Might we have another highly reviewed amateur script on Scriptshadow? Read today’s review to find out!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: Trapped in a secluded cabin, a hunter and his daughter fend off attacks from a relentless grizzly bear hell-bent on vengeance for the death of its cub at their hands.
Why You Should Read: I vividly remember the sensation of being stalked by a black bear during one summer visit to the Sierras… Well, stalked is a bit strong – it passed me within grabbing distance. Still, the feeling of power in its gait, the potential explosion of ferocity if it so pleased was unsettling and stuck with me ever since.
Writer: Walon Costello
Details: 84 pages (just to be clear, that this is an UPDATED draft from last week. Walon addressed some of your notes)
I’ve got one question.
Did Walon write this script in one day?
Because Wednesday I reviewed a nature thriller and all I talked about was how a lack of character development hurt the script. I read a nature thriller today and… IT’S ALL CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. So either Walon read my complaints and wrote this in a day, or he has the ability to freeze time so that he can take as long as he wants to write a script.
I bet you’re wondering what all that character development did. Would it prove that I was right? Or would it turn out that all character development does is slow down a script to an unbearable crawl? Read on to find out!
Our teaser opens with a deer being chased through the woods by something unseen. Then, just as it makes it to a clearing, it’s SMASHED INTO by a car, which goes careening off the road. The driver, a man, is instantly killed. The woman in the passenger seat is going to wish her death was that quick. Because seconds later, a little bear cub comes in and starts nibbling on her dead boyfriend. Then, seconds after that, a much bigger mama bear arrives. And this woman turns into her lunch.
Cut to a week later and Hank (40) along with his daughter, Zoe (20), are driving through those same woods. They make it to an old gas station, where the car from the teaser is being kept until someone can come along and trash it. It’s here where we learn that that car and the people who were in it are the reason Hank and Zoe are here. The woman is Hank’s drug addict ex-wife, and Zoe’s mother. Since she wasn’t found in the wreckage, they’ve come up here to look for her.
The two head up to the family’s cabin which the mom was staying at. This once regal camping fortress is now a barely standing rotted-out piece of garbage. Hank and Zoe use it as a home base to go out and look for mom. They arm themselves just in case, and after a long search, Zoe notices something coming at her out of the corner of her eye, turns and shoots. She’s horrified to see that she’s killed a baby cub.
They get back to the cabin late and decide to stay for the night. But almost immediately, they hear something outside. It’s Mama bear (“Mama”). She’s come to get revenge. At first, Hank doesn’t give her any credit. She’s a freaking bear. Not John Wick. And even if she was the bear version of John Wick, she can’t break into a house. Well, that may be true. But remember, this isn’t exactly Fort Knox. And Mama starts prying for ways in.
Having left the only guns in the car, the two are forced to move around the cabin to stay clear of Mama, who has the added advantage of being a black bear in total darkness. We’re never quite sure where she’s going to pop up next. Finally, she’s able to get into the house. Zoe moves to the bathroom while the injured Hank finds another spot to hide. I don’t want to spoil anything but let me put it this way. Not everyone is getting out of this house alive.
First thoughts?
Overwritten first page!
I kept having to go back and read it over and over again. Walon was trying to be too cute with the wording. It may sound weird but he was TOO DESCRIPTIVE. And in trying to paint a picture, he painted a Picasso. It was angular and tilted and hard to make out what you were looking at.
So things didn’t start well.
However, once we get to Hank and Zoe, the script gets a lot better. Like I said, Wednesday we had no character development. Here, we have a lot. There’s a ton going on with these two. For starters, their wife/mother left them, became a drug addict/prostitute, and now drives around and robs people to feed her habit, along with whatever co-conspirator she can find.
This makes their search party complicated. Lesser writers would’ve had the mom be the perfect mother – her life robbed by the randomness of some angry animal. By making her a drug addict who’d abandoned her family, their connection with her is much messier. The reason why this tends to work better is because it mirrors real life. Real life is rarely drawn with straight lines. The lines are squiggly. And the color between them is gray. Just that choice alone made this feel authentic.
Also, Zoe is newly pregnant. And one of the ongoing themes here is the idea of, should Hank and his wife have had Zoe? They were way too young. They weren’t ready to be adults. And it turns out that maybe it was a mistake. Mom eventually prioritized getting high over parenting. We also learn that it was Hank who initially wanted the abortion. And now Zoe’s in the exact same spot they were, weighing whether she’s ready to be a mom, and using her own less-than-wonderful time on earth to decide if she wants her own kid to go through that hell.
In other words, THERE’S A LOT GOING ON HERE. And Walon is really clever in how he thematically connects their family troubles to the threat. Here these people are, weighing whether it’s right for their children to even be born, while Mother Bear will stop at nothing to avenge the death of her own child.
Another thing I liked that Walon did was he OPENED UP a portion of the CONTAINED THRILLER. I think that when we write contained thrillers, we get this idea that they have to be contained from start to finish, if only to convey to producers that it will be cheap to make. However, I like when contained thriller writers start their scripts OPENED UP so as to create the illusion of a bigger story. Between the teaser and seeing these two drive in and the gas station scene – it made the movie feel bigger than it was. Had Walon started this script with the two of them showing up at the cabin, I’m not sure I would’ve felt the same way about the script.
There were a couple of things I didn’t love. The script does get a little repetitive at times inside the cabin. There are only so many ways to stay away from a window. But the biggest issue was that dad and daughter don’t have anything unresolved with one another. Despite all of the intense stuff with mom, Hank and Zoe seem to be good. And I kept wondering if that could’ve been improved somehow. In fact, a couple of times I thought, “I wonder if this would be better if Zoe was trapped in here with her drug-addict mom who’d abandoned her?” You can imagine how much more tense those conversations would be.
Despite that, I thought this was a good spec. The best Amateur Friday script this year behind Cop Cam. I could easily see this pitched as “Jaws with a bear.” The problem with all the Jaws clones over the years is that they’re too similar to Jaws. This feels just enough like its own thing that you don’t find yourself constantly comparing it to that movie, which is the last thing you want to happen as a writer. You want your script to be your own, not some lesser version of a better movie.
I battled back and forth on this as far as whether to give it a single or double ‘worth the read,’ and I’m going to settle on a single because dad and daughter didn’t have anything to resolve with one another. And it wasn’t just that. It was that Walon was trying to make it seem like they were butting heads despite the fact that there wasn’t any reason to. For example, she kept calling him “Hank” instead of “Dad.” And all I thought was, “Wait, she likes her dad. Why avoid that title when addressing him?” If future drafts would address that, I could easily see bumping up the score.
But this was solid writing. Good job, Walon.
Script link (new draft): Grisly
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Regarding the first page. Remember, all writers overwrite. But the good ones don’t make it LOOK like they overwrote.
