Review of Bear (2010) by David L — 30 Jan 2015

If you go down to the woods today, you'll be sure of a big surprise, and funnily enough this film was quite surprising in the sense that it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. Still bad, but could of potentially been a lot worse.

For starters there appears to be a lot of realistic footage, which I hadn't assumed would be the case. I was expecting a gigantic beast of a bear that only reveals close ups of its eyes and claws, so as not to reveal the poor computer generated monster that is the star of this flick.

The real life footage does make it look less menacing than it perhaps needs to be for a film dubbed as a horror, but the simple presence of a bear in any case is enough to be terrified by. The main concept of the film is simply how the four teens are going to escape the ravenous creature as it contains them within their broken down car as a means of revenge for the killing its 'mate'.

Aside from this, there is a lot of character development as we learn more about the internal dynamics and relationships within the group, as well as coping with the threat from outside. It's as much an emotional battle with one another as a physical one with the zoo animal.

It's an interesting little story that has some nice moments but it's clearly very low budget and comes across as more a hardcore showing of Home and Away that cinematic material. Exceeded my expectations but they were never set very high in the first place, and although I give it a half hearted thumbs up, it's a thumbs down to watching it again.