Cocaine Bear

Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr., from left), Officer Reba (. In 1985, ex-narcotics officer Andrew Thornton (played in the movie by Matthew Rhys) brought more ...

“A lot of this is about how this bear is sort of the victim in us all. “Cocaine Bear” marries bizarre truth with bonkers action, though Banks says "everyone was just a little concerned" about a fictional scene when the children find a kilo of coke in the forest, try eating some and then spit it out comedically. The film on the whole is a subtle critique of the “Just Say No” era and the war on drugs, Warden adds. “I just need to believe that there's some truth in everything that the bear’s doing.” “It made a huge difference that we really had him there.” The beast (which earned the nickname “Pablo Escobear”) eventually was stuffed, owned for a time by country music legend Waylon Jennings and now resides in a Kentucky mall. “I got a lot more confident after that moment.” (The late Ray Liotta also has one of his last movie roles in "Cocaine Bear," as a St. Bears should not drink a bottle of Coca-Cola, but you can find that on the internet,” she says. Instead, “Cocaine Bear” veers from the original story and centers on a 500-pound coke-addled creature that terrorizes a single mom (Keri Russell), two 12-year-olds (Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery), a pair of criminal buds (O’Shea Jackson Jr. In 1985, ex-narcotics officer Andrew Thornton (played in the movie by Matthew Rhys) brought more than 800 pounds of cocaine from Colombia into the USA via plane. “And also way funnier.”

I felt like there was no greater metaphor for the chaos all around us than a bear who is high on cocaine,” director Elizabeth Banks says of her ...

In addition to the film’s cutting-edge technology, the bear was brought to life by motion-capture artist Allan Henry—also a stuntman and a former student of Andy Serkis. “It was so wild and out there, and it sounded like something I had to do. Martindale plays a forest ranger who gets in some trouble with the bear. In one pivotal scene, in which the bear passes out on top of Ehrenreich, Henry wore a bulky foam bodysuit to emulate the bear’s large girth. Instead, a CGI bear was created by Weta, the New Zealand–based special effects company founded by Peter Jackson—renowned for their work on The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and Planet of the Apes franchises. You have to have that gore to balance out the ridiculousness of the situations. “The blood and guts crosses a line, and that’s part of where the humor comes in. Banks’s film takes this stranger-than-fiction tale and reimagines the bear on a coke-fueled, murderous rampage, leaving a trail of gore in its wake. “These kinds of movies need some kind of heart and tenderness, or otherwise it feels meaningless. One scene features the bear snorting coke from a severed leg. Months later, a black bear was found dead in Georgia, next to clawed-open bags of the missing drugs. So if this helps people process the last two and a half years of their life, I’ll feel great about that.

In the film, a black bear ingests several kilos of cocaine after a drug smuggler's plane crashes in the wilderness. That part is true. Where the film diverges ...

The film also marks one of the final performances of Ray Liotta, who you may know from Goodfellas or if you prefer, he's the bad guy in Wild Hogs. The perfect viewing scenario for this film would've been at a sleepover in high school when you're staying at the house of your one friend with the cool mum who lets you get out an R-rated film. The action is gory, but never enough that you have to watch through the cracks in your fingers. In the film, a black bear ingests several kilos of cocaine after a drug smuggler's plane crashes in the wilderness. So the film imagines one particular scenario that could've occured in the intervening hours. In the film she kills a whole bunch of people.

REVIEW: Directed Elizabeth Banks absolutely nails the mid-1980s B-grade horror vibe and then mashes it with a goofball high-school teen comedy.

Once you watch it, you'll find that easy to believe. and the great Isiah Whitlock Jr. And yes, that is a huge recommendation. We learn early on, in true Jaws style, that this bear might kill anyone it meets, especially if it gets a whiff of coca. * And yes, the cocaine really was eaten by a black bear.

Given these two passions, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood would combine its two loves into the film extravaganza of 2023: Cocaine Bear. As its ...

I think that these creatures represent so much to us, in terms of the wild and representing what is left in the wild, we don’t have many opportunities to protect creatures like this. I don’t want to blame the victim, but it just seems that there are a lot of things that need to happen in order for you to get mauled by a bear. There’s a lot going on between the ears of these bears — they’re very smart, complex, individualistic — that we need to respect and celebrate. Grizzly bears in the north of North America are a great example. And they are clinging on to the mountaintops, in these wild, wild places where we can’t get to them and destroy their habitat. And it’s probably the polar opposite to a bear on cocaine. If a bear gets into garbage, it’s usually the end of them, because garbage to a bear is highly addictive. And I think the compelling thing about Cocaine Bear is that the bear goes on a rampage. It’s highly processed, and it’s dangerous for wild animals, and usually ends up in their death, if not the death of a human. And if that bear ate as much as I heard — you know, a big portion of cocaine — then that’s a death sentence for the bear just like it would be for humans. Bears will often eat up to 100 different plant species out in the forest, and they know where they are and when they’re there. But as a lot of people know, there are mushrooms that are full of psychedelics and bears eat mushrooms.

Elizabeth Banks says her mom doesn't know what to make of her new gory comedy about a bear who eats cocaine.

“I want to see ‘Cocaine Rats,'” said Aaron Holliday, who plays a high school troublemaker in the movie. “It definitely has to be ‘Cocaine Dolphin,’” she said. “I’m taking my son and a pack of wild teenagers,” she said. “I’m taking the parents, too. “Cocaine Bear” is completely bonkers. Inspired by the true story of a bear that ate cocaine that scattered in a Florida forest when a drug trafficker’s plane crashed, “Cocaine Bear” is a gory horror comedy about a bear that goes on a killing spree while under the influence of coke.

Director Elizabeth Banks spoke to Insider about making the horror comedy that is one of the most anticipated movies of 2023.

Everything that I wanted in is in the movie, but I did pull out some gore toward the end. But because of that, there were a lot of great character beats that did end up on the cutting-room floor and they were heartbreakers. And then we recreated in Ireland the shots from the footage of the accident. But people were confused, they asked if the bear was going to be animated. The bear makes the coke better and the coke makes the bear better. The way everyone dressed, the people in the background, that came right out of the research. We had a really high blind recruit rate because people were just like "What the hell?" And in regards to what happened, we saw the necropsy report from that bear. I do not use any slow motion in the movie except for one moment, and that moment is the bear jumping into the back of the ambulance. The very first thing in terms of the CGI was the bear sneezing the cocaine, and I think we thought that was going to be the essence of the whole movie. Its heart basically burst, its liver burst, and the bear was found surrounded by the drugs that were dropped. How deep down the rabbit hole did you go in regards to what really happened?

"Wait until you hear about the Cocaine Shark that got totally addicted and terrorised drug smugglers in Florida."

Upcoming film Cocaine Bear arrives in cinemas tomorrow and the director shares how the bear was created in collaboration with visual effects company Weta.

"[It was a] blow by blow of the gore. "I'm a director and directors like to have a sense of control over the material – and it was really scary to me. [subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article). Wondering what to watch on TV? Cocaine Bear is released in cinemas on Friday 24th February 2023. I said this has to look like we've made a documentary of this bear. And luckily, Weta came through with flying colours." Meanwhile, star Keri Russell said that the cast had nicknamed the bear 'Cokie' on set – and she added that she was able to draw on her previous experience working with Weta a few years ago, when she had a role in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. "And he's also a stunt performer – so there was never a moment on set where if the actors were meant to be encountering the bear that we did not have Allan Henry there for everyone to have an eyeline, a physical something to push against. Banks added that although there was no bear actually present on set, she did utilise an "incredible bear performer" named Allan Henry – a veteran of the Planet of the Apes films – to help her block the action. I really had to trust Weta, who were great partners, and trust that the resources were going to be there [and] that the bear was going to be photorealistic." "I was about to embark on making a movie where the central character was never going to be on set, and I was going to have no control over it," she said.

Elizabeth Banks says that 'Cocaine Bear,' which she directed, and produced with Brownstone cofounder Max Handelman, is a direct line from 'Wet Hot American ...

“As a female filmmaker, and someone with a company that cares about centering female stories, I felt like I was being put in this box of ‘She’s got a feminist manifesto at the center of everything.’ And I just wanted to just remind people, ‘You don’t know me! “That to me was the crux of this opportunity—and to show off a little bit.” “It was impossible to know what the reaction to Cocaine Bear would be,” he says. The fact that she directed the film might even be a surprise to many of those millions of people who watched the trailer. “I do bring a lot of experience to the table—I’m not floundering around.” Even in that regard, it’s easy for Hollywood to lean on blockbuster superhero movies or other franchises that have a proven track record of pulling people into theaters. “It’s been a chaotic past several years that has hovered over our entire country and culture,” Handelman says. But when Thornton jumped out of the plane, his parachute malfunctioned, and he fell to his death on a driveway in a residential neighborhood in Knoxville, Tenn. A film as outlandish as Cocaine Bear is truly best experienced in a theater full of strangers. “In the true story, the bear dying is really sad. But I’m slowly becoming more confident that people are going to like it.” All she would tell me is that the premise was exactly what you’d expect from the title.

Universal Pictures was willing to take a chance on a screenplay with an outrageous premise: a bear running wild on cocaine.

Snakes on a Plane (2006) · FOUR COCAINE BEARS OUT OF FIVE ; Zombie Strippers (2008) · THREE COCAINE BEARS.

[Jenna Jameson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenna_Jameson) (a genuinely big star in her day) and Robert ‘Freddie Kruger’ Englund, the plot is simple: a virus turns a group of strippers into zombies, and they start feasting on their customers. It’s fine, but it was never going to be as good as the Snakes on a Plane people had imagined. It’s about SNAKES ON A PLANE. A COCAINE BEAR. It’s a BEAR. Snakes on a Plane is the daddy of the modern schlocky high-concept movie, and it generated excitement as soon as word got out that it was coming.

Cocaine Bear screenwriter Jimmy Warden says he's already toying with the idea of sequels (plural!) to the stimulant-fueled thriller.

creating a photo-realistic, drugged-out black bear) and a script that early on sees two 12-year-olds dare each other to try cocaine, Warden said he didn’t exactly expect this project to get the studio treatment. “Cocaine Bear in Space is where we would probably end.” “I think that is a story that we can continue to tell over and over again. What happened is a product of circumstance and everybody else’s poor decisions,” Warden explains. In fact, he tells Based on a true story, Elizabeth Banks’ latest directorial effort

Elizabeth Banks told Insider she took out a violent scene because she didn't want people to "throw up" leaving the theater.

And don't worry horror fans, there's more than enough gore in the movie. It's coming to a close, and I wanted people to leave happy and not be freaking out and wanting to throw up." "We also filmed his death, but I took it out."

Director Elizabeth Banks and actors Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich and O'Shea Jackson Jr. sat down to talk about their film Cocaine Bear.

“I didn’t have to do anything crazy, the bear on cocaine was crazy enough. While the film requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, there is a level of realism to it. Banks based most of the bear action we see in the film on some sort of reality. “We trusted that she was minding the store when it came to tone. Frankly, I’m always trying to make something as original and exciting for the audience and unique as possible, regardless of where the material came from.” Banks seems aware that with the film’s title and premise, it’s primed to be a viral sensation but that played no part in how she approached the film. “The fact that a studio made this movie called Cocaine Bear is so crazy. “My first thought was that I was really sad for the actual bear because the real bear OD’d on the drugs and died. There’s a bear eating people’s faces off, it’s insane,” Russell says of the controversy. And I think Banks was so right to go there and make it as crazy as she did.” “The whole world was a mess. ‘There was no greater metaphor for the chaos of life than a bear high on cocaine’

With a title like Cocaine Bear, you'd be hard-pressed to think that the new movie by director Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 2) isn't worth the watch.

As critics underscore, the great thing about Cocaine Bear is that its title already provides a pretty clear picture of what you can expect from the adventure. Cocaine Bear tells the insane story of what happens after a massive shipment of the drug from the title falls from a plane mid-flight, in the middle of a forest. As the early reactions from the crazy story (based on real events) come in, we have confirmation of what we already suspected: the action-comedy is a wild trip that is as unhinged as you’d expect it to be and delivers exactly what it promises.

A stuffed bear passed through the hands of Waylon Jennings and a mysterious Chinese collector before winding up in a Kentucky souvenir shop that renamed it ...

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The new movie “Cocaine Bear” goes into wide release Friday. Playing off that renewed interest in animals gone wild, the Normal Theater is screening two of ...

[He wrote about “Cocaine Bear” and other nature-bites-back films on his Normal Theater blog](https://www.normaltheater.com/118/Film-CULTure#bites). They are 1981’s “Wild Beasts” (about a zoo where the water supply becomes contaminated with PCP) and 2020’s “Psycho Ape” (about a killer gorilla that escapes from a zoo and goes on a murdering spree). We love it whenever we can bring in talent associated with the film, to have a conversation about how it was made.” It seems to be wired into us as a species, no matter where we live or our cultural backgrounds. Saturday](https://normaltheater.com/). “It’s a lovely chance to peel back the curtain a little bit.

'Cocaine Bear' filmmaker Elizabeth Banks caught up with Deadline to discuss her pitch for the horror-comedy, her plans for the future and more.

Yell out.” It was just so fun that that was how I was able to get the performance, was just describing you being eaten alive. I like to go to the theater and be entertained. I want everybody to be excited about the movie that we’re about to make. I mean, the combination of Keri Russell, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Margo Martindale, the three of them got on like a house on fire. I’m a husband grieving the loss of my wife and trying to connect with my son. I like to be on; I like to be up in everybody’s business on set. So when I say this movie was risky, when I say that I was scared of it…Look, I can bring great actors to set. BANKS: I’m proud to say that PETA did reach out to us at the very beginning to ask how it was going to work. The rampaging bear on cocaine was a great hook, but I knew that the opportunity here was to make something with these grounded characters that the audience would fall in love with. I was in love with them on the page, and then I got this incredible cast, and that’s what really kept me invested the whole time. I’m getting older, and I want to stay relevant and be in the conversation.” It’s definitely rare to read something that you think, “Oh, I can’t wait to commit two and a half years of my life to this.” [Laughs] You’ve got to really feel that there’s some passion behind it, and I just fell in love with the characters in this script.

Starring Keri Russell and Ray Liotta (in his final film role), Cocaine Bear is a gory comedy-thriller inspired by a true story — but with more "murderous ...

To be clear, 95 minutes is as long as a film titled Cocaine Bear should ever be (how Snakes on a Plane got away with 106 minutes – in 2006! On the other hand, you'd think that a film with a premise this outré would offer more in the way of overtly coked-up hijinks, by human as well as ursine characters. A nurse as well as a single mother, Sari functions as the film's voice of reason – paralleled by none other than the bear, who in this telling is a lady and a mother herself. (OK, it was pretty funny when the bear inhales a fat stripe of the stuff off a severed foreleg… (It's gotten a considerable glow-up, too: The CGI version weighs in at 230 kilograms, versus the OG's measly 79.) Since then, the bear has found a final resting place – after its taxidermied corpse was bounced between multiple states and owners of varying degrees of legality, including a Nashville pawn shop and country singer Waylon Jennings – in a Kentucky-themed novelty store.

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Keri Russell in a scene from “Cocaine Bear,” directed by Elizabeth Banks. Pat Redmond/Universal Pictures via ...

“For the scale of that movie, it’s a huge hit. The risk was: I was never going to have the lead character of the movie on the set of the movie,” Banks says. “Cocaine Bear” is here to party. Nothing, it turned out, could cut through all the noise like “Cocaine Bear.” “Cocaine Bear” is here to be bold. “We thought at some point, someone was going to say, ‘Well you can’t call it ‘Cocaine Bear.’ You have to call it ‘A Walk in the Woods.'” “That was the goal.” The movie, itself, is like a meme sprung to life — a kind of spiritual heir to “Snakes on a Plane” crossed with a Paddington Bear fever dream. It just means you have to swing the bat a little harder,” Lord says. “I’m the bear who ate cocaine,” reads one of the film’s official tweets. At a time when much in Hollywood can feel pre-packaged, the makers of “Cocaine Bear” think it can be an untamed exception. Yes, “Cocaine Bear” is a real movie.

Not since Snakes on a Plane has a title promised so much, but despite a great cast the plot is too tame.

There is also no bear behavioural expert, spurious or otherwise, to talk us through what happens to the ursine brain on cocaine, ideally with wall charts and diagrams. But is this film, like that Samuel L Jackson vehicle, also fated to be blown off-course by the hot air of its own hype? Once upon a time, deep in the woods by Georgia’s Chattahoochee River, a bear stumbled upon a cartel’s stash, ingested $2m worth of cocaine and …

Elizabeth Banks has promised her viewers no more than a bear on drugs, and a bear on drugs is what they get.

But the main event is the cocaine bear, and the meager humans only distract from her might. What that poor creature did before keeling over is a mystery, but Jimmy Warden’s script imagines a bacchanal of carnage around that event, retaining only the location (a national park in Georgia) and the name of the drug runner who caused the incident, Andrew C. The true story of the cocaine bear is relatively mundane—after drug smugglers dropped their latest shipment from Colombia in the woods, a dead black bear was found with some 75 pounds of cocaine in its system, and was eventually stuffed and mounted. If blockbuster-level gore is what you’re after, Cocaine Bear delivers—I was impressed with how gleefully gross Banks gets at times, dropping severed limbs from the sky and strewing plenty of intestines on the ground. This project does not skimp on its main attraction, but it does seem unsure of what to put around it, throwing a variety of hapless characters in the mix and arming them mostly with indifferent comedy in the face of some truly gnarly violence. I’m probably the fool for trying to summon some profundity from these bloodstained reels; Banks has promised her viewers no more than a cocaine bear, and a cocaine bear is what they get, all growly and crazed and rendered with very expensive-looking CGI.

Good news: The movie with a coked-out bear is pretty good and 1980s kids especially will enjoy the kills and hilarious thrills of 'Cocaine Bear.'

[Ray Liotta](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/05/26/ray-liotta-dies-star-goodfellas-field-of-dreams/9943257002/) plays a St. But the bear is more underdog than serial killer in general – honestly, there’s a lot of gnarly horror that’s not really her fault. The [“Citizen Kane”](https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2016/11/11/citizen-kane-75th-anniversary-greatest-movie-ever/93584442/) of coked-out bear movies is not perfect by any stretch but like its furry star, the film is scrappy and hungry while owning its throwback absurdity. “Cocaine Bear” is a movie with many instances of dismemberment, bullet wounds, clawed buttocks and gory death – and almost as many subplots. The real animal overdosed and died – not so much in the movie version. Duffel bags of the stuff rained down on a Georgia national park, and thus Cocaine Bear was born.

The audience is cued to watch Elizabeth Banks' coked-up-bear-as-slasher comedy as a wilderness thriller crossed with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

The sequence that follows is a true jaw-dropper, though it almost feels like it could have come out of a new version of “Smokey and the Bandit.” “Cocaine Bear” does whatever it takes to get a rise out of you. But have no fear, we’re always in on the joke of it all, which is that none of it matters. “Cocaine Bear” was never crowdsourced, but one of its selling points is that the film’s audience has been primed to think of the movie as theirs. And the elaborate chintziness of the characters is all part of the design. It starts out in the Ranger’s cabin, which the bear has ambushed, and carries on in the van that several characters jump into — we think, once they start driving, that they’ve escaped, but we would be wrong. The line on “Cocaine Bear” is that it’s so nutty, so luridly preposterous, so WTF-are-we-watching? But the other half of the joke is that “Cocaine Bear,” unlike “Snakes on a Plane,” takes off from a concept that you can take to the bank: In 1985, a black bear, in the Chattahoochee mountains of Tennessee, has consumed several kilos of cocaine (they were left scattered from a plane by a flaked-out drug dealer), which transforms the normally peaceful animal into a gnashing, raging, bloody-jawed human-eating beast. [Keri Russell](https://variety.com/t/keri-russell/) grounds the movie as the distraught mom, and the great Margo Martindale does what she can with the broadly written role of the Park Ranger, who is myopically romantically inclined. Movies have been mixing carnage and giggles since at least the carnival horror of the “Evil Dead” films. (at the screening I attended, someone literally yelled out, “What the fuck is this movie?”) that it’s all but irresistible. Jackson line, “I have had it with these mothefuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin‘ plane!” The result was that “Snakes on a Plane” felt like the first piece of brazen Hollywood schlock that was crowdsourced. “Snakes on a Plane,” which sounded like a title that Don Simpson scrawled in white powder on a table at 4:00 a.m., was a movie that wore its brain-deadness on both lapels.

Truth-based tale of an animal on a drug-fuelled rampage is gonzo-horror fun until the buzz wears off.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. Compare Standard and Premium Digital For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital,

When "Cocaine Bear" ads started going viral, the immediate question was whether this was another one of those titles in search of a movie (see "Snakes on a ...

To the extent wandering around the woods being menaced by an unconvincing bear doesn’t cost much either, even a modicum of success will probably unleash a Cocaine Bear Cinematic Universe. Exploitation fare has its place, and nobody can accuse “Cocaine Bear” of taking itself too seriously. as a cop seeking the same; and Margo Martindale as a park ranger with amorous designs on a visiting biologist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). As we’ve witnessed in other movies that employ movie magic to replicate present-day animals (as opposed to, say, monsters or dinosaurs), the bear might be unstoppable, but shoddy CGI renderings can halt a movie in its tracks. “Bear” doesn’t achieve that level of wit, but it does ratchet up the gore factor with limbs occasionally flying in all directions, those body parts looking a whole lot more realistic than the bear itself. The answer lies somewhere in between, as director Elizabeth Banks conjures bursts of absurdist energy and humor without delivering anything approaching a sustained rush.

If only this Pablo Escobear of a movie had snorted enough to stay up later and write a better plot.

Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. “Cocaine Bear” is like a dull butter knife against those two. “Jane,” the opening song, is an homage to ”Wet Hot American Summer,” which Banks co-starred in and had the same Jefferson Starship opening tune. There’s a reference to Pines Mall, which is a little nod to “Back to the Future,” but who really cares? Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden have created a mashup of Quentin Tarantino bloodfests, Sam Raimi’s scare tactics and the Coen brothers’ absurdity. If you think it’s hysterical to see a bear do a bump off a severed leg stump, by all means, the movie theater is this way.