This is one of those movies that almost had it right, but did a few things wrong that kept it from being a really good horror film. This one was obviously doing a Jaws type movie, its problem, it tried to be too much like Jaws. What I mean is, there are scenes in Jaws that cannot be recreated due to the fact the shark resides in an ocean. It just does not translate to the woods or any other territory that is not water. They try to recreate the scene when they were chasing the shark with the boat, but running on foot, just is not the same. Still, they did have some pretty good kills and the cast was good too.

The story, a killer grizzly is in the woods as it dispatches two girls camping. Soon, they have to go on the hunt, but unfortunately, it kills a ranger. Then it takes out a man's wife which prompts hunters to flood the woods to kill the bear. This leads to two men flying a helicopter trying to get the bear and another whose home is the woods riding a horse and trying to capture it. However, this bear is a lot more clever than the hunters know!

Christopher George plays the head forest ranger with Andrew Prine as the copter pilot and Richard Jaekel as the outdoors man. All of them are good and as I said good kills. Too bad there are just some stupid things going on during this film that one has to take off points for. One of the first things that was head scratching, during the search for the bear in the early stages of the film a female park ranger takes her clothes off and starts rinsing herself off in the waterfall where she is devoured. I am just thinking, who does this while they are working? There is also a scene near the end where the bead buries a guy and the guy is alive and gets out and is promptly attacked by the bear again and killed making one wonder what the point of him initially surviving was!

So, not a bad movie, but not really an all that good film either. It does contain a good amount of blood and gore for a PG rated film, the do an okay job with the attacks and the acting is fairly decent. On the other hand they try to recreate scenes from Jaws and it just does not work, there are more than a few scenes that are just stupid and you just have to wonder, why didn't the bear get its head lopped off when it attacked the helicopter as the blades were still spinning!?!

Generally after a movie comes out is when people , critics or whoever, begin making comparisons between it and other films.

If there happen to be any similarities at all then the film is labeled a rip-off and then sent off to the wonderful land of the back room shelf. This is one that I am glad stayed off the back room shelf, if anything, for nostalgic reasons.

Most film makers would tell you they were inspired by something whether it was "Spider Man" or "Black Narcissus" when they were a kid. It doesn't mean they directly ripped it off.

The story for "Grizzly" was written before "Jaws" came out, the writers didn't know each other, and though one might be able to draw parallels as far as the story goes it is not a "Jaws" rip-off. It's just that you have blood, guts and gore and so did Jaws which came out, theatrically, a year earlier.

One is on land and one is in the ocean...How exactly is that the same? No. The real rip-off movie of "Jaws" is the Italian movie "The Last Shark".

"Grizzly" came out in our nation's Bi-Centennial year. "Jaws" kept me out of the water and "Grizzly" kept me out of the woods for a LONG time. Even now though,31 years later, the film is still worth a look and it has some very interesting ideas represented and some very interesting camera shots and a couple of good scares.

Does it have a cheese factor? Of course, but overall it a pretty good low-budget flick which makes me think of guerrilla film-making and it makes the effort at trying to tell a good story..

I put it right in the middle of the scale and worth checking out depending on your own personal perception of what a monster movie should be .