Critics and audiences alike weren’t sure what to think of the trailer Cocaine Bear (2023) featuring Melle Mel’s party song “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” and a slasher movie spoof plot where a bear goes on a rampage and attacks innocent people in the woods. Any movie with a title as wild as Cocaine Bear seems destined to have encountered a narrow path to the big screen. Its existence feels unlikely.
Even less likely is the fact that it’s the directorial follow-up to actor Elizabeth Banks who is best known for her supporting role as the wealthy and ridiculous-looking Effie Trinket in The hunger Games (2011) and its sequels. Banks previously directed the Charlie’s Angels (2019) reboot starring Kristen Stewart and its musical sequel pitch perfect 2 (2015), in which she also reprized her supporting role as an a cappella match commentator. Despite all this, that’s the detail that seems the least likely to be true Cocaine Bear is based on a true story.
Is Cocaine Bear Based on a true story?
The opening credits of Cocaine Bear makes the incredulous claim that the movie is “Based on a true story,” practically daring moviegoers to pull out their phones and watch Wikipedia right there in their seats. (Incidentally, the titles include a quote about the nonviolent nature of unprovoked bears, which is hilariously credited to Wikipedia.)
As it turns out, there is some truth to the credits claim. But Cocaine Bear uses all of its “true” elements in the opening sequence and archive footage from local news stations in the American South. From that point on, the movie is completely fictional, meaning almost none of the events in the movie are true. The true story of Cocaine Bear is as follows:
In December 1985, a huge American black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee woods after ingesting a duffel bag full of cocaine dropped from a Cessna plane by a narcotics officer turned smuggler who jumped from the plane with a malfunctioned parachute and was found dead in a Knoxville driveway with a Kevlar body armor, Gucci loafers and heavy packs of cocaine strapped all over his body.
After undergoing an autopsy (an animal autopsy), the dead bear was taxidermized and put on display at a local visitor center. From there, the stuffed bear changed hands to a porn store in Nashville, where it was bought by country musician Waylon Jennings, who then gave it to a friend who kept the stuffed bear in Las Vegas. Somehow, the stuffed bear ended up at the Kentucky For Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, where it remains to this day.
The Cocaine Bear It was unlikely that the script would actually be made
Speak against Kentucky for Kentuckysaid the retired medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the real cocaine bear:
[The bear’s] stomach was literally filled to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral hemorrhage, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.
After getting wind of the cocaine bear and his tragic fate, Cocaine Bear‘s screenwriter Jimmy Warden wondered what would happen if the creature somehow ingested all that cocaine and became a threat to public safety? Warden found his answer in a script he wrote to specification (with no upfront payment and no guarantee that anyone would ever buy it).
Like Kevin Smith’s long teased, unmade Elk jaws movie, read Warden’s script as a modern take on the many Jaws rip-offs and spoofs from the late 70s and early 80s. The script made an impression 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 project off the ground, produced the film and recruited Elizabeth Banks to direct.
Cocaine Bear Is a modern take on a classic Jaws Rip offs
Like the Jaws rip-offs that Warden refers to Cocaine Bear in his script, Banks’ film plays like Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983) and Alligator (1980), Tobe Hoopers Eaten alive (1976), by Joe Dante piranha (1978), and of course William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976). Banks has claimed that her biggest inspiration for the film came from Sam Raimi Evil death movies.
Cocaine Bear also has a lot of second-hand Spielberg in the form of Mark Mothersbaugh’s synthy score that replaces Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s score for Stranger things (2016). The score for that show, in turn, is a rip-off of classic slashers like Charles Bernstein’s score for Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and John Carpenter’s music for his own films such as Attack on Precient 13 (1976) and The fog (1980).
Cocaine Bear Is filled with Sketch Comedy routines
By splitting her large cast into pairs for scenes that often degenerate into sketch comedy routines, Banks seems to have taken cues outside the horror genre from classic comedies like Hal Needham’s Smokey and the bandit (1977) and Lizard’s Broken Supertroopers (2001). After all, she has a rich pedigree of great comedies, from Wet hot American summer (2001) to Modern family (2009-2020).
The downside to Banks’s sketch comedy directing is that none of the scenes have any dramatic impact and some of her acting combinations are funnier than others, making Cocaine Bear variable from scene to scene. Although it must be said that one character is so funny that they should have been the main character.
Margot Martindale should have been the main character in Cocaine Bear
Margaret Martindale won an Emmy in 2011 for her role as “Mags Bennett” in FX’s critically acclaimed neo-western series Justified (2010-2015), and two for her work in the excellent FX series The Americans (2013-2018). Aside from dramatic chops, all of Martindale’s comedic talents were teased Running Hard: The Story of Dewey Cox (2007) and August: Osage County (2013) can be seen in full Cocaine Bear. Martindale is unforgettable in her role as the bumbling park ranger, “Ranger Liz”, who provides about 80% of the movie’s laughs with lines like these:
Park rangers are peace officers. Which means we can shoot people.
Martindale’s Ranger Liz is a fantastic female version of “Buford T. Justice” played by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the bandit. If her character had time to stop for a bite to eat in a deleted scene, maybe Martindale’s Ranger Liz would order something just like Bufford does in Smoky:
Give me a Diablo sandwich, a Dr. Pepper, and do it quick, I’m in a goddamn hurry.
Martidnale even drew the comparison from itself Cocaine Bear to Gleason Smoky character while speaking Page six. She also added:
Honestly, as fat and crazy as I look, I loved the way I look in it.
Ranger Liz is so funny she should have been the main character and Martindale could easily have almost carried the whole movie on her own, with even more laughs. Naturally, Banks had a script with an ensemble cast, so she shot the movie that way, giving her cast a relatively equal amount of screen time, except for the late Ray Liotta. In a repetition of being Good day gangster persona, Liotta looms throughout the film, only appearing near the end, as does Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse now (1979).
Will Cocaine Bear get a sequel?
Universal images
In any case, there must be an even better cut Cocaine Bear somewhere between the minute and a half trailer and the hour and a half feature film, which some critics argued was more of a stretched version of the trailer than an actual movie. A half-hour short that sidelines the rest of the cast (as Liotta was in the feature) and restores deleted scenes with Martindale may not be suitable for theatrical distribution, as very few shorts are.
On the other hand, everyone who saw the trailer did Cocaine Bear Do you think it was the kind of movie that would actually be released in theaters? Maybe we’ll all be less surprised by the time the sequel”Cocaine cubs‘ rolls around. While no announcements have been made yet, a sequel is almost certain Cocaine Bear has performed well at the cash register (after knocking Avatar: the way of the water back to number three), and the final shot in the film teases the demented coke-addicted cubs who seem ready to take another bloodthirsty warpath through the Georgia woods.
Perhaps an entire franchise is in order, a shared cinematic universe of drug-addicted animals – Heroin hamsters, Meth Magpies, Pot Sloths. Whatever happens, Margot Martindale better be in it somehow.