What you probably haven’t seen is a 500-pound bear (because everything is bigger in Hollywood) mauling her way through a once-idyllic stretch of federally protected woodland. You’ve seen worse new movies in February, maybe even this February. Whether or not audiences form lines for “Cocaine Bear,” it’s hard to completely dismiss a mainstream horror-comedy that offers a nice supply of sharp and grisly, at least until it takes a disappointing turn for soft and cuddly. Having grabbed headlines with its viral trailer, cheerfully self-explanatory title and sly redefinition of “high concept,” the movie has already invited obvious pre-release comparisons to “Snakes on a Plane,” the (sadly underseen) 2006 thriller that soared for months as an internet sensation before crashing to box-office earth. Nasty, brutish and snort-filled, “Cocaine Bear” provides an extremely gory and amusingly speculative answer. From this real-life tale of greed, stupidity and humanity’s unthinking abuse of nature rises a natural question: What if the bear, rather than simply kilo-ing over, had gone on a murderous coke-fueled rampage driven by a hunger for not just sinewy human flesh (though there’s plenty of that), but for another whiff of that sweet, sweet powder? By the time the illicit cargo was found in Georgia’s Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, much of it had already been ingested by an unfortunate 175-pound black bear, found dead nearby of a massive overdose. The bags full of cocaine he was transporting into the country took longer to recover. In September 1985, Tennessee authorities discovered the body of Andrew Carter Thornton II, a former narcotics officer turned drug smuggler who had fallen to his death from a plane.
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