Cocaine Bear is every bit as ridiculous and to the point as it sounds. After a black bear ingests enough nose candy to give even Jordan Belfort a run for his money, it unleashes bloody carnage upon a quiet Georgia forest and…well that’s it. No really. That’s the whole plot.

You would think that with such a surprisingly simple premise, along with an extremely short hour and a half runtime (barely qualifying as feature length), the resulting product would be a rushed, confusing mess. Indeed, I came in with a high anticipation of boredom and an acceptance of ill-fated regret for my foolish wallet. Yet at risk of sounding hyperbolic, this pessimistic prediction could not have been farther from the cinematic experience I was exposed to that night. Right from the get-go, it was very apparent that everyone involved knew what they were getting into.

The Thrills of Cocaine

The acting, particularly that of the child characters, was a layered affair that can best be described as “so good at being so bad it’s good”. The heart-racing, synth-heavy soundtrack was unequivocally both contemporary and retro. The rampant use of dated-looking practical effects was such a refreshing return to an art form far too often lost in today’s era of CGI. But above all else, the defining excellence of Cocaine Bear is found in its pacing. Filler was not a word in this movie’s vocabulary, with every scene serving a fundamental purpose, and there was not a single second where I was not bursting in laughter at the script’s dry humor.

Elizabeth Banks confidently wore her horror comedy influence on her sleeve with this film and it clearly shows her adoration and respect for the genre. How else do you explain the baffling fact that Universal Studios took the risk of greenlighting this project? So if you’re in the mood for a movie with a lot of heart that doesn’t require any kind of thought, give Cocaine Bear a shot.

Rating: 9/10

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