The terrifying animal at the centre of Burke Doeren’s thriller is convincingly ferocious but the supporting humans don’t match its power
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espite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana’s Glacier National Park (described here as a “trillion to one” occurrence), Burke Doeren’s debut grips in tooth’n’claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.
Down at the park, fire season is all the rangers think they have on their plate, but they’re not reckoning with wayward teenagers and rogue bears. At the giftshop, Michele (Ali Skovbye) leans on Paul (Jacob Buster) to join her posse and help her shoo off an unwanted suitor at Trout Lake. So he leaves colleague Julie (Brec Bassinger) to a sexy bivouac with boyfriend Roy (Matt Lintz) in a separate location. Meanwhile, with smoke plumes occupying the rangers, rookie Joan (Lauren Call) is commandeered to lead a tour group heading out to a remote lodge.
The initial attack – with Julie and Roy caught prone in sleeping bags – conveys with horrendous immediacy what being at the mercy of a quarter-ton of fur and muscle must be like. And Doeren further hammers home the verisimilitude, using the visitors’ lodge to firmly establish the geography and vulnerability of the nervy rescue mission – protected only by a fire bucket – to reach screaming Julie. Doeren cranks up this near-forensic grasp of the predicament by his focus on the inflicted injuries: doctor-in-the-house John (Oded Fehr) battles to stop Roy bleeding out, while it falls to Paul to pick up the pieces at Trout Lake.
