Claws - 1977

Jaws came out in 1975 to a worldwide boxoffice explosion, invented the "summer blockbuster" supposedly, and was a great critical success.  You can't expect it to have no follow ups, rip offs, or attempts to cash in on that...  And while there are hundreds of stupid killer shark movies, there are also similar forays into killer "other creatures".

I mean lets be honest here, for a minute.  The title?  Pretty fucking cool.  Jaws, Claws?  You see what they're going for here?  Do ya, motherfucker???!  Claws, cause bears have claws.  I'm issuing false enthusiasm here, cause I don't have much.  So let's get to it.

The guy who did the American opening montage of Terror of Mechagodzilla directs this Jaws ripoff about a killer bear.  There's a old Native American legend about a bear demon, and in the beginning of the movie a grizzly gets wounded.  Now, as we all know because we're all reading my blog every day, I discussed revenge as one of my reasons for killing in my last blog entry.  I'll copy and paste here...
3) Animal escapes zoo and generally goes on random rampage.  Seemingly out for revenge, the hunky hero is called in and when tranquilizers don't work, it's kill time (usually sad and dramatic)

Now in my example I said it was a zoo, but what I should have focused on was not the "how" part but rather the revenge part.  In these, it's all about the animal seemingly wanting revenge specifically against humans.  In this case, Jason, Henry, Chris, and the Sheriff, who are all out in a small Alaskan town where people are getting mauled.  Native American dude Henry is warning about the bear while Jason and his ex-wife Chris have spats, and in the meantime don't forget the 15 foot tall bear.

It's a fine example of a decent middle grader movie.  There's nothing BAD about it, in fact I was even slightly entertained.  At the same time, it's not that cool, and there's not much GOOD about it either.  It was filmed in Alaska, and the scenery is beautiful.  Some of the shots of the bear are decent.  But then there's the end, where literally the entire thing is in degrees of slow motion, and there's many a scene where it's shot and edited in a confusing way...  There's also the fact that, plain as day, you never see bear and human in the same shot, and it's obvious as to how this was made.

In an era where people are still hailing Jaws as a classic, movies like this are completely forgotten.  One other reviewer pointed out, this was basically the Asylum knockoff of it's time, but this is before knockoffs were consistently complete shit, so I give this a 3.5...no, a 4 star review.