Cocaine Bear, a movie that sounds prefer it was dreamed up between bong hits, arrives in theaters as we speak. Like Eight Legged Freaks, Snakes on a Aircraft, and Sharknado earlier than it, the premise suits squarely into the “animals behaving badly” subgenre of elevator-pitch films. Primarily based on the title and the tagline—“Apex predator, excessive on cocaine, out of its thoughts”—you realize what you’re getting while you purchase a ticket. And who wouldn’t need to see a bear on a drug-fueled rampage? It’s a straightforward promote.
Sadly, Cocaine Bear will not be good, and never even in a “nonetheless price watching intoxicated” means. The movie simply doesn’t land proper, and you’ll’t assist however really feel that it was manufactured simply to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer.
The film is “impressed by actual occasions” in the identical means that the Keep Puft Marshmallow Man is impressed by actual marshmallows. The true cocaine bear, which roamed the Georgia mountains till one fateful day in 1985, was of the American Black selection, weighing in at 175 kilos. The story goes {that a} police officer-turned-drug smuggler hurled a number of duffle luggage of cocaine from a aircraft after which met his personal demise whereas attempting to parachute from the craft himself. The bear that found one in every of his cocaine care packages was discovered lifeless three months later with practically four grams in its bloodstream and its abdomen “packed to the brim” with the white stuff. Following the incident, the bear was stuffed and displayed within the splendidly named Kentucky Enjoyable Mall in Lexington. The mall dubbed the creature “cocaine bear” in 2015.
Artistic liberties, thankfully, have been taken for the movie. This bear has much more enjoyable. The film opens on a aircraft zooming over the forests of Chattahoochee, Georgia, with an aviator-clad man who can’t be something apart from an ’80s drug supplier disco dancing and hurling crimson duffle luggage out of the emergency door. He meets practically the identical inglorious finish as his real-life counterpart, banging his head and falling out unconscious after the luggage.
Cocaine Bear then cuts to an amorous pair of hikers within the woods under. They’re deeply in love, harping on about their wedding ceremony and their oneness with the pure world, and subsequently destined for a foul finish. Positive sufficient, they spot and start to take photos of a bear, and the viewers will get its first glimpse of the bristling CGI beast, coked as much as its eyeballs, gyrating in opposition to a pine. Bloody limbs are quickly flying by way of the bushes. Cocaine Bear, you will have been warned, is brutal. Within the warmth of the maulings, the movie shifts from comedian to disturbing: Intestines are uncovered; heads roll.
The stage is about, then, for a forged of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. You might have Syd White, arch-drug supplier (performed by the late Ray Liotta); his wimpy son with a penchant for plain penne pasta (performed by Solo’s Alden Ehrenreich); and Syd’s deputy, Daveed, performed by O’Shea Jackson Jr. There may be additionally a police detective, performed by The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr., who’s scorching on their path and fearful about his coiffured “fancy canine,” Rosette. Additionally tempting death-by-drug-bear: a pair of youngsters reducing faculty and a involved mom in pursuit, a park ranger and a Smokey Bear-loving wildlife man, and a gang of colorfully dressed hoodlums who patrol the woods stabbing individuals for loot. Some are viciously mauled, and a few aren’t. Then the movie ends.
