SHITTY FLICKS: BEAR

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

If the film Bear has taught me anything, it's this: run, screaming, from bears. For they want nothing more than to trash your minivan, steal your purse, and exacerbate your already strained familial relationships.

Meet Nick. He's 20-something, has a band/girlfriend, and willingly drives a minivan.

His brother is Sam, who might be in his late-20-somethings. You can tell straightaway by his wardrobe that he has never approved of any of Nick's choices.

Nick and Sam and their girlfriends then meet Bear. 

"I don't like the way he's looking at us," says one of the girlfriends about Bear, who seriously looks just adorable. Luckily Sam is there to save the day and shoot Bear something like 37 times.

Nick does not approve of this at all. "That bear was innocent! Now there's one less bear in the world! Thanks a lot!"

In the interim, Sam has just enough time to make an offensive joke about the Chinese before another Bear shows up.

"That's not the same Bear," offers up one of the girlfriends. "This one's got balls."

I honestly don't know if this was intended as a joke or not.

AWWWWWWWW!!

They turn to Sam and his magical gun, but it's empty. They promptly run and flee directly into the van, prepared to leave Jellystone Park forever.

"I don't think so!" says Bear as he pushes the entire fucking minivan over, his strength fueled by his new-found hatred for humans.   

"I'm sorry," Nick says directly to the back of Bear's gigantic fur ass. "I did not mean to invade your home."

In response, Bear lays down next to his fallen cub, looks sad, and has flashbacks to that time this dude named Sam emptied an entire clip into a fucking baby bear.

In the midst of the overturned minivan carnage, all of them offer up legitimately great ideas as to how they can improve their situation:

Girlfriend # 1 picks up a cake box, looks forlornly down at the cake that I guess was for someone's birthday, and thinks, "I wonder if I can fix it."

Sam suggests that Nick get out his guitar and play some music for the bears, in hopes they will sign him to a record deal.

Girlfriend # 2 takes this opportunity to offer up her own pearls of wisdom: "Stop fighting."

Working together, they right the minivan, setting it back on its tires, so that they may continue the minivan's goal of parking its fat ass directly in the express lane and not moving for any fucking reason unless it were to spot a Walmart at the next exit. (And don't forget your Pennsylvania plates, minivan!)

Nick tells Sam he can probably fix the minivan's engine, so he grins as widely as possible for some reason and slips out of the passenger seat. As Nick does all the work, Sam stands over him and continues to berate all of Nick's life choices. According to Sam, Nick's girlfriend is "smokin' hot," but not marriage material, and his career so far has consisted of playing gigs in dive bars for tips. Nick lets all of this roll off his shoulders with ease because he's inhumanly affable. And he LOVES bears.

AWWWWWWWW!!

Meanwhile, inside the van, the girls are getting along famously. "Suck my dick!" one of them says to the other. 

If only.

They quickly forgive each other, though, and trade some secrets, and cry.

Nick manages to fix the van's engine, but then the tire falls off, so it looks like they're walking. 

"I'm getting a really bad vibe like someone's watching us," says Girlfriend # 1.

Cue Bear to stick his head up out of a fucking bush like this is a cartoon. I love it.

Our characters run to a nearby drainpipe and climb inside, which has thankfully been punched full of holes, likely by Bear after a bad day at the mine. This allows Bear to stick his paws in at his convenience and bat around our characters. It's during this moment that Bear becomes not just a vicious animal but also a common thief, as he quite literally steals Girlfriend # 2's purse. I'm not sure why - perhaps it was filled with pic-a-nic foods.

Then they run BACK to the minivan.

HUH????

"Instead of Groundhog Day it's like Grizzly Day where we keep coming back to the same place reliving our terror over and over but instead of the groundhog seeing his shadow it's the bear coming out of the drainpipe trying to kill everybody," says Girlfriend # 1, which is one of the most punchable things anyone has ever said. 

Bear agrees, so he rips her out of the minivan and destroys her. Sad Middle Eastern vocalizations fill the musical score, telling us what has happened is both upsetting AND mystical.

Nick, not quite terribly sure how to confront these new tragic events, runs out of the minivan, cries, and begins to jog in place. Sam hugs him and drags him back to the van, as incensed and disturbed by the jogging-in-place as we all are.

Bear, not satisfied with having taken out Nick's girlfriend, charges the van for Round Two. His adorable, gigantic bear ass can be seen circling the minivan, choosing the weakest spot to attack. 

"I'm going to fucking kill your babies!" Sam shouts at the attacking bear. "I'm going to eat your fucking babies! I am going to skullfuck your fucking face!" he adds, which is not only absurd, but also a bit redundant, but, he's in a really bad place right now, guys.

"He came back for retribution!" Nick offers up. "He came back for his honor! Native Americans believe bears contain a human spirit!"

Then Bear flips over the van. Again.

As our remaining characters root around the van's contents for a potential weapon, it cuts to the bear sitting on top of the van, lounging, one paw awesomely resting on a tire. Memes were invented for this shot.

AWWWWWWWW!!

The back of the DVD case boldly exclaims (including quotation marks) "What makes the film even better is the use of REAL bears, no CGI here, folks," and is credited to exactly no one. And it's true: At no point does the bear seem computer generated or automated. And at no point does the actual footage of the bear suggest it was shot with the same camera as the main action.

Way to go, jack-asses.

Our characters devise a plan to lure the bear inside their van, with the aid of some birthday cake, and then escape the van with enough time to run around the other side and close the door, trapping the bear inside. 

It all goes exactly to plan until Nick gets trapped inside the van with the bear and gets his human ass handed to him. He survives with only a few scratches as the injured bear takes off.

"This is never going to end, is it?" bellows Girlfriend # 2, who is apparently reading my mind.

Sam decides to try and hoof it to their intended destination - a local steakhouse - leaving Sam's girlfriend and Nick behind to openly discuss the affair they had that one time.

"It didn't mean anything to me. You were a good lay, that's all," Nick says, who up until now was supposed to be the likable one.

Girlfriend # 2 begins to sob and the actor playing Nick clearly fucks up his dialogue, but the scene forges ahead, anyway.

Meanwhile, Sam breaks through the shrubbery and finds himself in the parking lot of the steakhouse. And Bear follows, hilariously, right behind him. Sam cowers behind a car for a moment before Bear grabs him and drags him all the fucking way BACK to the van!

Holy shit!

"That bear wants us to suffer," Nick explains. "He brought Sam back because there's unfinished business. That bear knows more about us than we do about ourselves."

"I'm pregnant," adds the girlfriend. (It's Nick's.)

"We Bears are a proud race," adds Bear. (I wish.)

Bear ends in tears, confessions, self-sacrifice, and bears.

The moral of the story is: next time you drive in a minivan with your brother, make sure you're not fucking his wife, or else bears.

SHITTY FLICKS: SAVAGE PLANET

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant, camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

I've seen a lot of dreck. I've seen dreck from low-rent filmmakers, and I've seen dreck made by established directors with access to multi-million budgets. I've sought dreck and gotten quality; and, in turn, I've sought quality, and boy oh boy, did I get dreck. It happens. It's unavoidable. And all during this, Savage Planet comes along - a cinematic equivalent of a really, really bad liar - comes up right behind us all, and says, "Sorry I'm late. I forgot how doors worked.”

Savage Planet is pretty special. Not just because it's "ha ha" bad, and not just because it was made by the Sci-Fi Channel back when their original television movies were bad by accident instead of kitschy bad-on-purpose nonsense like Sharknado, but for a very different and special reason. We'll get to that reason in a bit. I suppose it should be considered a spoiler - not because it will ruin the "plot," but because it would ruin the moment during the film that you would be struck by the sheer stupidity of its "villain" and be so utterly taken aback in joy that I kind of don't want to let the air out of your tires.

But, if you choose to keep reading, that's on you.

The film opens with a group of scientists on another "planet" machetteing their way through a thick wood. The leader takes readings with a gizmo and mentions how the levels of whatever on this planet are better than on Earth. It's really important that the film establish right away that these guys are most def NOT on earth, because what are clearly very plain woodsy areas of Canada should at NO point be mistaken for Planet Earth.

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 1

Lead guy gets his hand hacked off by a machete completely by accident and falls into a hole, where he burns his hand stump in a puddle of radioactive green goo. His hand grows back (kind of), and he is then viciously attacked by a space alien. This poor man's fear is paramount. Never, back on Planet Earth, had he ever encountered such an otherworldly monster, but yet here he is, facing something harvested from his nightmares, something so indescribable and beyond comprehension that H.P. Lovecraft would have needed two volumes and limitless cognac to properly describe every detail. 

On a planet that savage, aliens look like this:

Okay, you got me. It’s bears. And not just plain old bears, but "mutant" alien bears. This is also something they will say over and over to Jedi-mind-trick you into believing you're seeing, like, gigantic mutant bears. But, you're not. Even the DVD packaging goes very far out of the way to avoid dropping the "b" word. The front cover is a picture of a mossy-looking planet, on the back is nary a photo of a bear, and the summary reads:

Earth is declared uninhabitable from years of toxic pollution and ecological damage. A team of scientists are sent to visit an unknown planet in hopes of finding a new, safe, world. But within the lush and verdant landscape of the new planet they find a mutated species that turns their expedition deadly. They expected and needed utopia but instead found something more deadly than what they left behind.  

Bears are what they found. 

They found bears.

Sean Patrick Flannery plays Randall Cain, a sad earthling with a haunted past who has a giant scar across his chest that looks like an even gianter Cronenbergian sex bug. It's off-putting to look at, and even more off-putting to pet. He lives in a "Dystopian" future, which means everything looks exactly the same as it does now, except for the first establishing shot of the city, which is a 3D generation of smoothed-over metallic building blocks probably designed by the guys who made Candy Crush while they were each on their own toilet. 

Cain's vacation of looking sad and lying in a future cot with that weird bug-looking scar thing across his person is interrupted by his superiors and is brought on to be briefed on a very important mission that he apparently has no choice but to endure. There, he is told that a planet nearly identical to Earth (let's just get that established as soon as possible) has been discovered and I guess some dudes and dudettes need to go there and do some science stuff to determine if the people of Earth can go live there. The planet is called Planet Oxygen, which is just as imaginative as the person whosever idea it was to film a movie set on an alien planet in the not-so-alien looking woods of Ontario. (See, because there's a whole bunch more vegetation on this planet, and hence, a whole bunch more oxygen.)

Cain and his rag-tag group of colleagues, including Not Stephen Moyer, Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby, Token Black Guy, and Almost Lisa Kudrow are beamed directly onto Planet Oxygen using an invention called DST (standing for distance travel). 

Each time someone is beamed onto the planet, the director is quick to use split screen, so we can see everyone's understandably amazed faces while the person disappears right before their eyes!

If they think that's amazing, wait till they see how LARGE these bears are!

Alien Bear steps on a Lego.

One of the last people to beam through - and also the guy in charge of security - dies during transference. He hilariously makes pain sounds identical to that of a monkey's, his bones disappear, and he crumbles into a pile of thin, blankety, wet man. Carlson says, "We all agree this is a tragedy," without looking all that bothered by it, and then he--

Oh, shit!

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 2

Where were we? 

Oh, right.

So, these scientists, I guess, are about to--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 3

Jeeze. 

So, the scientists begin their expedition--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 4

Right.

During their recon, they locate the body of a dead bear.

"What the hell is it?" asks one of the many people claiming to be a scientist.

After an autopsy of sorts, this amazing exchange takes place:

"It's a prehistoric cave bear; been extinct on Earth for over ten thousand years...The most formidable predator in its day." 

"How does an extinct bear come to get on this planet?"

"Somehow its DNA sequence regressed. No modern bear, even full-grown, has claws this big, or a hide this dense...Their only known enemy was man."

Later, everyone has a philosophical conversation about whether or not the lives of those already lost are worth whatever discoveries they might find on Planet Oxygen. If this were real life, of course the lives lost would be deemed irrelevant, but since this is television - brainless, brainless television - these scientists have hearts and decide it's not worth it and everyone wants to go home. Not Carlson, though, because he's the movie's resident money/fame-driven penis head.

"For a scientist, you know a lot about death, but nothing about life," someone says to Carlson, and god damn does he look SHUT DOWN.

(No he doesn't.)

Also:

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 5

One of the scientists decides it would be best to go off on her own. I think her name was Bird Seed(?)

Weird, right?

Then this happens:

It was quite a sight to see!

Cain attempts to take control of the mission, since the whole science part of it seems to have gone out the window and now it's more about survival, which means Carlson can be 100% dick. Bears come and Cain asks Carlson to shoot some of them, but Carlson says "fuck that" and him and his eyebrows peace out of the scene. Cain promptly falls and hits his head on a gigantic rock.

I don't blame him. Maybe he accidentally watched a little bit of his own movie.

As everyone makes plans to spelunk down a cave wall, let's all pause for a moment of out-of-context dialog:

"Okay, here's the plan: I'm gonna go down first, followed by the two girls." 

Day dims, night comes, and it's almost too easy to take out these attacking bears with a shot gun. A perfect juxtaposition of: stock footage of roaring bear, man with shot gun, stock footage of roaring bear calmly lowering from two feet down to all four = man successfully killed bear with a shotgun. 

Movie magic.

After one of the dudes' girlfriends gets dragged from her tent and eaten perfectly in half, the other scientists begin to really doubt their own faith in science. Talk about horror!

- "And in my dreams, the bear and I were one."
- "Okay.”

The bears continue to take out our scientist characters one by one, and shockingly, Token Black Guy is still hanging in. Even Harold Perrineau was bear meat at this point in The Edge. 

Have you seen The Edge? 

It's great.

Anyway, this shit has gotten far too complicated for a killer alien film where the aliens are played by bears. There's something happening now about "life serums" and Planet Oxygen's habitat becoming "increasingly unstable." All I know is: more bears, please. Token Black Guy is still breathing, as is Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby.

Whoop. Never mind.

As the bear viciously attacks Token Black Guy and begins tearing apart his innards and ripping off one limb after another, he screams for Cain to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Count how long Cain stands there holding his shot gun with a stupid look on his face before he actually does anything to alleviate Token Black Guy's suffering, and then convert that to Bear Time. 

Rest in peace, Token Black Guy!

Dear god, I've never seen a more boring film where bears play aliens and aliens rip apart really terrible dummies filled with gooey balloons that play the people. My time would've been better spent digging a hole in my backyard and shitting directly into it, and when my one neighbor called the cops and the cops came and asked, "Just what on Earth were you thinking?" I would say, "Well, it was either that or watch Savage Planet," and they would be like, "Say no more, we totally get it. Please shit some more into that hole you dug," and I would say "Thanks, officer," and I might even buy a couple tickets to their Policeman's Ball, even though I'd have no one to go with, because who's gonna go to a ball with someone who shits in the backyard?

No one. :(

Carlson gets his head beared off and things begin to look really dire for our remaining heroes. Almost Lisa Kudrow manages to beam herself back to earth while Cain falls down for something like the hundredth time, and then a large mutant alien bear with regressed DNA, bigger claws, and a denser hide (read: normal bear) attacks Cain before he can beam back to Earth.

The scene cuts to several days (weeks? months?) into the future at a press conference where it's revealed that Cain somehow survived his attack even though I'm pretty sure he was within the snares of a bear and moments away from having his fake head slapped off. I couldn't tell you what happened during this scene because I was already ejecting the disc and dreaming of the fifty cents I'd get for it at MovieStop.

Production is underway on Savage Planet 2: Beary Scary, and it will star Norman Reedus from "The Walking Dead," which is both a stupid joke I just made up and also an excuse to put the words "Norman Reedus" and "The Walking Dead" into this review, just so a bunch of pre-teen girls and lonely moms can find it by accident when Googling the phrases "Norman Reedus no shirt" and "Norman Reedus kiss me" and "Norman Reedus friend bear movie."

Sean Patrick Flannery was in the movie Powder. He played 'Powder.'

Good night.