Critics and audiences alike weren’t fairly positive to what to make of the trailer for Cocaine Bear (2023) which featured Melle Mel’s get together anthem “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” and laid out a slasher film spoof plot of a bear doing a bunch of blow and attacking harmless individuals within the woods. Any film with a title as wild as Cocaine Bear appears destined to have confronted a slender path to the massive display. It’s very existence feels unlikely.
Even much less probably is the truth that it is the directorial follow-up from actor Elizabeth Banks who’s greatest identified for her supporting position because the wealthy and ridiculous-looking Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games (2011) and its sequels. Banks beforehand directed the Charlie’s Angels (2019) reboot which starred Kristen Stewart and the musical sequel Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), through which she additionally reprised her facet position as an a cappella competitors commentator. Despite all of this, the element which appears the least prone to be true is that Cocaine Bear relies on an actual story.
Is Cocaine Bear Based on a True Story?
The opening titles of Cocaine Bear makes the incredulous declare that the movie is “Based on a True Story,” virtually daring moviegoers to tug out their telephones and examine Wikipedia proper there of their seats. (Incidentally, the titles function a quote in regards to the nonviolent nature of unprovoked bears, which is hilariously attributed to Wikipedia.)
As it seems, there may be some fact to the declare within the opening credit. But Cocaine Bear makes use of up all of its “true story” parts within the opening scene and archival footage from native information stations throughout the American South. From that time on the movie is fully fictional, that means virtually not one of the occasions of the movie are true. The true story of Cocaine Bear is as follows:
On December 1985, an enormous American black bear was discovered useless within the Chattahoochee forest after ingesting a duffel bag stuffed with cocaine that had been dropped out of a Cessna plane by a narcotics-officer-turned-smuggler who bailed out of the plane with a defective parachute and was found useless on a driveway in Knoxville carrying a Kevlar bulletproof vest, Gucci loafers, and a heavy packages of cocaine strapped throughout his physique.
After receiving a necropsy (an post-mortem for animals), the useless bear was taxidermized and put show in a neighborhood customer heart. From there the stuffed bear modified palms from a Nashville porn store the place it was bought by nation musician Waylon Jennings who then gifted it to a buddy who saved the stuffed bear in Las Vegas. Somehow the stuffed bear ended up within the Kentucky For Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, the place it stays to this present day.
The Cocaine Bear Script Was Unlikely to Actually Get Made
Speaking to Kentucky For Kentucky, the retired health worker who carried out the real-life cocaine bear’s necropsy mentioned:
[The bear’s] abdomen was actually packed to the brim with cocaine. There is not a mammal on the planet that might survive that. Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, coronary heart failure, stroke. You title it, that bear had it.
After catching wind of the cocaine bear and its tragic destiny, Cocaine Bear‘s screenwriter Jimmy Warden requested himself what would occur if the creature had in some way survived ingesting all that cocaine and have become a risk to public security? Warden discovered his reply in a script which he wrote for spec (with out fee upfront and no assure that anybody would ever purchase it).
Like Kevin Smith’s long-teased, unmade Moose Jaws film, Warden’s script learn like a contemporary tackle the numerous Jaws ripoffs and spoofs from the late Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties. The script impressed The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street reboot director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who used their good names to get the eyebrow-raising challenge off the bottom, producing the movie and recruiting Elizabeth Banks to direct.
Cocaine Bear Is a Modern Take on Classic Jaws Ripoffs
Like the Jaws ripoffs Warden referenced for Cocaine Bear in his script, Banks’ movie performs like Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983) and Alligator (1980), Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1976), Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978), and, after all, William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976). Banks has claimed that her best inspiration for the movie got here from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films.
Cocaine Bear additionally has loads of secondhand Spielberg within the type of Mark Mothersbaugh’s synthy rating which rips off Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s rating for Stranger Things (2016). The rating for that present, in flip, is a ripoff of traditional slashers like Charles Bernstein’s rating for Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and John Carpenter’s scores for his personal movies like Assault on Precient 13 (1976) and The Fog (1980).
Cocaine Bear Is Filled with Sketch Comedy Routines
By splitting up her giant solid of into pairings for scenes which often descend into sketch comedy routines, Banks seems to have taken cues outdoors the horror style from traditional comedies like Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Broken Lizard’s Super Troopers (2001). She does, in spite of everything, have a wealthy pedigree of nice comedies, from Wet Hot American Summer (2001) to Modern Family (2009-2020).
The downsides to Banks’ sketch comedy course are that not one of the scenes have any dramatic impression in anyway and a few of her actor pairings are funnier than others, making Cocaine Bear hit and miss from scene to scene. Though it have to be mentioned there may be one character that’s so humorous that they need to have been the primary character.
Margot Martindale Should Have Been the Main Character in Cocaine Bear
Margot Martindale gained an Emmy in 2011 for her position as “Mags Bennett” in FX’s acclaimed neo-Western sequence Justified (2010-2015), and two for her work within the wonderful FX sequence The Americans (2013-2018). Dramatic chops apart, all of Martindale’s comedic abilities teased in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) and August: Osage County (2013) are on full show in Cocaine Bear. Martindale is unforgettable in her position because the bumbling park ranger, “Ranger Liz,” who delivers about 80% of the laughs within the movie with strains like this one:
Park rangers are peace officers. Which means we will shoot individuals.
Martindale’s Ranger Liz is a incredible feminine model of “Buford T. Justice” performed by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit. If her character had time to cease for a chunk to eat in a deleted scene, Martindale’s Ranger Liz would possibly order one thing precisely the way in which Bufford does in Smokey:
Give me a Diablo sandwich, a Dr. Pepper, and make it fast, I’m in a goddamn hurry.
Martidnale even drew the comparability from herself in Cocaine Bear to Gleason’s Smokey character whereas talking to Page Six. She additionally added:
Honestly, as fats and loopy as I look in it, I loved the way in which I look in it.
Ranger Liz is so humorous she ought to have been the primary character and Martindale might simply have carried the entire film virtually on her personal, with much more laughs. Of course, Banks had a script that featured an ensemble solid, so she shot the film that method, giving her solid comparatively equal quantities of time on display, apart from the late Ray Liotta. In a rehash of his Goodfellas mobster persona, Liotta looms over the whole movie however solely seems towards the tip, very similar to Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979).
Will Cocaine Bear Get a Sequel?
Universal Pictures
In any occasion, there should exist an excellent higher reduce of Cocaine Bear someplace between its minute-and-a-half-long trailer and hour-and-a-half lengthy function movie, which some critics insisted was extra like a stretched-out model of the trailer than an precise film. A half hour quick movie sidelining the remainder of the solid (like Liotta was within the function size) and restoring any deleted scenes that includes Martindale might not be worthy of theatrical distribution as only a few quick movies are.
Then once more, did anybody who noticed the trailer for Cocaine Bear assume that it was the form of movie that will really be launched in theaters? Maybe we’ll all be much less shocked by the point the sequel “Cocaine Cubs” rolls round. While there have been no bulletins but, a sequel is nearly sure since Cocaine Bear has carried out properly on the field workplace (having knocked Avatar: The Way of Water all the way down to quantity three), and the final shot within the film teases the demented coke-addled cubs who look able to go on one other blood-thirsting warpath by way of the forests of Georgia.
Perhaps a complete franchise is so as, a shared cinematic universe of drug-addled animals — Heroin Hamsters, Meth Magpies, Pot Sloths. Whatever occurs, Margot Martindale higher in some way be in all of them.