Josh Bell
When Elizabeth Banks’ horror comedy Cocaine Bear was first announced in 2021, it immediately became a viral online sensation, thanks to the irresistibly ridiculous hook of an unlikely semi-true story about a rampaging bear high on cocaine. There were plenty of alternately amusing and annoying memes, and the timing worked out so that the momentum wasn’t completely exhausted by the time Cocaine Bear hit theaters in February 2023.
It’s no surprise, then, that enterprising independent filmmakers took advantage of the attention, especially since Cocaine Bear went on to be a mostly well-reviewed box-office hit. When the mockbuster specialists at The Asylum announced their forthcoming project Attack of the Meth Gator (later shortened to simply Meth Gator) on the day that Cocaine Bear was released, it seemed like an inevitability, coming from a company that produces copycat versions of nearly every prospective blockbuster.
For various reasons, though, Meth Gator wasn’t released in the U.S. until August 2024, long after Cocaine Bear furor had died down. While the original movie may now be just another amusing meme-horror curiosity to watch in between M3GAN and Snakes on a Plane, the Cocaine Bear knock-off industry has continued to flourish. The latest release, Brad Twigg’s Crackcoon, is out today on VOD, the same day that Meth Gator starts streaming on Tubi. For low-budget filmmakers, animals on drugs are still perfect exploitation fodder.
The actual connection between these movies and Cocaine Bear is highly variable, however. It makes sense that Meth Gator is the drug-animal movie that most closely follows the original template, since the filmmakers at The Asylum have so much experience with replicating major studio productions. Like Cocaine Bear, Meth Gator is about a wild animal that gets into a stash of drugs left behind by fleeing criminals, sending it on a brutal killing spree. In this case, it’s an alligator in the Florida Everglades that ingests a whole bunch of meth and terrorizes a small town.
Director Christopher Ray and screenwriters Joe Roche and Lauren Pritchard borrow heavily from Jaws as well as from Cocaine Bear, including a buffoonish mayor who’s more concerned with tourism revenue over Memorial Day weekend than with the safety of residents, and a ragtag team of cops and hunters who make a plan to take out the gator. Cocaine Bear is refreshingly witty for such a silly movie, but Meth Gator treats its material with dull seriousness, shoehorning in a half-hearted romance and a tragic backstory for one of its main characters. “I have a reason to fight,” says bartender and former police officer Anna (Vanesa Tamayo). “I lost my dad on meth.”
It’s a tiresome exercise in stretching out a bare-bones premise, but at least it demonstrates a baseline level of competence, and the CGI alligator looks almost passable at times. None of the other Cocaine Bear imitators come close to the production values of an Asylum movie, which is tough when the story calls for frequent depictions of animal attacks. Micro-budget mainstays Mark Polonia and Dustin Ferguson have never let problems like that get in their way, and their respective films Cocaine Shark and Cocaine Cougar — the first releases in this burgeoning subgenre — are visually and narratively incoherent, with only vague resemblances to the movie they’re attempting to capitalize on.
In the case of Cocaine Shark, that’s because Polonia is engaged in another time-honored B-movie tradition, retitling an existing movie to piggyback on a popular trend. No shark ever takes cocaine in Cocaine Shark, which is an incomprehensible sci-fi fever dream about an undercover cop (Titus Himmelberger) who stumbles on a dangerous new experimental drug.
A more accurate title might be Shark Cocaine, since the drug is made from shark-gland secretions, and its side effects include transforming people into horrific mutant shark creatures (constructed from what looks like papier-mâché). Cocaine makes a single brief appearance, when the local drug kingpin (Ken VanSant) takes out rivals who are dealing cocaine.
Cocaine Cougar is marginally more straightforward, and at least the title isn’t misleading. “The cougar is whacked-out on coke!” exclaims a guy who may be a government official. After escaping from a science lab, the cocaine cougar prowls around Los Angeles, taking out victims in a series of repetitive, bloodless kill scenes, padded out with seemingly endless filler. The 50-minute movie hardly even qualifies as a feature film, and it begins with a six-minute opening-credits sequence and ends with eight more minutes of slow-moving credits. Somewhere in the middle, Ferguson includes a lengthy interlude of characters visiting an amusement park, with no introduction or explanation, like he just threw in his friends’ home videos.
The majority of the time, the cougar is represented solely by offscreen growling and red-tinted POV shots, and the occasional onscreen glimpses offer up a hideous CGI monstrosity, wandering through the frame without its feet even touching the ground. Another time-wasting segment features a sexy photo shoot with a model wearing a T-shirt with the movie’s production company logo on it, which is like the opposite of product placement. Even the people who made this movie shouldn’t want to be associated with it.
If Polonia and Ferguson are just churning out quickie garbage to chase the latest pop-culture phenomena, at least Oregon-based filmmaker Chuck Magee comes by his schlock honestly. Like Cocaine Shark, Magee’s Cocaine Crabs From Outer Space was repositioned to take advantage of the Cocaine Bear hype, but it owes far more to kitschy 1950s sci-fi and self-consciously retro filmmakers like Christopher R. Mihm (The Monster of Phantom Lake) and Larry Blamire (The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra).
Working with even fewer resources than his peers, Magee delivers a goofy, self-deprecating alien invasion movie about crabs from the planet Crabulon who come to Earth and immediately enter a frat house, where a couple of bros feed them cocaine. That sends them on a murderous rampage, and the only humans standing in their way are a police detective (Magee) with a shellfish allergy and a pet-store employee (Kat Andrews) with an encyclopedic knowledge of crustaceans.
The crabs are played by inert plastic toys dragged around on clearly visible strings, the dialogue is full of groan-worthy puns, and the entire story is a wind-up to a stale punchline. It wears out its welcome at 83 minutes, but it has a homemade charm that’s hard to resist, and Magee has an apparently endless supply of endearingly dumb ideas. That’s far more enjoyable than a meager effort to replicate a Hollywood sensation.
There’s a small amount of that kind of good-natured humor in Crackcoon, but it’s mostly just a sluggish, rote animal-attack movie, with an animal that doesn’t even show up for 20-plus minutes. Director and co-writer Twigg spends far too much time laboriously setting up the potency of Acid Mind Drainage, a new “super-charged crack” that turns people into orange-eyed homicidal maniacs. Eventually, that crack makes its way to a raccoon, which goes on a killing spree through a national forest. The raccoon puppet is kind of cute, and Twigg makes good use of his practical effects — except for the occasional shot of a CGI raccoon that looks nothing like the puppet.
Like Cocaine Cougar, Crackcoon presents a series of uninteresting characters who are quickly introduced and just as quickly killed off, although it does also feature two gratuitous shower scenes with copious nudity, plus an equally gratuitous scene of a character taking a substantial dump. It would be a stretch to call anything in Crackcoon funny, but Twigg obviously has a sense of humor about the type of movie he’s making, even if he can’t quite properly express it.
Twigg is already crowd-funding for Crackcoon sequel Crackodile, as well as for Cracula, which joins Polonia’s Cocaine Werewolf in expanding the subgenre beyond animals into supernatural creatures, with no signs of stopping. “I’d love to not remember that,” says 13-year-old Henry (Christian Convery) in Cocaine Bear, “but it kind of seems like a thing that stays with a man forever.” He’s talking about a particularly gnarly bear attack, but he could just as easily be describing the experience of sitting through these movies.
“Cocaine Shark,” “Cocaine Cougar,” and “Meth Gator” are streaming on Tubi. “Cocaine Crabs From Outer Space” and “Crackcoon” are streaming on Screambox.
