The bear who does cocaine in ‘Cocaine Bear’Like “Snakes on a Plane” and “Sharknado,” “Cocaine Bear” seeks to entice an audience with an amusingly trashy title.
But the title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy.
One of those “inspired by true events”—i.e., almost wholly fictitious—stories, “Cocaine Bear” takes place in 1985, when (as a news clip of that era featuring Tom Brokaw tells us) a cocaine trafficker fell to his death from a plane in Tennessee while ditching duffel bags full of the stuff.
In real life, some of the bags landed in the woods of Georgia, where a black bear ingested the drugs and died.
In legend, the animal was stuffed, put on display, at one point owned by country superstar Waylon Jennings , and wound up entertaining shoppers in a Kentucky mall.