The Night of the Grizzly

USA 1966
produced by
Burt Dunne for Paramount
directed by Joseph Pevney
starring Clint Walker, Martha Hyer, Keenan Wynn, Nancy Kulp, Kevin Brodie, Ellen Corby, Jack Elam, Ron Ely, Med Flory, Leo Gordon, Don Haggerty, Sammy Jackson, Regis Toomey, Candy Moore, Victoria Paige Meyerink
written by Warren Douglas, music by Leith Stevens, song Tree Top Tall by Charlie Aldrich, Clint Walker

review by
Dale Pierce

Long before Jaws there was Night of the Grizzly, a nature-strikes-back flick which was considered bloody at the time. Though mild by today's standards and some of the special effects even look tacky, the movie still endures and has some tense moments, surviving the passage of time. An all star cast of veteran cowboy actors (Clint Walker, Jack Elam, Keenan Wynn, etc) help carry this movie through. A horror film, a splatter film (for the time period), a western and at times a comedy, all rolled into one.

A Rancher (Clint Walker) moves his family to Wyoming, where he encounters a gigantic bear unflatteringly named Old Satan by the local yokels. Like the shark in Jaws and the angry killer whale in Orca several years later, this animal is not only big and brutal, but offers itself as a forbidding enemy, with almost human logic.  Out of sheer anger, it kills Walker's livestock, breaks out of a barn where it is imprisoned by slamming right through the wall, and later starts to kill his friends. A bounty hunter brought in (who has issues with Walker) ads some spice to the film, as viewers wonder whether it will just be the bear or his old enemy he decides to kill. In the end, the bear gets this guy too. Tough guys just don't win all the time one has to suppose.

Walker, the hero of the story though, prevails and Old Satan dies, but not before some tense moments.

Other killer bear films would follow, such as Grizzly and Day Of The Animals, but this movie was the foreunner to both of them, and as a whole to vindictive animal versus man type movies which would later become a hot item.

It is odd to see Ron Ely as one of Keenan Wynn's punk sons in this. Ely played Tarzan on TV  during the 1960s. Likewise funny to see Nancy Kulp, the secretary in the Beverly Hillbillies TV show, as storekeeper looking to land a man for herself.

Jack Elam provides comic relief as a hired ranch hand, complete with the one-eyed Popeye glare given at opportune moments (his trade mark)

review © by Dale Pierce

 

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