Landman's Billy Bob Thornton Fought A Giant Grizzly Bear In This Overlooked Horror Movie

Billy Bob Thornton has been acting since the late 1980s, and has plenty of under-seen gems in his filmography. Depending on your sensibility, 2015's "Into the Grizzly Maze" might qualify, but either way, it's an interesting entry in the Thornton filmography. This direct-to-video survival horror film features a surprisingly solid cast that, alongside Thornton, includes James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Piper Perabo, and Scott Glenn. More enticing than that, however, is the fact it sees them all face off against a giant grizzly bear in Alaska.

In 1996, "Sling Blade" earned Thornton a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, thereby changing his life and establishing himself as a major force in Hollywood. The man who had appeared alongside Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in 1993's "Tombstone" and appeared in another of the best Westerns of the '90s, Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man," had finally broken through. Since then, Thornton has enjoyed a hugely successful career that included another Oscar nomination and multiple high-profile roles. He now stars as sly West Texas oil man Tommy Norris in Taylor Sheridan's "Landman," which has been yet another massive success for everyone involved.

But even someone of Thornton's stature has gone the direct-to-video route at various points, and in 2015 that's exactly what he did with "Into the Grizzly Maze." The film was directed by production designer-turned-filmmaker David Hackl, who previously worked as a second unit director and production designer on multiple films in the "Saw" franchise before directing "Saw V." Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, aside from being a ridiculous action movie, his second directorial effort, "Into the Grizzly Maze," also has strong horror elements.

Everyone surely remembers when Liam Neeson faced off against a wolf in his best action movie, "The Grey." But for whatever reason, nobody remembers when Billy Bob Thornton hunted a giant bear through the Alaskan wilderness.

"Into the Grizzly Maze" stars James Marsden and Thomas Jane as estranged brothers Rowan and Beckett Moore. As youngsters, the pair came across a grizzly bear in an area of the Alaskan wilderness known as the Grizzly Maze. Since then, they have grown apart, with Beckett becoming a local deputy and Rowan an ex-convict. After the latter returns home to Alaska, he reunites with his brother and the pair learn about a series of killings in the woods nearby. It's here that Thornton comes in.

The "Landman" star plays Douglass, a hunter who arrives in town to give the standard "you don't know what you're dealing with" speech à la Richard Crenna's Colonel Trautman in "First Blood." In Thornton's case, however, he's not talking about a lethal ex-Green Beret, but a giant murderous bear who's much more cunning than a regular grizzly and "a big, nasty son of a b****," to use Douglass' phrasing. With the experienced tracker leading the charge, Douglass, Rowan, Beckett, and Rowan's ex-girlfriend Kaley (Michaela McManus) venture into the Grizzly Maze to save Beckett's wife Michelle (Piper Perabo), who's gone missing just as the bear's murderous rampage reaches a fever pitch.

"Into the Grizzly Maze" hit video-on-demand services back in May 2015 ahead of a limited theatrical release, after which it faded into obscurity. Today, it's not quite an underrated Billy Bob Thornton project on the level of his Coen Brothers movie "The Man Who Wasn't There," but it is an interesting curio in the Thornton oeuvre. For one thing, it has a decent cast for a film that should have been stacked with B-movie actors who sort of resemble bigger stars. It's also far from the worst film in Thornton's catalog (that honor belongs to crime thriller "London Fields," which currently bears a lowly 0% Rotten Tomatoes score). "Into the Grizzly Maze," however, currently has a disappointing but not disastrous 36% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The only "top critic" who contributed to that score was Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine, who seemed to be quite taken with David Hackl's action horror. According to Bowen, Hackl "keeps the film humming along at a confidently brisk pace" and builds towards "an impressive climax." Elsewhere, however, Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com gave the movie just one star and dubbed it a "Z-grade SyFy Channel movie that also happens to star A-listers." According to Abrams, this "boring man-vs.-nature film" will ultimately have you "rooting for the wild grizzly bear" rather than the protagonists.

Even with that in mind, it is sort of interesting to see Thornton in this DTV film, which arrived the year after his standout turn as villain Lorne Malvo in season 1 of "Fargo" and the year before his Prime Video series "Goliath" debuted. Even if you're a casual Thornton fan, it's worth a watch just for its odd place in the man's career.