Inventory Inventory: 12 Acceptable Man-Vs.-Beast Films

1. King Kong (1933)

More misunderstood than evil—but fairly destructive anyway—King Kong wasn't the first animal to create chaos on the big screen, but he set the pattern for films to come: Humanity thinks it's bested nature. Nature has other ideas. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's original (and still the best) version of the story captures the pity and affection we feel toward the animal world, and the terror at the way it reminds us how easily we might be dragged back into an animal existence.

2. Them! (1954)

This giant-ant movie taught us how to detect the presence of giant ants—by the smell of formic acid! Now if we only knew what formic acid smelled like. James Whitmore, in his pre-craggy days, plays a Nevada police sergeant investigating the mysterious deaths of desert folk, aided by James Arness as an FBI agent and Joan Weldon as the standard-issue beautiful female scientist. Turns out that mankind's confidence in the progress of civilization is somewhat misplaced. Why did we think we could test atom bombs without spawning a race of super-ants the size of airport shuttle-buses? What fools we were.

3. The Birds (1963)

A flock of birds terrorize a coastal California town, maybe to take revenge on humanity for polluting the planet, or maybe because Tippi Hedren has been acting kind of bitchy lately. As close as "master of suspense" Alfred Hitchcock came to making an actual monster movie, The Birds plays with his usual pet themes of guilt and panic, but mostly, it's all about creepy shots of birds gathering for some nefarious unknown purpose.

4. Frogs (1972)

Leave it to the 1970s, the decade that gave us Earth Day and that ridiculous green ecology flag, to bring us the ultimate B-movie nature-gone-mad film. Thought-provoking? Not really. Absurd? Slightly. Creepy? Yep. Starring a scenery-chewing Ray Milland as a pesticide-happy master of what appears to be an antebellum plantation in the middle of a kudzu-choked swamp, Frogs boasts an angry-animals-take-revenge plot that isn't terrifically original. But scenes of insects and lizards crawling over every available surface, including the characters' faces, are enough to prompt viewers to shut and latch the windows. The downside, of course, is that the threatening-animal film hinges on one thing: threatening animals. And creatures that victims can simply walk away from, stomp on, or fling across the room are less menacing than, say, giant sharks. Which brings us to…

5. Jaws (1975)

Steven Spielberg's industry-redefining summer blockbuster left a whole generation afraid not merely of sharks—who isn't?—but of the ocean in general. How? By doing what he does best: bringing the fantastic, and in this case the horrible, crashing down into the middle of normal life. What's a dip in the ocean worth if there's even the slightest chance that a rhino-sized maneater has found its way into the water?

6. Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)

Sure, Brave Sir Robin and "only a flesh wound" and the shrubbery and all that. Everyone knows the real star of Monty Python And The Holy Grail is the killer rabbit that guards The Cave Of Caerbannog and The Legendary Black Beast Of Aaaaarrrrrrrggghhh within. It's just a fluffy bunny, but get too close and it flies at you with its sharp claws and big teeth, taking your head right off. That rabbit's dynamite! Better have a Holy Hand Grenade Of Antioch handy. Or at least a less-haughty attitude about the potential danger of cute, fuzzy critters.

7. Piranha (1978)

Half Jaws parody, half straightforward scarefest, this Roger Corman production—directed by Joe Dante from a script by John Sayles—imagines what happens when genetically engineered killer fish are set free from an old military base and left to swim downriver to a kids' summer camp. Mayhem, yes, but also gratuitous nudity, inside fish jokes, and hilariously cheap cardboard cutouts of piranha zipping around. They're an enemy made by man, in more ways than one.

8. Cujo (1983)

As a novel, Stephen King's Cujo is a digressive mishmash that gets taken over by long subplots about restless ghosts and the advertising business. As a movie, it's more stripped-down and primal, with E.T. mom Dee Wallace playing a cheating spouse who pays for her sins by getting trapped in her car with her kid while a rabid St. Bernard waits impatiently outside. If she can't out-think the dog, she'll either get fatally mauled or starve to death. Lousy, unforgiving nature!

9. Tremors (1990)

The animals-attacking subgenre was pretty much dead when Tremors was released in 1990, but Ron Underwood's delightful horror-comedy served as a colorful reminder of why it flourished in the first place. The always-dependable Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon star as handymen who tangle with giant underground snakes that leap out from the earth and pick off the inhabitants of a tiny Southern shit town ironically called Perfection. Underwood and screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock maintain a scary-fun retro drive-in vibe, and though Tremors was only a modest commercial success in theaters, it won a cult following on television and video. Aptly enough, it spawned three direct-to-video sequels and a short-lived television spin-off.

10. Jurassic Park (1993)

Okay, so you breed a few dinosaurs… what's the harm? A brontosaurus, a stegosaurus, maybe a triceratops or two… But an amusement park isn't an amusement park without a thrill-ride, which means you'll need a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And because human beings are human beings and rampaging beasts are rampaging beasts, how long will it be before the T. Rex gets out of its pen and comes looking for human-shaped snacks? And then comes the running and the screaming.

11. Deep Blue Sea (1999)

By comparison with Jaws, the specially bred super-smart sharks of Deep Blue Sea are small fish, but they're still pretty sneaky, and clever enough to leap out of a convenient opening and chomp Samuel L. Jackson mid-rousing-speech. Better appreciated as camp than as horror, Deep Blue Sea starts generating appreciative giggles from its earliest moments, when the protagonists explain their sea-lab setup. Now seriously, if you're going to produce intelligent aquatic killing machines, why place your lab in the ocean, where things are just destined to go tremendously wrong? If you absolutely must create smart sharks, you do it in the middle of the desert, where their inevitable escape is much less dangerous.

12. Willard (2003)

The original 1971 Willard and its 1972 sequel Ben are the classic kinda-poignant, kinda-gross rat-attack movies, while the 2003 Willard remake rings slightly hollow, not to mention unnecessary. Still, the central creepy-misfit role could have been designed with Crispin Glover in mind, and as the man whom only a rat could love, he's so eerie, he's mesmerizing. Actually, he's much creepier than the film's hordes of CGI rodents—particularly in the not-to-be-missed tie-in music video, in which he croons the title song from Ben to a gigantic rat on a creepy set straight out of David Lynch-land, while ecstatic-looking models rub rats against their breasts and faces. Apparently the animal world doesn't always inspire terror.