Sora (Fuku Suzuki) is a young man with a plan. He’s designed a video game – it’s rough around the edges and looks like a first-timer’s attempt, but it’s his – and he hopes to further his skills next year at college. Those dreams are extinguished, though, when his father commits suicide after losing the family’s savings to scammers. With nowhere else to turn, Sora starts accepting quick pay gigs for a local gang typically involving the transportation of illicit goods.

His latest task involves abducting a fellow worker, Sakuraku (Wan Marui), after she steals the gem she was supposed to deliver and swallows it instead. Sora and some others take the young woman out to the woods, tie her to a tree, and prepare to reluctantly open up her belly, but an aggressively hungry bear interrupts their evening and paints the forest red with some of their blood and guts. On the run for his life, Sora has to decide where his priorities sit – making it home alive, or helping Sakuraku achieve the same.

Let’s just get this out of the way right at the start. The killer bear at the center of Higuma! The Killer Bear looks… unique. It’s a spirited blend of puppetry, animatronics, and guy (guys?) in a monster suit, and you will never for a second “believe” that it’s real. The bear lumbers along with an awkward gait, occasionally rearing its head and opening its slobbering, bloodied jaws with a roar, and there’s an odd stiffness to its neck and head (no, we’re not talking Rawhead Rex level of rigidity here). Its fur is singed and matted with blood, smoke wisps upward from bullet holes along its sides, its eyes glow in the darkness – some of you are going to find it very silly looking, and I can’t argue with that.

But the damn thing works for me all the same.

Writer/director Eisuke Naito commits to the bear and stands firmly behind its presence on the screen. He doesn’t skimp on its appearances, and while there are closeups and fast cuts during some of the attacks, Naito also lets the camera and viewers take in the bear in all its head-to-toe prosthetic effects glory. He enjoys a comedic tone throughout, but he also finds the intensity in those attack scenes as limbs are bitten off, heads are gloriously disfigured, and characters are mauled. You can almost smell the beast’s fetid breath as it exhales into terrified faces, and the actors sell the horror of it all when they’re in the bear’s grip. It looks a bit goofy, but it’s ultimately an effectively entertaining creation in an equally entertaining movie.

While the bear itself might turn some viewers off, Higuma!! The Killer Bear’s bigger issue is arguably a protagonist who really tests the audience’s patience throughout the first two acts. The film’s opening makes him an empathetic character, a young man visited by tragedy and forced to abandon his goals to help support his own mother, but he burns through that goodwill with lightning speed. He goes along with the thugs to the point of even letting them approach Sakuraku with the intent of disemboweling her, and it’s only the bear’s arrival that saves her initially.

Similar beats appear throughout that first hour with Sora being a cowardly fool, and it quickly comes clear that it’s Sakuraku we should all be rooting for. Naito’s script brushes past anything resembling character depth, but while she’s clearly in her own financial distress, she isn’t tossing Sora to the wolves – or to the bear – just to save her own hide. Marui makes the most of the role, unleashing a handful of beatdowns and showcasing an energetic and determined will to live no matter what comes her way. The case can be made that she’s the bear’s spirit animal (or vice versa), especially when the beast seemingly mirrors her by swallowing the gem a short while later, but it also seems clear that only one of them will be walking out of the woods alive.

Naito packs Higuma!! The Killer Bear’s early scenes with contemporary food for thought, from the financial threat of scammers to an employment economy that leaves vulnerable people making poor choices just to cover their bills, but the killer bear itself is every bit as timely. While the whole of North America sees a handful of deadly bear attacks each year, Japan saw 13 deaths at the claws and maws of bears in 2025 alone. A serious issue, clearly, but Naito isn’t here to reflect on it seriously.

For a film with such a heavy opening, this is a comedy through and through. Gags run rampant, humorous dialogue is tossed around even more frequently than the dismembered limbs, and the film even ends with a character looking directly into the camera and laughing. (You’ll want to stay through all of the end credits for that.) Naito knows this is a comedy, and he embraces that tone just as he embraces his goofy-ass looking bear. Whether or not all of it (or even any of it) lands comes down to the individual viewers’ senses of humor, but it works for me.

Less defensible is the aforementioned lack of character depth beyond Sora, and even there the film seems to forget about his own opening drama by the time the film ends. This is mostly a three-hander between Sora, Sakuraku, and the bear, but Naito does introduce another character in the form of an old hunter (Takashi Ukaji) pursuing the bear out of revenge. It’s no coincidence that he’s both the most surprising character and the funniest, and that same kind of creativity would have benefited the others as well.

Higuma!! The Killer Bear is far from a serious animal attack thriller, and that’s obviously a smart play given this bear design. It is an entertaining animal attack flick, though, with the degree of that entertainment really coming down to the viewer. So on the list of fun killer bear movies? Not nearly as good as Grizzly, but better than Cocaine Bear.

Higuma!! The Killer Bear made its North American premiere at the 25th New York Asian Film Festival.