Naturally, Cocaine Bear triggered a bunch of copycats, so I watched a marathon of three more. No, I don’t know why (but at least I didn’t subject my hubby to them). It almost wasn’t worth it, but one film saved this from being a total disaster. So, which one gave me the best horror high?
COCAINE COUGAR (2023)
This is bottom of the barrel jungle junkie horror. It runs 51 minutes long, has 10 minutes of closing credits, and perhaps five minutes of time-filling montages in between, including one really long one of rides at an amusement park.
A cougar escapes a lab, attacks a druggy in the mountains, busts open a bag of coke, and then attacks anyone who wanders by.
There’s red cougar POV, snarls that I’m convinced are the sound sample from Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat”, and a CGI cougar that looks like something out of a late 90s video game. It even floats off the background at times…like a glitch in a late 90s video game.
There are mostly off-screen kills with no cougar/human contact (probably because they couldn’t get the CGI cougar to stop floating above victims), but there is gay representation, with a dude heading into the woods to meet an online hookup.
METH GATOR (2023)
Despite jumping on the whacked-out wildlife trend, Meth Gator offers absolutely no humor, so the meth eating aspect is irrelevant. It’s simply a “giant gator terrorizes a small community” movie, giving this a very 2000s SyFy movie vibe.
It opens with a drug bust in the wilderness. A bag of meth falls into the water, and what alligator can resist a bag of meth? He gobbles it down and immediately gets red-eyed.
This one takes place in hillbilly land, so our Black sheriff has to contend with lots of American flags and white trash while he and his team search the swamps for a hidden meth lab in order to break the gator’s addiction. He’s even forced into a slap fight with a redneck.
The gator looks pretty cool despite its CGI construction, and there are plenty of irrelevant characters thrown in just to serve up dinner for the gator and blood splatter for us. Yay!
The only downside to this paint-by-numbers movie is that despite the mayor demanding that the big parade coming to town not be canceled, there’s no parade massacre! What the hell?
CRACKCOON (2024)
If I have to watch an indie cash-in on Cocaine Bear, this is the one. This sleazy, bloody, silly, crass, low budget flick nails it, and is perfect for a watch party. Best of all, it has a gay hero of sorts!
It does its trashy tone right, with loads of rednecks and druggies being taken down by a raccoon puppet thrown at them from off screen. There’s comedy, sex, female nudity, some toilet humor, and plenty of practical gore effects with buckets of blood. The raccoon puppet is an evil looking bugger that resembles a baby version of the American werewolf in London.
So, a gay drug dealer starts selling a new drug to his customers (blame it on the gays), and immediately they turn into infected with yellow eyes, foaming mouths, and violent urges. I was feeling it and momentarily wished that this wasn’t going to turn into a drugged-up raccoon movie.
Thankfully, the raccoon is a blast, and I quickly forgot about the infected people…and so did the movie. Once the raccoon shows up, it’s a fast-paced streak of people being devoured.
There’s even more than one gay guy in the movie, and one of them helps take down the raccoon in the end, landing this film on the does the gay guy die? page.
