When just the poster (see lower down the page) for your movie has the internet buzzing, you know you might have something different on your paws… er… hands. So it was with the first image of Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear, which had people talking earlier in the week. The trailer for the comedy horror thriller is set to do the same, and you can see it now…
Using a real incident where a drug runner in the 1980s dropped a stash of cocaine in the Chattahoochee National Forest in north Georgia - which was then found by a black bear, who gobbled it all up – as a springboard, the movie tells an imagined story of what might have happened in the following 24 hours.
You can find more on the real story right here, but the film itself promises to be a wild adventure featuring the likes of Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, Margo Martindale, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Isiah Whitlock Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery and the late Ray Liotta.
Various characters come into the bear's coked-yup orbit and it doesn't end well for many of them… "After learning of the true story and reading the script [by Jimmy Warden], I felt like we should make a movie that is the bear’s revenge story," said Banks at an event where Empire got a sneak peek at the trailer. "So that’s what this is." It's also a crafty commentary on the '80s obsession with the war on drugs.
Mostly though, Cocaine Bear promises much gory comedy, Banks channelling Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, and though the director didn't name-check him at the event we attended, James Gunn, given her experience on his gore-tastic comedy Slither. And with Phil Lord and Chris Miller producing, you know it'll have some clever chuckles.
Though Banks was committed to real, in camera effects for the bloody outcome of its coke-crazed rampage, the bear is an entirely CG creation, brought to life on set by performance capture expert Allan Henry and then created by Wētā FX.
Following the trailer, we also watched a clip from the film - essentially the paramedics' encounter with the bear and the ambulance chase that ensures show split in different parts of the trailer. Banks had a great summation of it — "it's a mini Fast & Furious scene where one of the cars is a bear and the other is an ambulance driven by an idiot." Somewhere, Vin Diesel is already getting ideas…
Cocaine Bear will be in UK cinemas from 24 February.
