandoned building, then I guess shoots them and lets the rats eat their faces.
This is the first thirty minutes of the movie! The only reason I'm not sure if he shoots them or not is because it flashes back to him shooting the Vietcong dude who cut off his friend(?)'s head, then he just leaves. The Exterminator doesn't have time to answer simple questions like "why does he have a blowtorch" or "is that the same abandoned building" or "how does he know where his friend's wife is but the police don't?"
It's too busy being awesome, and the movie hasn't even gotten to Ginty's sweet "exterminator" outfit, which consists of him wearing this:
While we're here, I'd like to point out that the editor's name is Corky O'Hara. If that's not a fake name then I'm very surprised. Either way, he's put together quite a collection of seemingly unrelated plot elements into a third rate sleazefest of violence and gore. The same goes to James Glickenhaus, who is probably using his real name.
Anyway, you should come over and watch this with me. I'll even start it over for you. Then we can watch Grizzly and 1990: Bronx Warriors, because there's a lot of beer here I'm not going to drink and lord knows you'll need it!
* also of Warrior of the Lost World, starring Robert "The Exterminator"Ginty***
** too soon?
*** see what I did there? tied it all back together!
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