Torn body parts, a bear on coke and a Han Solo in panic: with these ingredients, ‘Cocaine Bear’ generated almost three times its budget at the box office, which was estimated at 30 to 35 million dollars. Looking at it soberly, director Elizabeth Banks achieved an acceptable, respectable success. But trash movie fans know:
She was significantly more successful, after all, ‘Cocaine Bear’ caused a wave of imitators and is therefore the founder of a trend! While cheap filmmakers are now working their way through half the wildlife to produce horror films about animals on drugs (like sharks), you can now experience the original with a streaming subscription: “Cocaine Bear” can be viewed from today, November 3, 2023, on the Sky streaming service WOW. Of course there is also the movie Blu-ray, DVD and VoD for purchase and rental*.
“Cocaine Bear”: Yes, the bear is on coke!
1985 in the idyllic Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest: a bear weighing almost 200 kilos gets his hands on a sports bag full of Coke. He inhales the stuff and not only becomes hyperactive, but also immediately addicted. From now on he has only one goal: more material – and if people get in the way, they will simply be cut into pieces or crushed. It’s stupid that schoolchildren Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) are now skipping school to cause mischief in the vast forest area.
Can Dee Dee’s mother Sari (Keri Russell) save the little ones? Can Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and the depressed Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) at least save some coke to deliver to Eddie’s father, the unpredictable drug lord Syd (Ray Liotta)? And how does exhausted police officer Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) explain the crazy incidents and the many dead campers to his superiors?
In 1985, a drug delivery actually went wrong, causing a bear to consume enormous amounts of cocaine – the animal then went down in history as Pablo Eskobear. However, Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden freely imagined what the flesh-eating pile of fur and muscle did while on drugs.
What they came up with turned out to be surprisingly controversial: FILMSTARTS editor-in-chief Christoph Petersen praised ‘Cocaine Bear’ in his review as ‘One of the craziest films ever released by a major Hollywood studio“. He also found warm words for Banks’ “fuck it, I’m doing my thing” attitude and for the acting of “Solo: A Star Wars Story” title actor Ehrenreich and company.
Colleague Pascal Reis, on the other hand, was very disappointed and thought that the filmmakers “only let the bear rush through the dense undergrowth with half its strength” – there would have been more blood, pain and nonsense. Not only the editorial staff of FILMSTARTS was divided; overall, it became clear that the camps of “Exactly the confident, high-class junkie I expected” and “Why so innocent?” were the same size.
And the author of this text? He finds himself between the camps and would advise anyone who has saved ‘Cocaine Bear’ for their home theater to have similar expectations: the film would have benefited in some way from a tad more aggressiveness – slightly stranger characters, a dose of more violence or raunchy images. (a kind of “Grindhouse”).
Nevertheless, the film delivers what the author of these lines hoped for: ‘Cocaine Bear’ doesn’t want to be a non-stop splatter, but rather a tribute to the majority of ’80s B-movies. A film that has its islands of action madness and violent escapades, but in between cheerfully shows strange characters who have their own problems and talk a lot of nonsense.
“Cocaine Bear” has many characters like this – both of which you would love to save yourself from the title hero. And the ones where you can’t wait for the drug monster to fill them up.