Grizzly Flats-Flat, and no Grizzly

With a Red Box rental being only a couple of bucks, sometimes you take a chance even when you know better.  Sometimes you get a pleasant surprise like Exit Humanity, other times you get Grizzly Flats.  I guess I’m a bit of a sucker for rampaging bear movies.  Maybe it was because I remember the lurid commercials for Grizzly as a child, or maybe just because I secretly always hoped Ben would one day take the head off that pompous Dan Haggerty. Well, there was no Grizzly, in Grizzly Flats,, rampaging or not, and barely a movie.

The plot, if you can all it that, is that a brilliant scientist runs off to the middle of the wilderness to build a sort of dimensional resonator.  His trial runs apparently allow shadow people to cross over into our dimension.  The shadow people harass him and his wife, as well as the local meth cooking inbreeds, and the resident trailer park hooker.  The wife finds a gourd baby, the scientist starts tweaking, the hooker gets scarred, the sheriff finally gets to see some boob, the inbreeds get killed, and the shadow men do shadow shit.  If only the movie was as short as that synopsis, I would only have wasted 2 bucks not an hour and a half.

So where to begin? This is really bad even for a low budget.  First the scientist Sylvane, or something it sounded a lot like So Vain (I’d accuse the director of being clever, but the movie itself makes that unlikely), a brilliant physicist who leaves a university to go to the wilderness to work on his invention.  His invention, a dimensional resonator which apparently is constructed from metal plates, copper tubing and a few circuit boards, looked a lot like Robbie the Robot if he were converted into a moonshine still.

Well So Vain likes to yell, like almost every line in the film.   If he isn’t yelling he’s talking in an “I’m better than you” sarcastic tone.  This makes it impossible to like him, care for him or take him seriously.  This is a bad thing for the main character, especially the protagonist in the film.  Maybe if he had been slightly less annoying and hysterical, he would have done a decent job, but I doubt it.  As it is I don’t know who the actor who played him is, and don’t care enough to look him up.

His wife was cute, but her acting skills were limited to, well honestly she had no skills, at least none on display.  She couldn’t have convinced me she had nice tits, if she had taken her shirt off, her acting was that bad.  The gourd baby was a better actor than his mom or dad.

The star power is provided by Judd Nelson, who plays the world’s most pathetic pornographer and red neck sheriff.  He is the most believable actor in the film, but it had to be force of habit, a very weak force at that.  He mostly just wanders around talking in a monotone, and trying to get the local hooker naked on tape.  The fact that the local law, can’t get the local prostitute naked (until she is horribly scarred, more later) points to the intelligence of this whole script.  Come on now.

The local hooker, who Nelson calls “Daddy”? Or maybe it’s Danni? Who the fuck knows, and does anyone really care for that matter.  She is played by Danielle de Luca, and Danielle is the only good thing about the film, it’s also probably her most embarrassing.  She is raped and horribly scarred by the shadow men. By horribly scarred I mean she has had a New York strip steak taped to her face.   She doesn’t really get to show off her acting skills, but she does show her breasts, much to the audience, and Judd Nelson’s relief.

The inbred rednecks are probably the most stupidly stereotypical rednecks on film since the Clampet family. They cook meth, are toothless, have speech impediments and dress like the Winter’s brothers.  Every time they opened their mouth I wanted to kill a city slicker.

As for the story, well there was no story. No coherent story anyway.  The scientist’s master plan to defeat the shadow men is to smoke meth with the rednecks and then shoot their weapons wildly and randomly into the air, as shadow men fly all around them. Not surprisingly but stupidly all the rednecks end up dead.  The scientist, his brilliant plan failing returns home and cooks his disturbed wife’s gourd baby and feed it to her.  That will snap her back to reality.  Thankfully he still had a bullet left in the gun so the movie ended shortly after that.

The direction couldn’t have been much more than “yell louder” “laugh manically” or “shoot randomly”.  I’ve seen better dialogue in a bukakke video.  For the actor playing Pastor Ron, retire immediately, go into stand up comedy, and immediately retire from that.  It’s like he was trying his best to be funny and he wasn’t.   The only time I almost laughed was in his final scene, and even that was badly botched

Really, it was that bad, worse actually, I’m just not watching it again to make the review more thorough.   There is absolutely no real reason to watch this film.  Danielle de Luca is gorgeous, but see Naked Prey if you haven’t already.  She’s totally nude and it’s a much better film.  Or see Necrosis, where she doesn’t get naked, but it’s a good little film.  Judd Nelson fans, stay the hell away, you’ll just feel sorry for him and try and send him money.  Just remember him as he was.   There is the novelty of seeing a relative of the master Edgar Allen Poe as one of the rednecks, but he has other films.

I gave this a one on IMDB, but I don’t have to be that kind on my blog.  On a scale of 1-10, I give it a -2.  If this film were lying on a beach, House of the Dead would kick sand in it’s face.