Werner Herzog
2005
104 minutes
This is one of those films you never watched because you thought you had already seen it due to its similarities to a different film with a much lighter tone. The other film, Project Grizzly, dealt with a man named Troy Hurtubise, a Canadian inventor who became similarly obsessed with bears after a harrowing encounter with a grizzly. Rather than anthropomorphizing them and infantilizing them, he saw the risks in bear research and decided to build a bear-proof suit of armor to research them up close. That rather quirky documentary traces Hurtubise's story and his work on one of his anti-bear exoskeletons.
This documentary, on the other hand, is directed by Werner Herzog, and (at least for someone with your morbid sense of humor) is darkly comic in parts, in a somewhat quirky way. The subject is another bear-obsessed man-child who ultimately ends up being mauled by one of his bear friends. Nature red in tooth and claw, as they say. You've personally always had a healthy respect for and wariness of wildlife--certainly for any but the smallest, most docile animals. Any animal larger than yourself is inherently frightening.
One of your most foolish wildlife encounters you can recall as an adult was the time you taunted an angry squirrel. He was sitting on the roof of your porch a few feet from your head, chirping at you, clearly unhappy about you being in his space. Feeling a bit whimsical, you decided to stare him down and make the same noise back to him to see what he would do. This further agitated the squirrel, who bushed up his tail and stood up and was clearly growing angrier and angrier. At this point you were faced with a dilemma. You couldn't remember the rules for what to do with a black squirrel versus a grizzly squirrel so you took a combined approach, angrily chirping back but slowly backing out of range to make sure he wasn't going to jump on your head, which was seeming increasingly likely the angrier he got. Eventually you got out of his range and he calmed down and you quickly retreated to the safety of your car. Your adventure did not come to an end.
The poor fucker in this documentary was not so cautious or so lucky. He got into bearspace and decided they were his new friends, much easier to deal with than humans. He considered himself an honorary bear. He gave them cute names and took lots of fascinating videos of his encounters. And then eventually he ended up being disemboweled in his tent by one of his whimsically named bear friends, leaving an apparently-horrifying audio recording of the event (which Herzog listens to and is shaken by).
Troy Hurtubise, the bear exoskeleton man, ended up being killed in a particularly gruesome car accident, burned to death in his vehicle when he collided with a fuel truck. It just goes to show that sometimes the danger you prepare for is not the one that gets you in the end.
Time to choose something different: