Cocaine Bear

New movies streaming or in theaters this weekend: A crazy true story drives 'Cocaine Bear,' David Harbour is a friendly phantom in 'We Have a Ghost.'

(And did we mention they're both in love with her, too?) She's at first put off by a tight-knit group of three British women (Sally Phillips, Rakhee Thakrar and Miriam Margolyes) already undergoing chemotherapy but soon becomes a fourth on their beneficial, fantastical "trips" in a sentimental narrative that smartly leans on MacDowell's Southern charms. The comedian is a standout in this thoughtful sci-fi dramedy as Cam, the host of a kid's science show with astronaut dreams. The teen finds understanding and comfort via an enigmatic drifter (a great Trevante Rhodes) with past ties to his parents. In the ensemble comedy, an A-list movie star (MacDowell) is diagnosed with colon cancer while in the U.K. Darious (Jalyn Hall) is a 14-year-old home from boarding school for the summer who immediately butts heads with his strict father (Shamier Anderson) and is beat up by an old friend. Come for the weird science, stay for a touching reveal and one whopper of an ending. Kevin (Jahi Winston) makes the spooky discovery that their house is inhabited by a bowling-shirted spirit named Ernest (Harbour), who can't talk but forms a bond with the youngster. Joel Courtney and Anna Grace Barlow play teens brought into their flock in an aggressively anti-drug melodrama that, if nothing else, preaches to its own choir. When Kevin's dad (Mackie) puts a video of Ernest online, the ghost becomes a viral sensation and a target of the government. A single mom (Keri Russell), a St. Where to watch: In theaters

In an age of big C-suite visions of streaming power and total global market domination, Universal Pictures has spent the first two months of 2023 seemingly ...

But most of the violence in Cocaine Bear is filmed with a perfunctory ugliness. The trick about the truly good schlock that you remember is there’s visceral joy in the viscera—a playfulness that invites audiences to indulge in bad taste. In its current diluted form, however, all I can warn is that it’s going to be a bad trip. It might not be the sign of a good movie, but it still could be solid schlock. It’s lovely that something so tasteless can still find a place in this theatrical (and social media) climate. It’s brutal, but it comes off with an air of desperation, like a salesman following you down the street insisting their product is pure. Yet rarely did the non-bear antics gain so much as a chuckle in my audience, save the bemusing energy of Henry (Christian Convery) and Dee De (Brooklynn Prince), two wide-eyed kids who discover a mountain of coke and then a bear in a sequence that plays like every 1980s anti-drugs PSA if it was… The picture should move like a black bear consumed with a Wall Street bro’s favorite vice. Liotta of course played one of cinema’s greatest coke heads in Goodfellas, who’s last day of freedom is a symphony of paranoia and kinetic madness. Yet that is how at least 70 pounds of pure Florida Snow ended up in the Georgian mountains of the Chattahoochee River and then, subsequently, in the belly of a 175-pound black bear. As aforementioned, Cocaine Bear is loosely based on the true story of Andrew C. But when about two-thirds of this grisly spectacle is populated by meat sacks who suck the oxygen out of almost every scene, even before the bear starts tearing them apart, it becomes a fatal problem.

If you go down to the woods today, you're in for an old-fashioned gory good time.

The movie has very little to say about the rights and wrongs of the war on drugs (besides sniggering at '80s-tastic " The ending really peters out, but most of all these characters are thinner than a line cut by a particularly stingy drug dealer. And obviously the bear didn't use banknotes to snort the coke, it just ate kilos of the stuff a brick at a time. This search element of the movie would work probably be more involving if it was a chase that required running/fighting/outsmarting of the bear. Banks' zingy direction and writer Jimmy Warden's blackly comic dialogue keep the laughs coming, with the ever-looming threat of a coked-up murderbear giving it that midnight movie frisson. This probably leaves you with a ton of questions: When and where -- and how -- did this happen?

It is an incredible blast, especially if you have the benefit of seeing director Elizabeth Banks' insanely violent comedy/thriller with a packed crowd.

But while the suspense that had carried the film for the first two-thirds of its brisk running time dips as it nears its conclusion, “Cocaine Bear” still emerges as a hell of a high. Much of the joy of “Cocaine Bear” comes from the look of the creature itself, which is surprisingly high-tech for a cheesy, silly movie. (Both kids are great in a throwback way, reminiscent of the kinds of brash, profane characters you’d see in movies like “ [The Bad News Bears](/reviews/the-bad-news-bears-1976)” or “ [The Goonies](/reviews/the-goonies-1985).” The boy’s reaction to discovering one of these illegal bundles is not fear, but rather a cheerful: “Let’s sell drugs together!”) They include a pair of mismatched buddy drug dealers ( [Alden Ehrenreich](/cast-and-crew/alden-ehrenreich) and O’Shea Jackson Jr.); their humorless boss ( [Ray Liotta](/cast-and-crew/ray-liotta) in his final film role, recalling one of his signature performances in “ [Goodfellas](/reviews/great-movie-goodfellas-1991)”); and a police detective from the Kentucky town where the smuggler’s plane eventually crashed (Isiah Whitlock Jr., perfectly deadpan as ever). The few times “Cocaine Bear” injects even a meager amount of sentimentality, the pacing starts to lag. [Jimmy Warden](/cast-and-crew/jimmy-warden) has taken the basic facts—a 175-pound Georgia black bear ingested some cocaine that a drug smuggler dropped from an airplane in 1985—and imagined what might have happened if the bear hadn’t died, but rather sampled the stuff and gotten hooked.

The greatest joke of this blood-spattered horror-comedy from Elizabeth Banks is that it exists.

That “Cocaine Bear” is cautious about touching on this theme is understandable, maybe even preferable. And the script becomes dutifully sentimental at the end with characters forced to say things like “You’re more than a drug dealer. At one point, Cocaine Bear sniffs a hint of white powder and emerges with renewed strength. Early in the movie there’s a clip of the old “This is your brain on drugs” ad, a reminder that the story takes place against the backdrop of the drug war of the 1980s, a catastrophic policy failure with severe human ramifications that we are still living with. At its best, “Cocaine Bear” has the feel of an inside joke. Inspired by the slasher films of the 1980s, not to mention great horror-comedies from that era like the “Evil Dead” films, Banks grasps the comic potential of the gross-out. Banks doesn’t always dole out the viscera artfully (better to follow a leg with an arm, not another leg) but she commits to the too-muchness necessary for comedy. In fact, “Cocaine Bear” too often feels like a one-joke movie, stretched thin. After a pratfall in a plane leads a smuggler to drop a ton of drugs on the mountains of Georgia, a bear discovers it, snorts it up and turns into a mix of Tony Montana and Jason Voorhees. The plot twists can seem irrelevant, including a betrayal that has the impact of a soft sneeze. While it beats out “M3gan” in levels of gruesomeness, “Cocaine Bear” doesn’t have that film’s mean streak or moments of acid weirdness. Whereas “M3gan” steered clear of too much onscreen violence, angling for a PG-13 rating, “Cocaine Bear” wallows in it.

'Cocaine Bear' director Elizabeth Banks talks about the movie's star-studded cast, the right kind of gore, and defying expectations.

I also feel like with this movie, the audaciousness and boldness of not just the title, but the movie that lives up to the title, is something that creates conversation and people don’t want to miss out on that conversation. Am I going to be able to disappear into this? Am I going to get to work with interesting people? I want to continue to surprise not just the audience, but myself. Am I going to be challenged? You almost have to oversell it with the gore and the blood and the outrageousness of it because it makes it more operatic and more entertaining. That being said, I love laughing and I love funny movies and I would love to see more comedy in the theater. I thought there was a great opportunity here to make people laugh, but to also take them on a a bigger ride where the laughs are just part of it. It’s not a documentary, but I also wanted to acknowledge the reality of a bear attack. I want to go to the theater and have a communal experience. The audience is not expecting her to do as much as she does and to be as bold as she is. But she was down on the ground and she was on the wires.

A coked-out bear goes on a drug-fueled rampage in 'Cocaine Bear,' a dark horror-comedy from Massachusetts native, Elizabeth Banks. It opens Friday.

As the ill-fated real-life smuggler setting the events in motion, Matthew Rhys (like Russell and Martindale, a vet of "The Americans") falls to his death in a hilarious opener that sets the campy tone. You come away from "Cocaine Bear" fully knowing the folly of drugs, but for the duration of this lean 95-minute adventure, you’re addicted to the ride. is the no-nonsense police detective on a hunt of his own. On the way, they stumble upon a bag of cocaine, which they decide to open. Banks, who also helmed "Pitch Perfect 2" and 2019's "Charlie's Angels," amps up the excitement to a frenzy by weaving together the deadly misadventures of four groups encountering the bad-news bear. The movie is not for the squeamish (I lost track of all the disembodied limbs), but, as Yogi would say, it’s better than your average bear.

"Elizabeth Banks' directorial debut is a hoot, providing you're willing to overlook some sketchy CGI – and really, who knows what a coke-fuelled bear on the ...

The movie seems destined for internet infamy, but doesn't live up to the promise of its viral trailer.

The stage is set, then, for a cast of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. Following the incident, the bear was stuffed and displayed in the wonderfully named Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington. In the heat of the maulings, the film shifts from comic to disturbing: Intestines are exposed; heads roll. The story goes that a police officer-turned-drug smuggler hurled several duffle bags of cocaine from a plane and then met his own demise while trying to parachute from the craft himself. The film just doesn’t land right, and you can’t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer. And [who wouldn’t want to see](https://twitter.com/SamuelAAdams/status/1628378464431620096?s=20) a bear on a drug-fueled rampage?

Movie Review: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, 'Cocaine Bear' is a loosely based-on-fact account of a bear that eats a mountain of cocaine and then goes on a ...

VHS is a thing of the past, and so is the late show and maybe even the whole concept of discovering things. They have to fail first and then get reclaimed by us through random discovery, preferably by popping in a dusty VHS cassette out of curiosity or turning on the late show. The mid-’80s was the height of Spielbergian kids’ adventures, but it was also the height of a particularly baggy and brutal period of slasher flicks, and Cocaine Bear carries whiffs of both. We’re here for the bear and the cocaine, and the film doesn’t skimp on that front either. appear to have set out to make a cult movie on purpose. Like the characters, it wanders around a bit too aimlessly, but by the end you feel like you’ve actually been somewhere. Sometimes the bear sneaks up on our characters like a grim woodland menace. By doing in one of the bigger names in the cast with their opening scene, Banks and writer Jimmy Warden slyly place us in a state of uncertainty over who will make it intact and who will not. Or the two low-level hoodlums, Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), sent off by their boss (Ray Liotta) to retrieve the missing cocaine from Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia? Then he buckles in his parachute, puts on his sunglasses, kisses off the empty cockpit, and promptly hits his head and drops lifelessly into the clouds. It also takes a few cues from its time period, not just in the vintage anti-drug PSAs that open the picture but in pace and style. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-thriller is loosely based on a 1985 incident when an American black bear ingested a massive amount of cocaine and was found dead soon thereafter.

The movie seems destined for internet infamy but doesn't live up to the promise of its viral trailer.

The stage is set, then, for a cast of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. Following the incident, the bear was stuffed and displayed in the wonderfully named Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington. In the heat of the maulings, the film shifts from comic to disturbing: Intestines are exposed; heads roll. The story goes that a police officer-turned-drug smuggler hurled several duffle bags of cocaine from a plane and then met his own demise while trying to parachute from the craft himself. The film just doesn’t land right, and you can’t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer. And [who wouldn’t want to see](https://twitter.com/SamuelAAdams/status/1628378464431620096?s=20) a bear on a drug-fueled rampage?

"You don't know how weird it is to do interviews all day, and people on the news are like, 'So, O'Shea, tell us about this bear on cocaine.

What a country." He's a giant dude from New Zealand dude decked out in black spandex and a bear head," Jackson Jr. "He's a great dude and made my job as an actor way easier. "I heard about it via a tweet," he explained. I'm very pleased with how people are receiving the news that there's a movie about a bear on cocaine," he added. "There are popcorn movies, but then there's cinema, as they say, and I want to be taken seriously in both. " She's a player-coach who knows what it is to be in your shoes and what she wouldn't want a director to tell her. "The online presence of Cocaine Bear is something that, as an actor, as a creator, that's what you want. "When I found out she was directing, it was like, 'She knows what this needs. It has already grossed $2 million in previews and looks set to secure an opening weekend in the region of $15 million. and Cocaine Bear, one of the most talked about films of 2023 so far.

Maybe a deadly beast hopped up on nose candy is exactly what the climate movement needs.

(Congrats for composting, the planet is still on fire!) In the hyper-dilated eyes of our rampaging ursine, though, drug peddlers and tree-huggers are one and the same. In fact, the literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued that seemingly lowbrow works of “genre fiction”—like detective novels or space operas—are able to introduce their readers to serious topics precisely because they are low-brow. But in an atmosphere in which it is all too easy to feel suffocated by climate anxiety, Elizabeth Banks’ film cuts through our ecological malaise. Though if I learned anything from Cocaine Bear, it is that squaring up with a coked-out Ursus americanus is not a good idea.) My classrooms are mostly populated by bright-eyed Environmental Studies majors who want to save the world, and yet watching films and documentaries about ecological catastrophes often seems to dampen their enthusiasm for activism. What is most interesting about the film is its off-kilter environmentalism. Almost all environmental discourse in America is predicated on the old enlightenment idea that knowledge is power: that if we simply know more about humanity’s impact on the environment, we’ll change our behaviors and attitudes. Indeed, if Cocaine Bear violates our expectations about what environmentalism looks like, it is because American consumers are accustomed to environmental discourse that is characterized by piety and a dash of mournfulness. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 dudes off the street and were told “one of these guys feeds cocaine to pigeons for a living,” you would have picked Frank 10 out of 10 times. And in a nation populated by hucksters and con artists, it is refreshing to have someone sell you exactly what you were promised. The bear turns the mountain red in pursuit of more cocaine. Of course, there is really only one reason to see Cocaine Bear, and that is because you would like to see what happens when a bear does cocaine.

The horror-comedy is based on a real story from 1985, but the director Elizabeth Banks and writer Jimmy Warden gave their furry lead a different ending.

“There’s no absolute way that this bear could have been taxidermied,” the medical examiner told her. He also wore a helmet with a silicone bear snout attached to two telescoping rods and Ping-Pong balls for the eyeline. “To collaborate with somebody who was down to do all that stuff was a dream come true.” Martinez drove to the store that claimed to have the real bear. But because it was high on cocaine, there were opportunities to stretch in little ways to create a superpowered character. “That’s the thing with these movies — you can’t just half-ass it,” she added. Banks got wind and signed him up as Daveed, the trusted fixer for the drug kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta) and former best friend of Syd’s son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich). Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way. But Warden was more intrigued by the bear than the smuggling, and he let his imagination run wild. They’re the real bad guys.” “I just thought, ‘Wow, there is no greater metaphor for the chaos going on in nature,’” she said on a video call. Thornton had parachuted out, weighed down with $14 million worth of the drug along with firearms and survivalist equipment.