I Got Crazy High And Enjoyed the Crap Out of Cocaine Bear

I had a bear of a good time watching the hot new animal movie

When I think about the disappointments and heartbreaks in my life and career one towers above all others: Snakes on a Plane. Like the rest of the world, I fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful, beautiful idea of Snakes on a Plane.

Who could resist a movie where a bunch of cold-blooded reptiles run amok in the not so friendly skies, leading an enraged Samuel L. Jackson to shout, with great ferocity, the magical words, “I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES ON THIS MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!!!?”

How could a movie like that be anything other than spectacular? 

Oh, but we had such high hopes! We pinned all of our hopes and dreams on that miraculous piece of cinema. 

Like all else in this sick, sad and unknowable world, Snakes on a Plane let us down. 

You can only imagine my shock and horror when I sat down at a ten o clock weekday screening of Snakes on a Plane stone cold sober many, many years ago and discovered that the movie wasn’t the best ever made, or transcendent, or even a deeply moving, spiritual, transformative experience that I will never forget. 

Snakes on a Plane was just kind of dumb. It was just bad. When Jackson yelled his big catchphrase it wasn’t badass or iconic or something I would treasure until my dying day. 

It was just cheesy. Granted, I did not necessarily expect Snakes on a Plane to be GOOD. I’m not sure I even wanted it to be good in any objective sense. I just wanted it to be FUN. It wasn’t. 

Snakes on a Plane taught me a painful but valuable lesson: sometimes something looks like it will fucking rock and kick ass but when it comes out it actually sucks. 

I REALLY wanted to enjoy Snakes on a Plane so I watched it a second time for my long-dead Sub-Cult 2.0 column over at Rotten Tomatoes but it left me just as cold. 

So when the internet, in all of its sober wisdom, began to lost its fucking shit over the existence of a movie with the title Cocaine Bear I couldn’t help but filter that wild enthusiasm through my disappointment with Snakes on a Plane. 

Cocaine Bear looks fucking amazing but then so did Snakes on a Plane. I try not to get excited about anything because hope is a sadist who delights in crushing fragile souls like my own and punishing optimism. 

Yet I CHOSE to believe. I CHOSE to have faith. I CHOSE to go into Cocaine Bear with a pure heart and a mind and body full of various mood-altering substances, some legal, some less so. 

I allowed myself to get excited about Cocaine Bear. I decided to give myself over to the movie, to see it under ideal conditions with an audience as excited and possibly stoned as I was. 

I saw Cocaine Bear at a ten o clock night screening of Cocaine Bear in a theater full of rowdy teenage boys. If you’re going to see a movie in a theater full of adolescents hopped up on goofballs and screaming meanies and bug juice Cocaine Bear is the film to see. 

Cocaine Bear wastes very little time establishing its premise. The year is 1985. Oh sweet blessed Lord is it ever 1985. Cocaine Bear is even more eighties than its title suggests and Cocaine Bear might just be the single most eighties title and premise in film history. 

It’s got everything. Cocaine! A bear! A bear on cocaine! The Reagan decade! Mark Mothersbaugh humping a synthesizer on the score!

Director Elizabeth Banks lays the period detail on thick. Cocaine Bear offers a theme park/costume party version of the 1980s where everything is cranked up to 12. Cocaine Bear never lets audiences forget that it’s not just set in the 1980s: it IS the 1980s. 

The action begins with drug smuggler Andrew W. Thornton III dumping cocaine from a small airplane before plummeting to his death. The drugs land in Georgia’s Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest, where it is consumed by a female brown bear who quickly develops a taste for the white stuff. 

All it takes is a little bit of booger sugar to turn this majestic creature of the forrest into a drug addict. Cocaine Bear is a broad, campy horror comedy of cheap but potent transgression but it’s also a disaster movie about a bear that knows how to party and feels a compulsion to tear apart anyone and everything she gets her paws on. 

The only character that really matters here is the titular cocaine bear but Cocaine Bear nevertheless feels a not entirely necessary need to fill out its cast with infinitely less compelling human characters.  

These people exist largely, if not exclusively, to have their bodies destroyed by a monster hopped up on Bolivian Marching Powder. In that respect they serve an essential narrative function but that’s about it. 

Drug kingpin Syd White (Ray Liotta) sends flunkies Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich, who the universe deemed not charismatic enough to follow Harrison Ford as Han Solo but magnetic enough for a sizable role in the motion picture Cocaine Bear) and Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr., who looks less like dad Ice Cube’s son than his clone) to retrieve the lost cocaine regardless of the consequences. 

Tweens Henry (Christian Convery) and his best friend Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) pick the wrong time and place to play hooky when they ditch school for a carefree afternoon meandering about the woods. 

But these are not your typical kids. Just like the titular animal, these kids party, swear and see things no one should experience, particularly children. Henry’s precocity is at once annoying and adorable, precious and extremely entertaining. 

When Dee Dee goes missing her nurse mother Sari (Keri Russell) comes to the forest looking for her. Isiah Whitlock Jr. plays Bob, a detective and dog owner who figures out the source of the missing cocaine and heads to Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest to track down the missing drugs before the bad guys can. 

There is a gnawing lack of physicality to Cocaine Bear’s title character. She’s a creature of pure CGI who is as fast, strong and patently unreal as a superhero or a supervillain in a Marvel movie. Cocaine Bear is super fast. She’s super strong. She can practically fly. She throws around adult human beings like rag dolls but she never seems to be in any danger because she is very ostentaciously not real. The cocaine bear is only slightly more realistic than the CGI Yogi Bear of the 3-D Yogi Bear movie but way more fun and way angrier.  

Cocaine Bear is not scary but it’s full of “oh shit” moments that are jarring as well as awesome in their cartoon brutality. Cocaine Bear is less a conventional motion picture than a party movie designed to be watched in a group by people who are aggressively non-sober. 

It works on that level and only on that level but that is enough for me. Here’s the thing. All I wanted from Cocaine Bear was a silly, fun movie where a giant bear does a fuck-ton of cocaine and goes on a killing spree. 

That’s just what I got from Cocaine Bear. It delivers on the gleeful, vulgar absurdity of its title and its premise and that’s all that really matters. 

I have an innate aversion to self-consciously outrageous exploitation movies that don’t wait for history or the moviegoing public to render a verdict before anointing themselves cult classics. 

That’s Cocaine Bear. It was a cult movie well before anyone had a chance to see it and leans into cult kookiness at every turn. Yet I had a whole lot of fun with it all the same. Would I have enjoyed it as much if I weren’t high or saw it by myself? Probably not! 

Here’s the thing. I know damn well that Cocaine Bear is not a good movie. It’s cheesy and winking and populated by campy archetypes just waiting to be mauled by the massive claws and sharp teeth of an out of control animal. 

But if you engage with the movie on its level and also take a lot of drugs this can be an eminently satisfying experience, and not just because it concludes with Ray Liotta’s villain getting punished for a lifetime of sin by getting his intestines ripped out by multiple coke-crazed bears, followed by a heartwarming dedication to the beloved thespian. 

Ray Lotta’s film career began with him sexually assaulting Pia Zadora with a garden hose in The Lonely Lady. It ended with him having his entrails eaten by a cocaine-crazed animal in Cocaine Bear. 

In between the man lived a life onscreen and created a legacy that will love forever. The prolific character actor still has a few films awaiting release but it would be hard to imagine a more beautiful or poetic way for the national treasure to conclude his magnificent film career than by having drug-crazed bears go to town on his internal organs. 

Honor the great man’s legacy by seeing Cocaine Bear. It’s a hoot and a half even if it’s not actually, you know, good. 

Three Stars (out of Four)