August 16th, 2006
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.
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