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Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity
William Morgan
Every actor has their fair share of flops in their back catalogue. Embarrassingly bad films that, despite their best efforts, failed to draw crowds to theaters and were panned by the critics.
Yet very few can claim to have starred in a movie so chaotic that it took almost four decades for anyone to even see it.
Surprisingly, however, George Clooney can count this as one of his accolades, alongside his two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes, and a BAFTA.
It is difficult to know what Clooney expected when he signed up for the 1983 film, which is best described as a bad sequel with a plot that is Jaws but on land, using an animatronic bear rather than a shark to frighten audiences.
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But with more than a decade to go until his breakthrough role in ER, then 22-year-old Clooney was more than likely thinking about the paycheck and a chance to fly behind the Iron Curtain for a holiday in communist Hungary.
The same can likely be said for the production's other young and not-yet-famous cast members, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen, who joined Clooney in Budapest to make a film that would not see the light of day until 2020.
For all three, the horror - called Grizzly II: Revenge - promised to be their big breaks on-screen, marking a first for Clooney and Sheen, as well as being Dern's first film since emancipating from her parents at the age of 16.
And yet, the flick would languish for decades, even as its cast exploded to stardom in blockbusters like Platoon, Jurassic Park, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
This is because almost everything went wrong, from the 16-foot mechanical bear being left out in the rain to mounting costs and a shrinking budget.
By the end of their first go at filming, they were left with a few seconds of bear footage and scenes with actors describing their terror at the largely absent bear.
"It’s hard to sell a movie called Grizzly II without a bear in it,” screenwriter and producer David Sheldon has previously noted.
This run of bad organization and worse luck only deepened for the production after this initial filming, with Grizzly II's animatronic bears reportedly being seized by Hungarian officials over unpaid debts accrued during the production.
Then, before these expensive props could be used to fill out the bear-less horror movie, a warehouse fire apparently destroyed them.
When the crew returned to Hollywood and attempted to market the film to distributors, Platoon producer Arnold Kopelson called the whole thing a 'disaster' and it was shelved.
But after years of gossip about this unreleased film starring three of the biggest actors in the world, Grizzly II was finally given a screening in 2020, to a small crowd at Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival.
When asked about her part in the film by AV Club, Dern finally explained what it was like to star in the flop with Clooney and Sheen, while also revealing why the trio of 'nepo babies' were really there in the first place.
Dern said: "Well, either way, I’ve never seen it, I can tell you that. The last I heard from George Clooney, who is also one of the cast members in the film, is that the whole movie is all of 40 minutes long, and no one’s ever actually seen it. It’s not even really long enough to call it a movie."
The film, which was extensively reworked in the intervening decades, is actually 76 minutes long, but its star cast can be forgiven for not quite paying attention. After all, they were mostly there for the vacation.
"The only thing I can say about it… I mean, I’m 16 years old, it’s six weeks in Budapest, Hungary, at the exact second Communism is ending, and it’s me, George Clooney, and Charlie Sheen," Dern justified.
"That’s all I’m gonna say. I’m not gonna say another damned thing. [Laughs.] Except that it was the craziest time. And the paprika chicken was outstanding."
Since being released to on-demand streaming services, Grizzly II has racked up an impressively bad eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes.