Cocaine Bear (2023)
Animal-attack movies often position their rampaging creatures as nature’s revenge for human greed, hedonism, and other sins mortal and venial. And so we have Cocaine Bear, whose characters reap the whirlwind after despoiling the widescreen Eden of Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. Here, it’s humans who offer forbidden fruit to an animal, the tree of knowledge in this case being a coca plant.
The trace of real history behind Elizabeth Banks’s film is – more than the film itself – a gruesome, ironic illustration of human appetites and their bitter aftertaste. In 1985, Drew Thornton, a drug smuggler and former law enforcement officer, dumped a load of fine Colombian from his twin-engine Cessna before leaping out, faceplanting in a Tennessee driveway when his parachute failed. Some of the cocaine was found and eaten by a black bear, who died almost immediately. The souvenir shop Kentucky for Kentucky now possesses a taxidermied bear, alleged to be that very ‘party animal’ and featured prominently on the store’s merchandise.
It was a tweet about this stuffed ‘Pablo Escobear’ that inspired Cocaine Bear’s screenwriter Jimmy Warden. In his riff, the bear lives to imperil a parkful of hooky-playing tweens, forest rangers, cops and traffickers; like Jackie Chan in the Drunken Master films, it becomes more powerful with each ingestion – faster, stronger, hornier, more aggressive.
Largely bereft of wink-nudge historical camp – references to Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign and Forest Service spokesanimal Smokey Bear are brief exceptions – Cocaine Bear will, in time, stand as a dated artefact of the current moment’s vogue for viral animal videos and epic memes. Early in the film, hikers argue over whether the bear glimpsed through their binoculars is a black bear or a grizzly; the same confusion applies to the film’s off-black sense of humour, which winds up closer to that of the kind of kids’ movie where an animated bear might be seen dancing to ‘Uptown Funk’ (this one chases down a speeding automobile to ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’).
The technology for rendering CGI bear attacks has not markedly improved in the years since The Revenant (2015), and digital gore’s inferiority to practical effects is especially evident when Banks recreates the best kill from Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985). With jump-scare maulings and gross-out dismemberments of characters who deserve it for being pompous, pathetic in their terror, or otherwise mildly irritating, the overall tone is too naughty-naughty for exploitation fare. The purest, most uncut exploitation here is of existing IP: ‘Cocaine Bear’ is a registered trademark owned by the Kentucky for Kentucky store, licensed to the makers of the film.
► Cocaine Bear is in UK cinemas now.