ONE DUMB LINE AFTER ANOTHER –
Feb. 23, 2023 – Loosely (very loosely) based on news reports of a black bear whose skeletal remains were discovered in 1985 by narcotics investigators in rural Georgia, along with 40 torn-open packets of cocaine thought to have been dropped from an airplane by a smuggler who died before he was able to retrieve them, the film is a wild extrapolation — part low-budget horror film, part five-minute comedy sketch padded out to the length of a Disneynature documentary — about what might have happened between the bear’s ingestion of the drugs and its death. Whenever the rampaging CGI critter, created by Weta FX, the acclaimed visual effects studio behind the Lord of the Rings and Avatar franchises, is on screen, the movie comes vividly, bizarrely alive. It’s funny, demented, and hyperviolent, in a goofy, half-baked way that might be best appreciated in an altered state. During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), “Cocaine Bear” goes into snoring hibernation.
