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Feb. 24 (UPI) -- The new movie Cocaine Bear, starring Keri Russell and directed by Elizabeth Banks, opens Friday. In it, Russell plays a mother who must find her runaway daughter in a national park before she succumbs to a bear hopped up on cocaine and attacking anything in its midst. O'Shea Jackson, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Ray Liotta also star in the film.
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Set to the tune of the 1983 rap classic "White Lines (Don't Do It)" by Melle Mel, the trailer shows the bear on a bloody path of destruction with comic overtones.
There is a real-life story behind the movie, one Banks appreciated when she was presented with a script from screenwriter Jimmy Warden. He'd discovered the story via a Twitter meme that showed a dead bear with the caption "Pablo Escobear, the cocaine bear." After heading down the internet rabbit hole, Warden thought he had a great idea for a movie.
The story begins in September of 1985, when a man named Andrew Thornton was found dead in a Knoxville backyard. Per a UPI report, Thornton was a former Army paratrooper and lawyer turned narcotics officer for the Lexington, Ky., police force. He turned to the other side of the law at some point, becoming a convicted drug dealer and the alleged leader of a drug ring called The Company.
After reportedly flying 79 grams of cocaine out of Columbia on a Cessna, Thornton, 41, had strapped the drugs to his body and attempted to parachute out of the airplane with drug packets worth $13 million on the street.
Whether it was the weight of the drugs or the chute failed to open, Thornton was found dead in Knoxville resident Fred Myers' backyard dressed in combat fatigues and Gucci loafers with $4,500 in cash, two handguns, two knives, night-vision goggles, ropes and food in a backpack, per the report.
But that was not the end of the story. In December 1985, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found 40 packages of cocaine, weighing close to 90 pounds and worth an estimated $15 million in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Fannin County.
They also found a dead bear who an autopsy revealed had died of a cocaine overdose.
"They'd been looking for the cocaine on Thursday, didn't find it, and returned to search on Friday. They found the bear, too," Fannin County Sheriff Walter Porter told UPI.
The bear had been dead for a month.
At the time, GBI's Gary Gardner said it was believed that the cocaine the dead bear ingested was from the same packets that were dropped by Thornton months earlier. Two other duffle bags filled with cocaine were found on national forest land.
Fortunately, for the general public, the bear did not go on a murderous rampage as he does in the movie. Actress Keri Russell told UPI when she first heard the story she quickly signed on.
"It was just wacky enough that I couldn't say no," Russell told UPI's Fred Topel in an interview.
Banks, the actress/director who appeared in The Hunger Games, starred in and directed Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) and 2019's reboot of Charlie's Angels, says that although she took some gore out of the movie's final version, she was all in with the storyline's grossest elements.
"I don't recommend anyone do this, but if you go down the internet hole of looking at actual animal attacks on humans, it's [expletive] gnarly as [expletive]," she told Variety. "I love gore. I grew up on Evil Dead. The gore is part of the fun of the ride."
The dead bear, or what was left of it, did live on in some respects. He was taxidermized and was donated to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Centre until country star Waylon Jennings bought it from a Nashville pawn shop. The bear changed hands again before ending up in a Kentucky mall where Cocaine Bear merchandise that predates the film is sold.
Though the film version takes many liberties with the true story, Banks says she's glad to have put her stamp on the movie.
At a premiere screening in Los Angeles, Banks addressed the audience saying, "I've been part of franchises like The Hunger Games and Lego Movie."
"I launched a franchise in Pitch Perfect," she continued, per Variety. "I relaunched a game show in Press Your Luck, I got Emmy-nominated for 30 Rock, and I've directed a few films along the way, but I'm fully convinced that everything has brought me to this moment in my career, the pinnacle: the rich and deeply cerebral Cocaine Bear."
