Claws (1977)

Fresh and Exciting

A different way of telling a story

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This is possibly the only good killer bear movie of its time. Most people who review appear never to have watched it all the way through, assuming it's just a watered down Grizzly. I mean, this isn't the best movie it could have been but it is still better. They used a real bear for most scenes instead of a lousy costume and the effects are just better. It's realistic to what bear attacks are like, and why one might start killing people. Heck, even the bear is a realistic height! Everything about this movie works (well, maybe not the trippy scenes with the old man...). It came out after Grizzly but improved on everything. There is no awesome man-on-bear fights in Grizzly, the end is stupid....I really hate that movie! It gets too much hype for what is just a bad Jaws rip-off. Try out Claws before Grizzly any day.

Since William Girdler's "Grizzly" supposedly was a shameless rip-off of "Jaws" (at least according to a lot of reviewers disliking the movie), then I guess this is an even more shameless rip-off of an already shameless rip-off and thus the ultimate rip-off of "Jaws"? Whatever! Let them say what they want. I usually enjoy these typically 70's and enormously cheesy "animals revolting" movies very much and even found a handful of redeeming elements in "Claws"! That certainly wasn't an easy thing to do, as this film is really poor and amateurishly put together. Basically speaking, a killer animal flick doesn't need a brilliant or flawless scenario in order to be entertaining, but it looks as if the makers deliberately tried to sabotage their own film with their continuous and inappropriate use of pointless flashbacks, dreadful clichés and irrelevant vendettas between dull main characters. There's an ordinary grizzly bear – perhaps a little bit over-sized, but still a normal bear – on the rampage deep in the Alaskan woods, but for some reason the plot insists to convince us it's not just a bear but a malignant Indian spirit known as the "Quistica". Consequently one of the supportive characters is an old Indian mumbling inaudible stuff all the time and having kooky hallucinations, whereas the story should be focusing on savage grizzly bear attacks instead! During the fairly good and atmospherically shot opening sequences, we witness how a trio of hunters illegally wound a gigantic bear but fail to put him down completely. The raged animal promptly attacks woodchopper Jason Monroe and terrorizes the woods for the following five years. When the bear beastly interrupts a boy scout camping party attended by Jason's son and his ex-wife's new fiancée, he decides to put together a hunting party to destroy the bear once and for all. Although nobody is likely to care or even sympathize with any of the lead characters, the film obtrudes their love lives to us through insufferable flashbacks. Worst of all is that these flashbacks serve absolutely no purpose and merely just count as filler and to make us care for the familial situation of the characters. That is called Emo(tion)-TV and really doesn't mix well with horror. The hunter has flashbacks about how he fell in love with his wife and then lost her, the wife has a flashback how she left her husband, the new lover has a flashback how he gradually stole the wife's heart and the annoying kid has a flashback of the time his parents were still happily together. I swear, at a certain point I was afraid that even the bear would have a flashback about the times he was carelessly swooping fish out of the river, or something. During the second half of the film, the lousy flashbacks are slowly being replaced with lousy gibberish about Indian mythology and brotherhood speeches. The bear attacks are okay, but not as virulent and exploitative as in the aforementioned "Grizzly" and the wildlife tableaux are occasionally enchanting to look at. The climax is exciting but unfortunately not exciting enough to make you forget the overall dullness of the script and the atrocity of the dialogs. Furthermore, "Claws" also suffers from terrible performances and inept direction, so unless you have an incredibly high level of tolerance for 70's eco-horror/killer-animal flicks, you probably shouldn't search for this puppy.

Claws is set in the Alaskan wilderness & opens to a red tinted shot of a Grizzly Bear walking around a bit, as the credits roll. Then we see two Grizzly Bears fighting each other as three big game hunters look on. They try to shoot one of the Bears but only succeed in wounding it, all three decide to split. Meanwhile, further down the road a logger named Jason Monroe (Jason Evers) & his wife Chris (Carla Layton) are heading back home in their truck when the radiator breaks. While attempting to walk back to town Jason is attacked by the wounded out-of-control Grizzly & although he survives the attack is badly injured. Claws then has a few paragraphs of text that appear "Admiralty, Alaska July 27. Local logger seriously mauled by rampaging Grizzly Bear near this community. Bear believed wounded by un-identified hunters." Then "September 2. State surveying party attacked by Grizzly Bear. Two killed one seriously injured. Reports confirmed after being wounded, giant Grizzly turns rogue killer" appears." Even more text flashes up on screen "November 14. two hikers killed by Devil Bear near this Alaskan community yesterday. Tracks of rogue killer disappear in fresh snow below Devils Paw mountain. Hunt called off." Finally "5 years later. Admiralty Alaska, again stunned by savage Bear attacks. Local logger says Satan Bear has returned to this community" appears & we can get on with the film proper! Jason Monroe still has nightmares about the day he was attacked, an attack that meant he could no longer continue his job, it also cost him his marriage & young son Buck (Buck Monroe, which means this kids real name is exactly the same as his characters!). Local scout leader Howard Lockhart (Glenn Sipes) is taking his teams of boys for a weekend of camping in the Alaskan forests. They are attacked by the Grizzly and Buck is badly mauled. The forest commissioner Ben Jones (Leon Ames) sets up a posse of men to try & track the Grizzly down, including Gil (Wayne Lonacre), Marshall (Bill Ratcliffe) & a guy named Virgil who was sadly left off the credits I'm afraid, who all think they can trap the Grizzly in a special cage. They fail & are killed by the Grizzly in the process. Since the Grizzly mauled his son Jason now feels even more anger, hate & bitterness towards the Grizzly & decides to go after it himself when all attempts to find it & stop it fail. Along with Ben who also feels responsible, Howard who funnily enough also has a grudge towards the Grizzly & an old Indian guy named Henry Chico (Anthony Caruso) who, yeah you guessed it, has personal reasons for going too, Jason sets out to kill the Grizzly killer once & for all (and make everyone's personal problems just disappear)! Directed by Richard Bansbach & R.E. Pierson Claws is a sorry excuse for a film. The script by cinematographer & producer Chuck D. Keen & Brian Russell is as boring, as clichéd & as padded out with unnecessary scenes as you would expect a cheap no-budget Jaws cash-in to contain. Claws has it's fair share of melodramatics between the dull characters & even relies on heavy flashbacks to expand upon these unnecessary sub-plots. The Grizzly Bear & it's potential victims are virtually never in the same shot, this makes for some very awkward looking attack sequences of which there aren't many anyway. And the dull as dishwater ending is mostly in slow-motion which becomes incredibly annoying. There's no blood or gore either so forget about that. On a technical level Claws is very poor, editing, lighting, continuity, acting, direction & production values throughout are certainly nothing to praise. One thing I will praise in Claws though is the cinematography by writer Chuck D. Keen it captures some of the beautiful untouched Alaskan wilderness extremely well, unfortunately this has the effect of the viewer thinking their watching some sort of nature programme rather than a horror film! Every other shot seems to be of an animal, tree or Alaskan landscape. Claws as a horror film fails to generate any atmosphere, scares, excitement, originality or memorable sequences. Definitely one to avoid unless you want to sit through 90 odd minutes of travelogue footage of Alaskan mountains & forests, which I most certainly don't!

A lot of people confuse this movie with "Grizzly". "Grizzly" has Christopher George AND Andrew Prine AND Richard Jaekl AND a female park ranger who decides to take time out from hunting an 18-foot killer grizzly bear to strip off all her clothes and take an impromptu shower in a waterfall (guess what happens?). "Claws" has none of these things, just a lot of travelogue footage of the Alaskan wilderness and some Native American nonsense about a "spirit bear". Neither movie is particularly scary. They both contain a lot shots of a disembodied bear paw flying through air, lopping off heads and limbs edited together with close-ups of the face of a real bear who looks only mildly annoyed. There is one pretty good scene where the bear menaces a boy scout camp, but it's only good because it's dark and you can't really see the bear. Actually, you can't see a lot of things in the very murky existing prints of this hard-to-find movie. It probably doesn't merit a DVD resurrection, however, because I have a feeling that what you can't see would still suck. "Grizzly" is so bad it's good; "Claws" is just bad.