Claws (1977) 1/2 (out of 4) Even Alaska decided to jump in on the JAWS craze with this rip-off, which features a killer grizzly. Just the previous year director William Girdler made GRIZZLY and wouldn't you know it, this low-budget film would be released as GRIZZLY II in some parts just to try and cash in. The story is pretty simple as a couple hunters come across two large grizzly bears fighting. They decide they'll look good on their wall so they start firing but one of the bears is just hit and runs off. At the same time a logger is walking through the woods and gets attacked. Through a text on the screen we learn that in the next five years this bear attacks and kills countless people and becomes known as the devil bear. Then our film kicks back and we see a group of men going after the bear. I'm a major sucker for these "nature attack" movies but this one here is just downright horrible. This is an incredibly cheap production and it really doesn't help when the bear is never in the same frame of the actors. Yes, many low-budget movies used editing to fool the viewer but this film isn't fooling anyone and what's even worse is how dragged out everything is. Not much makes sense in this movie including the fact that the "events" take place five years after the opening. As I previous said, we're give some text to explain what the bear has been doing but why not just show this stuff and forget this incredibly stretched out sequences that we wind up getting? The majority of the 100-minute running time has a bunch of idiots in the wood trying to track down the bear with the help of a Native American magic man. All of the scenes in the woods are just way too long and you can't help but feel as if this thing was just meant to be some sort of travelogue for Alaska and at the last second they decided to add a killer bear. The attack scenes are extremely weak with the viewer really not getting to see much. Everything usually so dark that you can't see or they just have the actors fighting with a fake bear arm coming down on them. I guess the one highlight in the film is a rather silly sequence where the bear attacks some boy scouts out camping. The performances are all rather bland and forgettable but then again so is pretty much everything else in this film. Stick with GRIZZLY instead.

Since William Girdler's "Grizzly" supposedly was a shameless rip-off of "Jaws" (at least according to a lot of reviewers disliking the movie), then I guess this is an even more shameless rip-off of an already shameless rip-off and thus the ultimate rip-off of "Jaws"? Whatever! Let them say what they want. I usually enjoy these typically 70's and enormously cheesy "animals revolting" movies very much and even found a handful of redeeming elements in "Claws"! That certainly wasn't an easy thing to do, as this film is really poor and amateurishly put together. Basically speaking, a killer animal flick doesn't need a brilliant or flawless scenario in order to be entertaining, but it looks as if the makers deliberately tried to sabotage their own film with their continuous and inappropriate use of pointless flashbacks, dreadful clichés and irrelevant vendettas between dull main characters. There's an ordinary grizzly bear – perhaps a little bit over-sized, but still a normal bear – on the rampage deep in the Alaskan woods, but for some reason the plot insists to convince us it's not just a bear but a malignant Indian spirit known as the "Quistica". Consequently one of the supportive characters is an old Indian mumbling inaudible stuff all the time and having kooky hallucinations, whereas the story should be focusing on savage grizzly bear attacks instead! During the fairly good and atmospherically shot opening sequences, we witness how a trio of hunters illegally wound a gigantic bear but fail to put him down completely. The raged animal promptly attacks woodchopper Jason Monroe and terrorizes the woods for the following five years. When the bear beastly interrupts a boy scout camping party attended by Jason's son and his ex-wife's new fiancée, he decides to put together a hunting party to destroy the bear once and for all. Although nobody is likely to care or even sympathize with any of the lead characters, the film obtrudes their love lives to us through insufferable flashbacks. Worst of all is that these flashbacks serve absolutely no purpose and merely just count as filler and to make us care for the familial situation of the characters. That is called Emo(tion)-TV and really doesn't mix well with horror. The hunter has flashbacks about how he fell in love with his wife and then lost her, the wife has a flashback how she left her husband, the new lover has a flashback how he gradually stole the wife's heart and the annoying kid has a flashback of the time his parents were still happily together. I swear, at a certain point I was afraid that even the bear would have a flashback about the times he was carelessly swooping fish out of the river, or something. During the second half of the film, the lousy flashbacks are slowly being replaced with lousy gibberish about Indian mythology and brotherhood speeches. The bear attacks are okay, but not as virulent and exploitative as in the aforementioned "Grizzly" and the wildlife tableaux are occasionally enchanting to look at. The climax is exciting but unfortunately not exciting enough to make you forget the overall dullness of the script and the atrocity of the dialogs. Furthermore, "Claws" also suffers from terrible performances and inept direction, so unless you have an incredibly high level of tolerance for 70's eco-horror/killer-animal flicks, you probably shouldn't search for this puppy.

When a giant,killer grizzly bear terrorizes the countryside three men go on a dangerous hunting mission to bring it down."Claws" is not as good as "Grizzly"(1976)-in fact it's pretty dull at times.There is no gore to speak of and no suspense.The photography of Alaska wilderness is outstanding.The acting is pretty good and the climax is fairly exciting.Still the special effects are not too hot."Claws" is tough to find,but if you liked "Grizzly" give this one a look.

This movie is not a good killer grizzly movie. I just don't know why they also call it Devil Bear because it is not scary enough to be called that. The movie is very dark. Sometimes you can't see certain things and the sound in the movie is bad. Most of all, the movie is boring. 2.5 stars out of 5 for my rating.