Project Grizzly

1996 Canadian documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Troy Hurtubise is a tough Canadian who works in a junkyard. He's got a pair of knives and a pair of testicles, both pairs probably average-sized for a person living in the Canadian wild but a little larger than those of somebody living in a suburb of Indianapolis. After surviving a sort of bear attack (the bear, he dubbed, The Old Man), he decides that he wants to research grizzly bears up close. He wants to be a "Little Jacques Cousteau," so he devotes his energies to designing a bear-proof suit. This documentary details the testing (giant swinging logs, spills from hill tops, car collisions, etc.) of version six of the suit as well as a venture into the wilderness to look for a bear. Unfortunately, there's a fatal flaw--the suit is too heavy and Troy can't move around in it well enough.

I had trouble deciding whether this was genuine or not. It is, and the guy's a little nutty. I like documentaries about obsessives and their obsessions, and this works because the subject is lively, interesting, slightly off, and funny. Lots of laugh-out-loud moments with the suit of armor being tested, my favorite being when he took it to a bar and had a motorcycle gang beat him with baseball bats in the parking lot. And I could have watched scenes with the thing, the thing being a 7-feet tall Transformer-like thing, being hit by a truck all day. A cheaply-made companion to Grizzly Man though much shorter and not nearly as heavy.

Fascinating, hilarious, and slightly unsettling: