FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Chase_Witherspoon If "Grizzly" was the B-grade answer to "Jaws", then "Claws" in my opinion, is the next generation answer to "Grizzly". Despite a top- notch cast (Evers, Aames, Caruso, Young & Healey), "Claws" lacks the technical expertise William Girdler displayed in conjuring his spin-off, the bear attacks and aftermath here, a lot less bloody and realistic.The acting of the veterans isn't bad at all, though Evers does at times seem more than a little self-righteous as he mentally deteriorates years after being attacked by what has now become the local folklore of "Devil Bear". Estranged from his wife & son due to his obsession with locating and killing "Devil Bear", Evers teeters on the brink of insanity, until, "Devil Bear" appears again to wreak havoc and give Evers the chance to avenge the livelihood he lost when his hand was crippled years before (he was a lumberjack by trade, until "Devil Bear" tossed him around like a rag doll).Clichéd and overly intense, "Claws" reminds me of "Snowbeast" both in terms of tone and production quality, it's a very distant standard to Girdler's "Grizzly" despite the obvious homage. Both Aames and Caruso have reasonably good dialogue and deliver earnest, watchable performances - I couldn't really say the same for Layton nor Sipes who both look decidedly amateurish by comparison. As aforesaid, I'm not sure who's more dangerous, "Devil Bear" or Jason Evers' maniacal stare. The slow-motion climax was a bit absurd and Evers' supposedly crippled hand seems to make a miraculous resurrection, but otherwise, it's what you'd expect in a film of this genre, but firmly on the C-scale.

Michael_Elliott Claws (1977) 1/2 (out of 4) Even Alaska decided to jump in on the JAWS craze with this rip-off, which features a killer grizzly. Just the previous year director William Girdler made GRIZZLY and wouldn't you know it, this low-budget film would be released as GRIZZLY II in some parts just to try and cash in. The story is pretty simple as a couple hunters come across two large grizzly bears fighting. They decide they'll look good on their wall so they start firing but one of the bears is just hit and runs off. At the same time a logger is walking through the woods and gets attacked. Through a text on the screen we learn that in the next five years this bear attacks and kills countless people and becomes known as the devil bear. Then our film kicks back and we see a group of men going after the bear. I'm a major sucker for these "nature attack" movies but this one here is just downright horrible. This is an incredibly cheap production and it really doesn't help when the bear is never in the same frame of the actors. Yes, many low-budget movies used editing to fool the viewer but this film isn't fooling anyone and what's even worse is how dragged out everything is. Not much makes sense in this movie including the fact that the "events" take place five years after the opening. As I previous said, we're give some text to explain what the bear has been doing but why not just show this stuff and forget this incredibly stretched out sequences that we wind up getting? The majority of the 100-minute running time has a bunch of idiots in the wood trying to track down the bear with the help of a Native American magic man. All of the scenes in the woods are just way too long and you can't help but feel as if this thing was just meant to be some sort of travelogue for Alaska and at the last second they decided to add a killer bear. The attack scenes are extremely weak with the viewer really not getting to see much. Everything usually so dark that you can't see or they just have the actors fighting with a fake bear arm coming down on them. I guess the one highlight in the film is a rather silly sequence where the bear attacks some boy scouts out camping. The performances are all rather bland and forgettable but then again so is pretty much everything else in this film. Stick with GRIZZLY instead.

seandr When I was 9 years old our den leader took our cub scout troop to see this movie in the theater. I was pretty terrified by it, and I couldn't sleep alone for a couple of years afterward. I can vividly recall some of the scary scenes. The bear dragging away a cub scout in a sleeping bag, his bloody hand sticking out of the back. Someone opens the door to a cabin and a bloody body falls down on them. The bear coming through a wall. The bear taking off a horses head. A man climbs a tree to escape the bear, but the bear knocks the tree down and gets him. I'd really like to see this movie again as an adult given how it traumatized me as a kid.

lazarillo A lot of people confuse this movie with "Grizzly". "Grizzly" has Christopher George AND Andrew Prine AND Richard Jaekl AND a female park ranger who decides to take time out from hunting an 18-foot killer grizzly bear to strip off all her clothes and take an impromptu shower in a waterfall (guess what happens?). "Claws" has none of these things, just a lot of travelogue footage of the Alaskan wilderness and some Native American nonsense about a "spirit bear". Neither movie is particularly scary. They both contain a lot shots of a disembodied bear paw flying through air, lopping off heads and limbs edited together with close-ups of the face of a real bear who looks only mildly annoyed. There is one pretty good scene where the bear menaces a boy scout camp, but it's only good because it's dark and you can't really see the bear. Actually, you can't see a lot of things in the very murky existing prints of this hard-to-find movie. It probably doesn't merit a DVD resurrection, however, because I have a feeling that what you can't see would still suck. "Grizzly" is so bad it's good; "Claws" is just bad.