Fletcher plays a park superintendent oh-so-subtly named Draygon, a buttoned-up manager who foregoes the safety of park attendees for the benefit of staging a money-making “rock concert.” Foreman (in a role prior to her breakout Valley Girl) plays the park ranger’s wide-eyed daughter, who develops a relationship that ends a few minutes later. She is, however, given a few icky scenes with her ranger dad (Steve Inwood) that unintentionally provide strong sexual chemistry. Rhys-Davies has the only role that is remotely interesting, as a Paul Bunyan-esque grizzly whisperer who speaks with an unintelligible accent and gets to chew on such dialogue as: “It sounds like you have the devil bear.”
As previously mentioned, one of the former versions of the movie was dubbed The Concert because the majority of the plot ditches any bear-centric suspense to focus on the superintendent’s massive Euro-trash music festival. Grizzly II: Revenge is far more concerned with splicing in old concert footage from these unknown musicians (even awkwardly tossing in a 2016 music video from a recent act) that are little more than time-capsule curiosities.
When it could have perhaps splurged on a digital grizzly, the film lazily relies on point-of-view shots from the ursine’s perspective, some moving at freeway speeds and one in particular where the bear appears to possess headlights.
“…an incoherent collage of shots that render any sense of narrative obsolete.”
The producer cites the struggles in obtaining the rights to the picture and then needing to craft a “challenging new narrative” out of the disparate pieces, but it’s arguably beneath the standards of the leaked workprint. Despite the former’s lack of sound and effects, the scenes it did have felt purposeful to an overall story. Aside from rearranging the chronology of events, Grizzly II: Revenge further re-edits footage into an incoherent collage of shots that render any sense of narrative obsolete. Plotlines are initiated and abandoned within the very same scene, characters are introduced and never heard from again, and dramatic music swells during the most innocuous conversations. The result is a paw-slap in the face to fans hungry for some completion.
The whole movie feels like an overlong Kickstarter set up for a The Disaster Artist-like treatment. Honestly, that would provide a far more fascinating story than the pureed plot provided here. It’s hard to imagine just for whom this was aimed, as the effort to give bad-movie lovers anything close to closure to this once-mythical cinematic creature known as Grizzly 2: Revenge gives us nothing but the bear minimum.
"…the Bigfoot of bad movies since it was filmed almost four decades ago."
Nice post