Cocaine Bear: A wild ride that doesn't let truth get in the way of a good story
Hanna Hoekstra’s hiker, Elsa, meets the Cocaine Bear
The provocative title may tell you everything you need to know about whether Cocaine Bear is for you. But there’s much more to the grizzly true tale of a drug run gone wrong in 1985 than meets the eye.
It all begins when infamous smuggler Andrew Thornton (played briefly by Matthew Rhys in the film) drops three duffel bags filled with cocaine (about 30kg in each) into the Chattahoochee National Forest of Northern Georgia, before abandoning his Cessna aircraft to crash and plummeting to the ground – perhaps after hitting his head, who knows – landing with an almighty thud in a driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee.
In an even more disastrous twist, one of the duffel bags of ‘sugar booger’ was found near Blood Mountain by a black bear that subsequently consumed its entire contents.
The events in oddball thriller Cocaine Bear hypothesise what might have happened had the 80kg bear survived ingesting 30kg of nose candy (almost a third of its own body weight) – spoiler alert, it did not.
“But why let the depressing truth get in the way of a good story?”
When the bear’s corpse was eventually found three months after Thornton’s, an autopsy revealed it had sadly succumbed to a combination of cerebral haemorrhaging, hyperthermia, respiratory failure, renal failure and heart failure.
But why let the depressing truth get in the way of a good story? As the film’s writer, Jimmy Warden, says: “l knew I wasn’t just going to have the bear die of a drug overdose. That’d be kind of a downer. So I thought it could kill a lot of people instead… Dreaming up different ways for a bear on cocaine to kill people in the woods is the most fun I’ve ever had writing a script.”
Margo Martindale, Keri Russell and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from left) are in for a big surprise
And so, as Cocaine Bear unfolds, a disparate group – including a panicked mother searching for her daughter (Keri Russell); a horny park ranger (Margo Martindale) and the target of her affections (Jesse Tyler Ferguson); a pair of bumbling criminals (Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr) seeking to recover their boss’ (Ray Liotta in his final role) dumped stash; a detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr); and more – tries to escape the ferocious apex predator on its coked-out rampage, while it tears people limb from limb in increasingly squeamish and creative ways.
“I have always loved horror and comedy together,” director Elizabeth Banks (Call Jane, Charlie’s Angels) says. “Horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. The best thing you can do is take the audience on a real roller coaster; making them laugh, making them scream, making them jump. That’s what the goal was in making this film.”
Cocaine Bear succeeds in all three with gory body horror sequences and a ravaging photorealistic female sun bear created by Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning New Zealand-based special effects company, Weta (no real bears were used for filming).
Pablo Escobear just wants the good stuff
As the bear continues tripping and picks off hapless hikers one-by-one, the filmmakers lean heavily into the ridiculousness of the situation – one scene depicting ‘Pablo Escobear’ snorting a line of powder from a severed leg. It’s a wild ride, but falls short in the character stakes as the ensemble cast is largely dispensable.
When the remaining players are thrown together in a hastily executed climax, giving Disney a run for its heartstring-tugging money, it begins to feel forced and rushed as a scramble to wrap up what little story there is happens.
Still, with a rocking retro soundtrack of 1980s bangers, led by Jefferson Starship’s Jane (keen film fans will recognise this one from Banks’ earliest film: Wet Hot American Summer) and a B-grade horror sensibility that nails the brief, Cocaine Bear is a trip worth taking for the mayhem and outlandish kills alone.
