Taking its absurd premise from an actual true story. Which in Hollywood speak means completely made up. The true story goes that in 1985, a convicted drug smuggler was found dead after a failed parachute jump. The working theory has it that he was on-board a plane which contained hundreds of pounds of smuggled cocaine.
Paranoid that the feds were on their tail, the smuggler threw some of the stash from the plane. The smuggler was found dead in Knoxville with roughly $15 million dollars of cocaine strapped to him and that was that. Four months later, a black bear was found dead in the nearby woods. The cause of death was determined to be an overdose of Cocaine.
‘Cocaine Bear’ takes that setup and simply asks “what if the bear didn’t die and went on a murderous cocaine-filled rampage instead?” Meanwhile, unwillingly caught in the path of the bear is a collective of human prey.
Among this random group of rag tags are the hired gangsters looking to retrieve the bags of cocaine for their boss (Ray Liotta), a detective hot on their heels, the quirky park ranger, a group of wayward teens who like causing mischief by way of random stabbings and a mother (Keri Russell) who is searching for her rebellious daughter. Not to mention the raging, frothing at the mouth black bear looking for her next hit.
When the trailer for ‘Cocaine Bear’ dropped late last year, it was powered by the sounds of White Lines (Don’t Do It) by Melle Mel. The trailer itself was absurdly hilarious and promised a fun throwback to the likes of the great B-films made by Roger Corman. The question is, does the film actually deliver on that promise? The answer is yes and no. If anything, it actually winds up feeling much more in the vein of 80’s Spielberg as it becomes more about the “family” element.
Tonally speaking, it is a bit all over the place. For gorehounds, there is plenty of gore to be had. It plays up its hard R-rating by delivering an abundance of spilled intestines, dismembered limbs and the likes. All of which are mostly played for laughs. It proudly plays up the horror-comedy angle and that’s all well and good. Less intriguing were its human characters.
Outside of Ray Liotta’s chiseled hard-boiled mob boss, I’m hard pressed to remember anything about the rest of them. That’s a shame considering the film spends a large chunk of its first 40 minutes establishing them. The problem is they’re all mostly bland cannon fodder. The reality is we’re all here to see the antics of the strung out Bear itself leaving the human characters to feel like a distraction.
Director Elizabeth Banks pulls a lot of cues from the likes of Sam Raimi and The Coen Brothers. It proudly wears its influences on its sleeves and never apologizes for it. The park ranger alone feels like a character ripped directly out of ‘Fargo’ with her quirky Southern accent.
I won’t deny that I got a few laughs from it, mostly with the CG Bear itself. The animators clearly had a lot of fun mimicking the behaviors of taking Cocaine and transplanting it into a black bear. But it mostly suffers from the same problem that ‘Snakes on a Plane’ had, where the premise and title alone were absurd genius but the movie itself was just rather flat.
Much like many of those direct-to-VHS horror films of the 80’s, it’s another case of the end product being unable to live up to the somewhat genius marketing fuelling it. It’s not without its charms and audiences will most likely have a good time with it, but for myself? I guess I wanted it to be more Roger Corman and less 80’s Amblin.
- Daniel M
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