“Wonderfully comical and mesmerizing by turns” (Globe & Mail), Project Grizzly remains one of the most successful documentaries ever made in Canada, winning fans everywhere (including American indy poster boy Quentin Tarantino), and officially achieving pop culture immortality when it was elaborately parodied on The Simpsons. The film’s subject is Troy Hurtubise, who became obsessed with grizzly bears after a chance encounter with one in the bush. Since then, he has devoted thousands of dollars to creating a suit of armour that would allow him to face another grizzly at close quarters. Hurtubise justifies his quest in the most outlandish terms, fusing science, pseudo-science, shamanism, television and movie references (the suit was apparently inspired by Robocop), and uber-hoser macho bluster. Hurtubise’s science isn’t exactly rigorous. He’s thrown off the Niagara Escarpment, run down repeatedly by a pick-up truck and, at one point, hit with a four-hundred-pound log. The film is deeply ambivalent about its subject, and well aware of his mythic import. (The magnificent score by Ken Myhr and Anne Bourne riffs off of Morricone’s work for Sergio Leone, while the opening shot elegantly evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.) “With his first feature documentary, Peter Lynch turns a mild eccentric from North Bay into the stuff of Canuck myth . . . [Lynch is] a sharp, uncondescending chronicler of the white Canadian male psyche. This is not a small thing” (NOW Magazine).

Rated 14A.