This post contains spoilers for "Cocaine Bear."
"Cocaine Bear" is a bit of a strange movie, but you probably expected that coming in, didn't you? The film certainly does get gleefully violent at times, something that arguably gets hampered due to its usage of CGI in combination with practical effects. Some viewers may not notice this overlay, while others, such as myself, might take issue with it. No what you end up thinking, you'll still walk away appreciating how a mid-budget studio feature can get away with the types of kills featured here.
One of the most intriguing was the sudden and off-screen death of Olaf (Kristofer Hivju), a tourist whose fiancée Elsa (Hannah Hoekstra) was the titular bear's first kill. Towards the end of the film, we hear him scream, only to find out a few minutes later that he was mauled to death. The reveal is very quick and obscured in darkness, and according to director Elizabeth Banks, that's for a good reason — Olaf's death was apparently much more graphic.
"We had some incredible prosthetics of him, they ripped off his whole face, and we had a close-up of it that is no longer in the movie," she told Entertainment Weekly. "Maybe in the director's cut we'll get some of that back in."
No Longer High On Life
While it's unclear whether an unrated cut of "Cocaine Bear" will ever surface, you don't actually have to wait long to see the gruesome results Banks teased. Fangoria actually included an uncensored photo of the Olaf prosthetics on the cover of their latest issue, Vol. 2 Issue #18. While not taking center stage on the cover, we get to see just what the bear did to that poor hiker, and man, is it gnarly. How do we know for certain that this is the cut corpse? The answer is its red bandana, which the hiker sports throughout the film.
Surprisingly, Olaf's mauling might not have been cut due to studio or MPAA interference. As Banks suggests in the Entertainment Weekly interview, these cuts may have been made to simply improve the story.
"At the very end of the process, we ended up cutting back on a few shots of gore in the third act of the film," she explained. "I just felt at that point the audience was on more of an emotional journey and I didn't want to distract from it."
The good news is that — as you likely know if you're reading this piece — that didn't mean all the nasty gore was cut from that pivotal third act. Come on, we got to see Ray Liotta's intestines get torn out by bear cubs! That more than makes up for Olaf's death reveal being altered, at least in my opinion.
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