Claws (1977)

the audience applauded

Absolutely Fantastic

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Claws (1977) 1/2 (out of 4) Even Alaska decided to jump in on the JAWS craze with this rip-off, which features a killer grizzly. Just the previous year director William Girdler made GRIZZLY and wouldn't you know it, this low-budget film would be released as GRIZZLY II in some parts just to try and cash in. The story is pretty simple as a couple hunters come across two large grizzly bears fighting. They decide they'll look good on their wall so they start firing but one of the bears is just hit and runs off. At the same time a logger is walking through the woods and gets attacked. Through a text on the screen we learn that in the next five years this bear attacks and kills countless people and becomes known as the devil bear. Then our film kicks back and we see a group of men going after the bear. I'm a major sucker for these "nature attack" movies but this one here is just downright horrible. This is an incredibly cheap production and it really doesn't help when the bear is never in the same frame of the actors. Yes, many low-budget movies used editing to fool the viewer but this film isn't fooling anyone and what's even worse is how dragged out everything is. Not much makes sense in this movie including the fact that the "events" take place five years after the opening. As I previous said, we're give some text to explain what the bear has been doing but why not just show this stuff and forget this incredibly stretched out sequences that we wind up getting? The majority of the 100-minute running time has a bunch of idiots in the wood trying to track down the bear with the help of a Native American magic man. All of the scenes in the woods are just way too long and you can't help but feel as if this thing was just meant to be some sort of travelogue for Alaska and at the last second they decided to add a killer bear. The attack scenes are extremely weak with the viewer really not getting to see much. Everything usually so dark that you can't see or they just have the actors fighting with a fake bear arm coming down on them. I guess the one highlight in the film is a rather silly sequence where the bear attacks some boy scouts out camping. The performances are all rather bland and forgettable but then again so is pretty much everything else in this film. Stick with GRIZZLY instead.

Claws is set in the Alaskan wilderness & opens to a red tinted shot of a Grizzly Bear walking around a bit, as the credits roll. Then we see two Grizzly Bears fighting each other as three big game hunters look on. They try to shoot one of the Bears but only succeed in wounding it, all three decide to split. Meanwhile, further down the road a logger named Jason Monroe (Jason Evers) & his wife Chris (Carla Layton) are heading back home in their truck when the radiator breaks. While attempting to walk back to town Jason is attacked by the wounded out-of-control Grizzly & although he survives the attack is badly injured. Claws then has a few paragraphs of text that appear "Admiralty, Alaska July 27. Local logger seriously mauled by rampaging Grizzly Bear near this community. Bear believed wounded by un-identified hunters." Then "September 2. State surveying party attacked by Grizzly Bear. Two killed one seriously injured. Reports confirmed after being wounded, giant Grizzly turns rogue killer" appears." Even more text flashes up on screen "November 14. two hikers killed by Devil Bear near this Alaskan community yesterday. Tracks of rogue killer disappear in fresh snow below Devils Paw mountain. Hunt called off." Finally "5 years later. Admiralty Alaska, again stunned by savage Bear attacks. Local logger says Satan Bear has returned to this community" appears & we can get on with the film proper! Jason Monroe still has nightmares about the day he was attacked, an attack that meant he could no longer continue his job, it also cost him his marriage & young son Buck (Buck Monroe, which means this kids real name is exactly the same as his characters!). Local scout leader Howard Lockhart (Glenn Sipes) is taking his teams of boys for a weekend of camping in the Alaskan forests. They are attacked by the Grizzly and Buck is badly mauled. The forest commissioner Ben Jones (Leon Ames) sets up a posse of men to try & track the Grizzly down, including Gil (Wayne Lonacre), Marshall (Bill Ratcliffe) & a guy named Virgil who was sadly left off the credits I'm afraid, who all think they can trap the Grizzly in a special cage. They fail & are killed by the Grizzly in the process. Since the Grizzly mauled his son Jason now feels even more anger, hate & bitterness towards the Grizzly & decides to go after it himself when all attempts to find it & stop it fail. Along with Ben who also feels responsible, Howard who funnily enough also has a grudge towards the Grizzly & an old Indian guy named Henry Chico (Anthony Caruso) who, yeah you guessed it, has personal reasons for going too, Jason sets out to kill the Grizzly killer once & for all (and make everyone's personal problems just disappear)! Directed by Richard Bansbach & R.E. Pierson Claws is a sorry excuse for a film. The script by cinematographer & producer Chuck D. Keen & Brian Russell is as boring, as clichéd & as padded out with unnecessary scenes as you would expect a cheap no-budget Jaws cash-in to contain. Claws has it's fair share of melodramatics between the dull characters & even relies on heavy flashbacks to expand upon these unnecessary sub-plots. The Grizzly Bear & it's potential victims are virtually never in the same shot, this makes for some very awkward looking attack sequences of which there aren't many anyway. And the dull as dishwater ending is mostly in slow-motion which becomes incredibly annoying. There's no blood or gore either so forget about that. On a technical level Claws is very poor, editing, lighting, continuity, acting, direction & production values throughout are certainly nothing to praise. One thing I will praise in Claws though is the cinematography by writer Chuck D. Keen it captures some of the beautiful untouched Alaskan wilderness extremely well, unfortunately this has the effect of the viewer thinking their watching some sort of nature programme rather than a horror film! Every other shot seems to be of an animal, tree or Alaskan landscape. Claws as a horror film fails to generate any atmosphere, scares, excitement, originality or memorable sequences. Definitely one to avoid unless you want to sit through 90 odd minutes of travelogue footage of Alaskan mountains & forests, which I most certainly don't!

A lot of people confuse this movie with "Grizzly". "Grizzly" has Christopher George AND Andrew Prine AND Richard Jaekl AND a female park ranger who decides to take time out from hunting an 18-foot killer grizzly bear to strip off all her clothes and take an impromptu shower in a waterfall (guess what happens?). "Claws" has none of these things, just a lot of travelogue footage of the Alaskan wilderness and some Native American nonsense about a "spirit bear". Neither movie is particularly scary. They both contain a lot shots of a disembodied bear paw flying through air, lopping off heads and limbs edited together with close-ups of the face of a real bear who looks only mildly annoyed. There is one pretty good scene where the bear menaces a boy scout camp, but it's only good because it's dark and you can't really see the bear. Actually, you can't see a lot of things in the very murky existing prints of this hard-to-find movie. It probably doesn't merit a DVD resurrection, however, because I have a feeling that what you can't see would still suck. "Grizzly" is so bad it's good; "Claws" is just bad.

Notable for it gratuitous use of flashbacks, even by 70's standards. This is a pure drive-in flick, the one your parents didn't want to stay awake for, so they drove home halfway through it. Right off the bat, you're introduced to bad stock footage, interesting color changes during scenes, and a so-called SATAN BEAR! Cheezy and vaguely energetic enough to be funny for awhile, halfway through it begins to lull the mind into a satisfying sleep. However, impressionable young minds might actually be frightened by this flick, since getting mauled by a rogue bear during a boy-scout outing is actually quite a plausable fear; as opposed to, say, getting mauled by Bigfoot...But that's a different movie.