Grizzly Night review – animals attack in campsite thriller of rogue bears and wayward teens

Despite 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.

Given the unsparing realism in the heat of the moment, it’s a pity the framing for the creature feature is so unconvincing. Shot with the overlit streaming-era sunburst look, the 1960s setting feels ersatz – and the various teen entanglements supposedly there to endear/bug us into caring about the bait are Scooby-Doo level stuff. Only Joan’s trial-by-fur to prove herself a leader carries any emotional or moral heft, though the final finger-wagging about sensible conservation is hard to disagree with. Doeren clearly has a feel for the bear necessities, but the human interest hardly gets its boots on.