(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 5 December 2025 14:30, UK
Every actor has a few duds under their belt, but for poor Laura Dern, an embarrassing relic of a teenage role that was far from the impressive heights of Blue Velvet or Jurassic Park was dug up almost 40 years later.
As the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, the actor got her start when she was young, even appearing as a child extra in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and by the early 1980s, she landed a role in the feminist punk film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which teased the beginning of a career that refused to stick to conventional.
However, before she could lend herself to some great movies like Smooth Talk and Wild at Heart, Dern appeared in a film that was so obviously going to be bad, it’s a wonder why her parents, as seasoned actors, didn’t sit her down and tell her that this perhaps wasn’t the best of ideas; I guess they wanted her to make her own decisions.
So, a young Dern chose to appear in Grizzly II: The Predator, a sequel to Grizzly, which had already been a flop. Following in the footsteps of Jaws, the movie’s set-up is hardly original, although there’s a bear causing chaos rather than a shark, and what possessed her to sign on, considering she’d just appeared in a rather gritty indie movie, is a question I’d love to know the answer to, but at least she can laugh about it now.
For some strange reason, the film, also known as Grizzly II: The Concert, wasn’t released until 2020, making its resurfacing a pretty embarrassing moment for Dern, who also co-starred alongside an unknown George Clooney. By then, the pair were of course Oscar-winning icons of Hollywood, so the film certainly came as a reminder that everyone has to start somewhere.
When she was asked about the film by AV Club, the actor said, “Okay, first of all, dude, that is fucking hysterical! I didn’t even know what it was called until you said it, and yet I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
Dern was far too busy back in 2020 to watch the movie, admitting, “I’ve never seen it, I can tell you that,” continuing, “The last I heard from George Clooney, who is also one of the cast members in the film, is that the whole movie is all of 40 minutes long, and no one’s ever actually seen it. It’s not even really long enough to call it a movie.”
It turns out that the movie is actually 74 minutes long, so while it’s certainly longer than what Clooney claims, it’s still only just scraping the title of being feature-length, and Dern concluded, “The only thing I can say about it… I mean, I’m 16 years old, it’s six weeks in Budapest, Hungary, at the exact second communism is ending, and it’s me, George Clooney, and Charlie Sheen,” before also admitting to remebering a more gastromonical experience than the film.
“I’m not gonna say another damned thing, except that it was the craziest time. And the paprika chicken was outstanding,” she added, and perhaps, for all involved, it’s better if Grizzly II: The Concert is forgotten.
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