2021 marks the 45th anniversary of the cinematic arrival of the big shitty bear in theaters with the 1976 indie blockbuster Grizzly. How fitting that on November 26, 2021, Black Friday, the Dow Jones plunged over 900 points, threatening the longest-running bull market on record with the rise of a big shitty bear market. This is the only time in history that a stock market’s Black Friday, being a Friday when a sell-off results in a massive value drop, coincided with the retail Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when sales are supposed to put retailers in the black, meaning ensuring profit. This particular bull market (bull meaning stocks on the rise) has been built on a landscape of bubbles—bubbles being overvaluations; the stock is worth more than the actual worth of the business. This means it is more of a bullshit market, where everyone knows it isn’t real but is still making money, so what the hell. So once there is a hiccup, even a tiny one, like the resurgence of global plague, the bubbles burst. This means everything reverts back to its true worth, and the market declines into a bear market, where value heads down, not up—a big shitty bear, ready to burst bubbles and chew up a*s. And there is absolutely nothing in place right now that can’t stop it from happening over and over again. For those of us who were around for the crash of ’87, the dot com bust of ’00, and the sub-prime sinkhole of ’07, there is once again the smell of big shitty bear in the air. So why not take a look back at five movies featuring big shitty bears that, even though they are not about the stock market, can provide us a few graphic images of the big shitty bear market slouching its way to Wall Street now.
Grizzly (1976)
The picture that took the cinema image of the American grizzly bear out of the Disney nature film honeypots and into the body count lane. Film audiences who had the living piss scared out of them by Jaws the previous summer were greeted in May by something that could eat them even if they had given up swimming or bathing: a big shitty bear. Not having a robot shark building budget, the early big shitty bear attacks in Grizzly are presented with quick cuts of a giant bear claw glove being waved around with lots of that 70s red paint blood that still looks so damn fierce. Later in the picture, they use shots of a real bear intercut with footage shot of the actors, though never really sharing the same frame, as they might have gotten eaten. The bear footage isn’t all that scary looking, but they take care of that with a big shitty orchestral score with the shitty shrill string section sawing away whenever the bears are onscreen. Also, must be noted the ball of fire at the end when the big shitty bear explodes as if the bear had been chugging gasoline prior to meeting Mr. Rocket Launcher (suitable for children eight and up). Made for less than a million dollars, this picture made $39 million at the box office and held the record for the highest-grossing indie movie of all time until Halloween came out two years later.
Adam and Eve Versus The Cannibals (1983)
To find the shittiest bear costume in all the big shitty bears in movies, we, of course, end up in the land of the strangest movies ever made, Italy. Mark Gregory pulls his britches down for Bible business between his lead roles in 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape From The Bronx. Like I had tried to mention in a previous article, Italian movies feature outlandish sequences of wild sound and wacko visuals that blind the ears and deafen the eyes, and no, that is not a typo. With Adam and Eve versus The Cannibals, the Italians blow your mind starting on 52:25 of the video with, low and behold, the lord god-king of shitty big shitty bear costumes. Is it the shittiest because of the carpet store rug fur? Is it the wide-open toothy mouth that doesn’t move? No. For whatever reason, maybe to make the bear look taller, the costume has the wearer’s head in the neck instead of the big shitty bear’s head. This ends up making the bear have one long honking neck, and my god, you will bust a lung watching it wrestle Italian cave men with its big shitty bear head teetering atop that telephone pole neck.
Guardians (2017)
Here we have a movie where the entire picture is saved by its big shitty bear. This superhero picture is a flop in its native Russia and provides a paraphrase remake of the recent low-hanging fruit Fantastic Four pictures. While graphically stunning for those medicating their way through, Guardians hasn’t all that much going for it until the must-see sequence starting on 1:03:03. This is where the Thing equivalent, Arsus the Were-Bear, transforms into a bear-headed half-beast and picks up a big mother of a machine gun. He goes to town, this huge body of a man with the head of a bear blasting away. Then Arsus completely transforms into a huge full-on bear, with the machine gun strapped to his back and set up to autofire. The image of a big shitty bear running around with a live machine gun firing away on its back is very satisfying. It looks an awful lot like when a pet gets into a pair of your dirty drawers on the floor and runs around with them on its head.
Annihilation (2018)
For the scariest big shitty bear, we look towards Alex Garland’s excellent British sci-fi horror Annihilation. The British sci-fi horror sub-genre has always produced some very cosmic variations on the gruesome, and this time it’s big shitty bears that get the treatment. Here we are treated to big shitty bears of the future, mutated by the alien forces as play in the picture. This time the effects are too good, too effective, and too scary, making this bear extra shitty. It has part of its face missing. Ewwwwww! It can also cry like a little girl to attract its prey—what a shitty way to hunt. So while Annihilation is a class film with an astounding third act, it also has the high watermark for the caliber of big shitty bears. I have only viewed this once as I am deathly afraid to run into that f*****g bear again.
Grizzly 2: Revenge (1983/2020)
The absolute shittiest movie of all the big shitty bear movies, so shitty it was not completed until 37 years after it was shot. How shitty is it? It used to be called Grizzly 2: The Concert; that’s how shitty. In this sequel to the grandpappy of all big shitty bear movies, the bear attacks a giant concert in the middle of a national park. Or at least would have attacked it if the money hadn’t run out. In true early 80s fashion, this time, there was a giant animatronic bear that was built for the picture, Jaws style. It just didn’t work worth a tin s**t, flailing around in the wrong directions. In order to cover this up, the camera work keeps the robo-bear in sight close-ups in the foreground of shots, only revealing smaller details and keeping the shots dark. You only get a look at how huge and wonderful this big mechanical shitty bear was when it is lying dead in a pile at the end of the picture. Apparently, Charlie Sheen passed on the lead in Karate Kid to get killed in this movie. George Clooney and Laura Dern show up to get killed too. The film was shot in Hungary in 1983, with the concert footage captured by having fake bands for the movie follow a Nazareth show. The audience, which was the largest public gathering up to that point in Hungarian history, rocked away without knowing the big shitty bands playing weren’t real or that they were to be attacked by a giant robot bear. The shitty restoration with shitty CGI and shitty nature shots is perfect for this kind of shitty project. It is always educational what can be put together after all the money goes away, which is exactly what many retail investors and 401k holders will need to do once the big shitty bear market begins.
