The movie Cocaine Bear is a testament to the power of two things: marketing and memes. These are kind of the same thing, of course; memes are largely just self-perpetuating marketing mechanisms. A lot of people ended up hearing about this movie, though, because of the viral nature of the Internet, and the fact that the premise sounds both silly and like it could be a fun movie.

Ultimately, though, the movie is not really that much fun? For a B movie type of film, I think they just don't take it far enough. There are some okay jokes, and it is certainly silly, but they really reign it in, and as a result it never feels like it becomes the over-the-top nonsense film that it truly wants to be. It tries to be funny all the time, and it thinks it is a horror comedy movie (well, pretty light on the horror angle - but see my lengthy PPS footnote below). But it doesn't truly succeed at being a comedy because it just isn't quite funny enough, either.

I actually don't think it's a TERRIBLE film; it is coherent, for instance, and it has a plot and enough closure of the right types, and enough jokes do work to make it function at a basic level. But its fatal flaw is that, incredibly, it is unwilling to simply be ridiculous enough to live up to its own premise. Plus, absolutely unforgivable to go for like 20 minutes at the start without seeing the cocaine bear in Cocaine Bear.

Score: 4/10

IMDb: Cocaine Bear

PS: Inspired by a true story? That is an awfully loose inspiration!

PPS: OK, this is one of my personal crusades. What does it mean to be a horror film? There are two kinds of horror, to me. One is horror as a "setting"; the aesthetics of horror, without the emotive force. Imagine dressing up as a vampire or zombie for Halloween, or watching Shaun of the Dead. These things aren't merely not scary, they aren't TRYING to be scary. They are just aesthetic choices that tend to be associated with horror (in the case of the movie, for the juxtaposition to set up the jokes). The second one is the actual feelings that a work of art is trying to invoke in you; fear, paranoia, anxiety. Of course many "horror movies" are both - like Halloween, for example. But many are only the second, an attempt to evoke the emotions without the aesthetics. That's the important part in defining the genre, to me. Ex Machina is a horror movie, and Shaun of the Dead is not, and I will die on that hill.