Cocaine Bear (2023), directed by Elizabeth Banks. Monday, February 27, The Main Cinema.

Cocaine Bear is the worst time I’ve had at a movie in many, many years. I saw it with good friends and we had a great dinner beforehand. But the life of the day was utterly destroyed by this unfunny, hateful film.

Look, I didn’t think this movie was going to be good, in the sense of someday we see it on Criterion, etc. I expected it to be fun, at best, and at worst, just a cheap product that didn’t work, no harm done. I kept hearing how “high-concept” Cocaine Bear is, but so what? A lot of horror movies are that way, a lot of good movies are high-concept. Tremors is some filmmaker going “a big, man-eating worm-thing attacks people in a small Arizona one stoplight town”. That movie’s a blast.

Cocaine Bear’s biggest issue: it’s made by the wrong people. I’m going to say it: director Elizabeth Banks and writer Jimmy Warden have contempt for this genre. The horror is terrible, utterly without suspense, the supposed gore totally reliant on low-grade CGI (this fucking movie cost $30 million dollars) and thus it has no visceral impact, it takes place in the 1980s and yet fails miserably at evoking that time. It throws characters into the mix that are repellant and that should, in the hands of someone who understands or cares about the genre, be killed by the bear. Instead, inexplicably, we are asked to care about these vile people, we’re supposed to feel sorry for characters who do utterly terrible things. There’s message about moms that’s just thrown in (and it’s poorly executed on top of that), and somehow we’re supposed to root for the bear and think it’s funny that her and her cubs like cocaine. Honestly, you watch this and wonder–do Banks and Warden even understand what cocaine does? God, long, long, long stretches of dialogue whose only purpose is to generate backstory for these awful people.

Cocaine Bear was made by people who don’t actually find horror movies interesting, knew they could wrangle a big budget from a studio, and make some money, that’s all. It’s the most cynical, mean-spirited movie I’ve seen in a long time, simply because it’s disdain drips from every frame.