Grizzly Park (Allumination DVD)
Picture:
C- Sound: C- Extras: D Feature: C-
Grizzly Park is a horror movie that was made
for horror fans. The classic cautionary
tale mode of horror that was so popular in the seventies and eighties has sadly
dropped off recently, but thankfully this movie has brought it back with two
tons of flesh-tearing social vengeance.
A group
of juvenile delinquents have opted for community service to pay off their debts
to society, each of them a true-to-form stereotype just like nearly every other
B horror film you’ve ever seen. As such,
if you are familiar with the conventions and trends that go along with these
movies, you can just about predict everything that’s going to happen at least
ten minutes before it does. And really,
that’s the fun of this movie. You don’t
watch a B horror flick to see an original, creative, thought-provoking film,
that’s why the good lord gave us Dario Argento. You watch a movie called Grizzly Park with the tagline “It’s
gonna be a bear” because you already know what’s
coming and you get the payoff of seeing exactly what you were expecting. When the park ranger warns the kids not to go
off the trail because of wolf traps, and then two of the kids go off the trail,
that’s your cue to nudge the person sitting next to you and whisper, “They’re
going to get caught in a wolf trap” and then wink knowingly. And then five
minutes later, you’re right!
But one
of the most pleasing things about this movie for horror fans is that it sticks
to the tradition of its cautionary tale predecessors in one very important way:
all of the effects are practical as opposed to digital, and that goes for the
bear as well. In the shots where the
characters are staring down a giant grizzly bear, the actors where really
staring down a giant grizzly bear. Now
granted, there’s not a whole lot of gore in the film, compared to the potential
for a bear mauling, but there is one really nice shot in which the extremely
stereotyped Latina girl (she actually threatens to “cap” the bear) is ripped in
half and oozing entrails. The only real
disappointment is that there is little creativity in the deaths. Now granted Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees
were practically artists when they killed, and the giant freaking bear is, well,
it’s just a giant freaking bear. But
it’s also a scripted bear, and I am a bit disappointed in the filmmakers that
they couldn’t come up with a single better death than this guy gets stabbed,
this chick gets mauled.
The
extras are more or less sub-par and consist of a few very short making-of
featurettes that mostly just explain to you again what the movie was that you
just watched. There is also the trailer
for Grizzly Park and a few other
very obviously B-rate movies. Also in
the audio options there is a commentary track with the director and producer
which is rather lacking and every few minutes trails off into dead air.
The video
is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The picture quality is less than
impressive if you take the time to notice it, but really there’s nothing
visually striking enough to even draw your attention to it. The colors are listless, the result of
shooting in the woods with no effort to improve the surroundings or even color
correct in post production. The sound is
Dolby Digital 5.1 stereo and either suffered in translation or was not that
well recorded in the first place. It’s
not even that there’s extra background noise, it’s just not as sharp as it
could be and like the color, there’s just no life to it.
One last
bittersweet remark I have to make about this disc is about the opening credits.
They’re really cool. They’re original, visually interesting, and
really well executed. But they have almost nothing to do with the rest of the
movie. They set up a biblical story in
which a bunch of kids get eaten by bears and then proceed into a really cool
animation made from found etchings depicting dark biblical scenes. And then that’s it. Not a single mention of religion or religious
undertones throughout the whole rest of the movie. What should have been a really cool supporting
aspect of the film gets left behind and forgotten only to be added as an end
note in a review.
- Matthew Carrick
