Last week we discussed GET CRAZY, a movie about a bunch of bands putting on a concert that was just barely released in August of ’83. Today we’re going to take a look at a 1983 film also about a bunch of bands putting on a concert, but this one wasn’t released at all until 2020, because it was never finished. Technically the thing they released is considered finished, but I’d dispute that description.

GRIZZLY II: REVENGE is officially the sequel to William Girdler’s GRIZZLY (1976). Over the years I’ve stumbled across it occasionally on IMDb when looking up various filmographies – I believe it used to be listed as GRIZZLY II: THE CONCERT and GRIZZLY II: THE PREDATOR – but it said the production fell apart before they finished filming. Little did I know there was an executive producer out there still determined to release it.

The first film’s co-producer and co-writer David Sheldon (FOXY BROWN, SHEBA BABY) wrote the sequel with his wife Joan McCall (a soap opera writer and actress in PEOPLETOYS and ACT OF VENGEANCE), and was set to direct, until the producer hired commercial director André Szöts behind his back. Though it’s set in Yellowstone National Park it was filmed on a Soviet military base in Budapest, in an unusual act of artistic cooperation during the Cold War. The premise is that poachers killed a baby bear to sell its bladder in China, so a giant mama bear is on an angry rampage at the same time a huge music festival is going on nearby. SPOILER: eventually the bear shows up outside the concert, and awkwardly smashes her face through the stage for like half a second at the very end, but mostly the bear and the concert are able to occupy the same movie without disturbing each other.

As the movie exists today, released digitally and on disc by Gravitas Ventures, it opens with footage clearly not shot anywhere close to 1983, and making no attempt to look like it was. We get these establishing drone shots of trees and clean digital stock footage of bear cubs, and then a ludicrous shot of a CG bullet hitting one of the bears. It looks more like a funny meme than something to put in a real movie, and the font choices on the credits are even less professional.

The first scene of the ’83 footage is a classic/typical low budget horror opening: three partying youths are hiking up a hill in Yellowstone, ignoring all the signs posted about bear danger. They find a place (near a cave) to camp out, play their boombox, drink some beer. One of the two men wanders off for a minute while the woman dances around the fire, strips to her underwear, crawls into a sleeping bag with her boyfriend. We see this from behind some trees, the perspective of a bear watching them, and then galloping toward their screaming faces. Their friend comes back in time to see their offscreen but presumably mangled corpses and then run away and also be eaten by the camera.

What makes the scene notable, and I’m sure what allowed them to release the movie, is that the three young campers are played by George Clooney, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen, who are of course given top billing for their brief appearance. This would’ve been Clooney’s second movie (after something called AND THEY’RE OFF), Dern’s followup to FOXES, and Sheen’s third role, following “Boy Under Lamppost” in BADLANDS and “Kid at Wedding” in THE EXECUTION OF PRIVATE SLOVIK. They all look fresh as the morning dew, and though the sound mix is weird it does appear to be their actual voices. The best part is Dern muttering oddball Dern-isms as they come up the hill. But then they’re dead.

There are other big names who actually do have enough screen time to deserve their place high up in the credits, most notably Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher. She plays local bigshot or politician or something Eileene Draygon, who’s putting on the concert as a fundraiser and pulls a the-mayor-in-JAWS when it comes to responding to the grizzly situation. The actual lead of the movie (as much as there is one in this not-very-coherent footage) is park ranger Nick Hollister (Steve Inwood, who played the director Jesse in STAYING ALIVE). He finds the dead bodies and leads a search for the large revanchist bear.

The female lead is Head of Bear Management Samantha Owens (Deborah Raffin, GOD TOLD ME TO), and coincidentally these two have a dynamic similar to Dennis Quaid and Bess Armstrong in JAWS 3-D. Samantha keeps making tearful pleas not to kill the bear, since she’s only seeking vengeance for the murder of her child, just like you or I would do, she says.

They quickly recruit French-Canadian expert bear hunter Bouchard (John Rhys-Davies from that movie RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), who wears a fringe jacket and face paint, speaks in poetic gibberish about their crusade against the “devil-bear,” and constantly refers to himself in the third person. He comes off the silliest of any of the actors, but he’s about the only one able to make much of an impression.

Samantha gets mad at Bouchard for saving her life by killing a bear moments before it mauls the shit out of her. Since it wasn’t female or giant it’s obviously not the bear they were looking for. A senseless tragedy. Should’ve let him tear her open and munch on her.

Meanwhile, we also follow some poachers, some of whom obviously suffer severe bear defeat. There’s a cool biker guy (he actually rides a motorcycle around in the woods) and the best one is a redneck played by CLEOPATRA JONES director Jack Starrett.

The odd and interesting thing about the movie (besides its disastrous production and late resurrection) is that all this killer bear stuff really is intercut with a concert movie. There’s setting up the stage, a little rehearsal, some incidents with the head of security (Dick Anthony Williams, UP TIGHT, THE STAR CHAMBER), and a part where a stagehand offends Draygon by stopping her from bringing VIPs into the off-limits area, and the stagehand is played by Timothy Spall.

It seems from the footage – and this is confirmed in a really entertaining and informative 2020 The Ringer article -that the producers really put on a big concert and filmed it. Apparently called “The Beast Festival,” it drew between 40,000 and 50,000 fans. The bands we see in the movie are mostly new wave/synth-pop type of stuff, but when they show the crowd coming in it looks like a HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT type of situation, lots of stoners with sleeveless W.A.S.P. shirts, jean jackets and studded leather gauntlets and shit. It turns out that’s because the headliners (not shown in the movie) were the band Nazareth.

In the movie the festival is headlined by a fictional synth-pop band called The Predator, whose lead singer (Nigel Dolman) uses his corny-ass hit song “So Good, So Pure, So Kind” to win over and then dump stagehand Chrissy (Deborah Foreman, VALLEY GIRL). The Predator also features Kevin Connolly (who, with Dolman, was a not-very-established duo called Michelangelo’s David). Barbie Wilde, a future cinematic icon for playing Female Punk in DEATH WISH 3 and Female Cenobite in HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II, is for some reason credited as “The Predator Robotic Drummer,” but sadly she is not dressed as a robot (though she looks cool).

The other acts are real bands from different countries, including a cool English all-female new wave group called Toto Coelo, a Scottish synth band called Set the Tone, and a Hungarian group called KFT (Korlátolt Felelősségű Társaság, or “The Limited Liability Partnership”). An interesting thing about that last band is that they did exist at the time but it appears their footage in the movie is shot decades later when they’re old.

That’s one of the funniest things about GRIZZLY II: you’re constantly time traveling while watching it. They have all this really impressive vintage footage of these bands playing to an enormous crowd but they’ll suddenly insert totally different looking shots of an audience who were definitely not alive in 1983. And then there’s this band that doesn’t seem to be of the same era, with a singer shot close up, without a microphone, looking into the camera, like a music video… because sure enough they’re just using the song and some clips from this 2016 video by a band called The Dayz.

It’s both amusing and frustrating to watch this mixture of a crude but somewhat impressive b-movie and a not remotely passable stock footage editing project. Reading that Ringer article gives me some sympathy for executive producer Suzanne C. Nagy and her decision to revive the movie decades after being screwed over by unscrupulous financiers, but without that context it feels insulting. You imagine some cynical rights holders asking themselves, “Short of finding actual filmmakers and giving them a budget for reshoots, what can we do to make this seem like it technically counts as a movie?” Initially I was shocked how little they cared about matching the new footage with the old, but the credits made me realize that there is no new footage – they credit numerous stock footage companies like Shutterstock, Pond5 and Getty Images, plus 19 different Youtube channels that provided sound effects. And there are nine different composers credited, which explains the constantly shifting, distractingly modern score.

But by far the biggest problem of the movie, and really the only one that matters, is how little you see the grizzly. Your average comedy that has one scene feature Bart the Bear has several times more bear in it than GRIZZLY II does. There are no trained bears at all, just the occasional licensed nature footage, and some fun but minimal glimpses of an adorably lifeless looking animatronic bear that was apparently 16 feet tall and built by Nick Maley (KRULL). They didn’t get around to shooting the main FX scenes before their budget ran out, so they promised he could do them second unit back in the States. Unfortunately the three bears he built were confiscated by the Hungarian government and/or destroyed in a warehouse fire, so it never happened.

In what little they did shoot with the bear she’s rarely seen next to anybody or anything else, so I didn’t realize how big she was supposed to be until the part where Bouchard lassos her and tries to climb up her back. Yeah, when they called her giant they really meant giant. Seems like something that should be shown in the movie.

Of course I’m happy to have finally been able to see what this was, and I’m especially glad it inspired me to read about the crazy behind-the-scenes story, but I do wish someone had come up with a way to make what they had into a passable killer bear movie instead of just a curiosity. That mama bear deserved her revenge. And so did Toto Coelo.

p.s. As long as we’re releasing incomplete movies, somebody find what they shot for THE RETURN OF BILLY JACK in 1985, please.