Tooth and Claw: A Field Guide to "Nature Bites Back" Movies.
Author: Dan Whitehead
Date: 2012-12-11 00:00:00+00:00
Description: A complete guide to horror movies in which nature fights back against mankind, from giant atomic insects in the 1950s through to the killer creature features of the 1970s and beyond.
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing

TOOTH AND CLAW

A Field Guide To “Nature Run Amok”
Horror Movies

INTRODUCTION

The very first horror stories ever told were about animals. Whether painted on cave walls or shared around a fire, our primitive ancestors first learned mortal fear from the predatory beasts that shared their domain. Such tales spoke to our need for survival, rather than entertainment.

But as time went on, we slowly but surely cut ourselves off from the natural world and removed ourselves from the cycle of hunter and hunted. Safe behind walls of glass and stone, we may have been able to separate ourselves from the Darwinian struggle, but those primal lessons still scratch away inside our DNA, a flight or fight reflex that we choose to provoke by subjecting ourselves to scary stories rather than actual peril.

It's no surprise, then, that the animal kingdom looms large in the popular horror culture. Ephemeral phantoms, undead ghouls and masked maniacs can be safely set aside from real life. The threat posed by the beasts around us, however, remains worryingly plausible. Few of us have been pursued around a summer camp by a hockey-masked killer, but we've all encountered an animal that for a brief moment reminded us what it was like to be just another creature fighting for survival.

Take away our buildings and technology, and we're still just meat. That truth is never far from the surface, and every now and then it's good to be reminded that, once you strip away the trappings of modern life, our place on the food chain isn't as secure as we like to tell ourselves.

That's where movies come in, of course, and film was quick to seize on our fascination and fear as a way to lure in the crowds. From the early safari flicks through to modern blockbusters, killer animals are a reliable fixture.

Not only do such creatures serve to remind us of the thin wall that keeps us apart from the herd, they also reflect our all-too-human concerns and prejudices. In the 1920s and 1930s, at the birth of cinema, it was the lingering colonial fear of savage lands beyond our borders that drove audiences to scream and squirm at rampaging lions and terrible apes. In the post-war period, with the nuclear genie released from its bottle, it was the impact of atomic radiation that led us to cower from mutated insects the size of freight trains, reflecting our hubris back at ourselves. At least in the atomic age monster movies you could rely on idealistic scientists and square-jawed soldiers to solve the problems they created.

By the 1970s, even that reassuring dynamic had faltered, worn away by grueling images from Vietnam and the disillusionment of Watergate. Now when the natural world turned against us, the blame fell on all of us, as pollution and the detritus from our consumption-crazed society turned the planet against us, one animal at a time or all at once. The authority figures could no longer be relied upon to save us, portrayed instead as ruthless politicians more interested in preserving their own image and happy to sacrifice lives rather than anger the almighty god of Tourist Season.

And so it continues today, with a fresh flood of postmodern, ironic monster movies in which desperate has-beens offer themselves up to cheaply created digital sharks, snakes and crocodiles in the hope of earning our sympathy – or at least a few moments of attention – before their career sputters out.

Call it “nature run amok” or “eco-horror”, but the animal attack genre has created some of the best movies ever made and some of the absolute worst. It echoes our most primal fears of a world we hold at arms length, and says much about how we view ourselves in the process.

This book is your field guide to the menagerie of real world beasts that have stalked us across the years, across land, sea and air, across screens both big and small. Enjoy.

Dan Whitehead

November 2012

AQUATIC AGGRESSORS

“Just when you thought it
was safe to go into the water...”

THE SEA BAT (1930)

Directors: Wesley Ruggles, Lionel Barrymore

Stars: Raquel Torres, Charles Bickford, Nils Asther

A giant manta ray causes problems for the natives of Portuga, while the  headstrong daughter of the mayor falls for an escaped convict disguised as a priest.

One of the earliest movies to use a killer animal as its central plot thread, this stiff but enjoyable talkie still retains a lot of the wide-eyed melodrama of the silent era. The manta ray itself swims in and out of the story, often making way for the tissue-thin romance between the feisty local girl (former Marx Brothers romantic foil Raquel Torres) and the brute with a heart of gold who wins her over mostly by deciding she's not worth beating some sense into. All the while, servile black extras smile and bow and jig dementedly around ceremonial fires. Dubious sexual and racial politics aside, this is a colorful adventure – even in black and white – and the manta ray itself is an amazingly accomplished piece of special effects work, considering the vintage. It swims and leaps and demolishes boats with surprising enthusiasm. Sadly, it also exits the story with no closure whatsoever – having led our lovers into each others arms, the end credits bring things to a close with the question of the man-eating fish maddeningly unresolved. Of course, the equally pressing question of the male lead being an escaped convict also remains in the air. He vows to return to pay penance for whatever he did wrong, while his girl promises to wait for him.

Trivia: Wesley Ruggles was removed from the director's chair during production. His replacement was the legendary Lionel Barrymore. Keep your eyes on the cast of leering sailors who provide most of the narrative flavor as well. One of them is a young Boris Karloff, still several years from finding fame as Frankenstein's monster.

DEVIL MONSTER (1946)

Director: S. Edwin Graham

Stars: Barry Norton, Blanche Mehaffey, Jack Del Rio

A fishing vessel sets out to bring back a lost crew member, but he resents being found and steers the ship into a battle against a giant manta ray.

A clunky patchwork screen filler, spliced together using lots of scenes from the 1936 movie The Sea Fiend, padded out with additional stock wildlife footage and other scraps, Devil Monster is as episodic and unsatisfying as you'd expect. If you're watching for the giant manta ray, you might as well skip to the last ten minutes as that's when it finally shows up. All you'll miss is some stodgy melodrama, topless native girls, lengthy sequences of sea lions cavorting and underwater shots of a moray eel wrestling an octopus. The manta itself is partly brought to life using real footage, but also a rigid puppet on a string. For shots where the actors need to be seen fighting it, a crude matte effect is used which renders everyone transparent. There's a certain old world charm to early stitched-together potboilers like this, but as a movie in its own right it's pretty dire.

PORT SINISTER (1953)

Director: Harold Daniels

Stars: James Warren, Lynne Roberts, Paul Cavanagh

An ancient island rises from the ocean, bearing a legend of pirate gold. Scientists and criminals race to be first on the scene but a colony of giant crabs stands in their way.

Running a little over an hour, and with stiff monochrome photography, Port Sinister – or Beast of Paradise Isle as it's also known – looks and feels like it's from the 1940s, not the start of the atomic age of monster movies. Despite the pulpy premise, it's a tedious effort, its minimal budget forcing it to abandon any ideas that might prove impressive – and therefore expensive. The crabs make some fleeting appearances as half-decent puppets, but do little to create fear or tension. By the end, the story falls back on typical cliffhanger scenarios as the island sinks beneath the waves, taking the bad guys with it. Roger Corman would deliver on the giant crab concept far more enjoyably a few years later in Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954)

Director: Wyott Ordung

Stars: Anne Kimbell, Stuart Wade, Dick Pinner

A young woman becomes obsessed with the idea that a giant amoeba is rising from the sea and attacking the coast of Mexico.

It's perhaps fitting that one of the early animal monsters to grace the big screen was also one of the first creatures to evolve on the planet. That's not to say that the giant carnivorous amoeba in this ultra-cheap drive-in quickie would be recognizable to any students of marine biology – it's a lumpy thing with tentacles and a single giant eyeball. Still, the characters insist it's an amoeba, and who are we to disillusion them?

The film itself is unsurprisingly turgid, despite running only slightly longer than an hour. Most of the time is spent with the small cast engaging in statically shot conversations, which only occasionally turn to the matter of a giant carnivorous amoeba. But then you can hardly blame them. The amoeba itself remains largely unseen, and its reign of terror mostly consists of killing a cow. It's easy to see why everyone is more keen on talking about the trials and tribulations of painting stoves for advertising than worrying about this lazy overgrown blob.

Where the film does score points is in its underwater photography, quite the novelty in the early 1950s and just predating the popularity of Jacques Cousteau. The climax of the film, in which the amoeba is defeated by crashing a miniature submersible into its bulbous eye, is rather charming though.

Trivia: Monster from the Ocean Floor was the first offering from legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, who talked Aerojet General into loaning him a mini-sub for free by telling them the movie would be great advertising.

It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955)

Director: Robert Gordon

Stars: Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis

Roused by atomic bomb testing, a gigantic octopus rises from the deep and attacks San Francisco.

Pretty much the only reason to stick with this typically slow-moving early creature feature is the octopus itself, brought to remarkably convincing life by the pioneering stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen. Sadly, the story surrounding the creature is soporific and, as with so many movies of the period, spends far too much time on the pointless romantic entanglements of its bland human cast. Get past that, however, and the sequence in which the octopus finally reveals itself in full, climbing the Golden Gate Bridge and attacking the Embarcadero with its tentacles, is a masterful showcase of the model maker's art. Harryhausen goes out of his way to come up with scenarios and shots that are difficult to pull off, and rises to the challenge with aplomb. Sadly, that brief burst of excitement comes near the end of an otherwise standard B-movie plot.

Trivia: Due to budget and deadline restrictions Harryhausen only gave the octopus six tentacles, and framed each shot carefully to disguise the deficiency.

The Sharkfighters (1956)

Director: Jerry Hopper

Stars: Victor Mature, Karen Steele, James Olson

A Naval commander heads to Cuba to take part in tests for a new kind of shark repellent. Having lost his crew to sharks during the war, he insists on testing it personally.

A sedate drama rather than full-blooded horror, this curious tale of wartime scientists still manages to surprise with a couple of tense shark scenes. Their effectiveness is largely due to the fact that much of the 70 minute running time is taken up with men arguing about naval protocol, men arguing about the dissipation rates of octopus secretions and Victor Mature halfheartedly romancing his gal. So when a shark munches on their young Cuban sidekick, who foreshadows his fate with an ill-timed celebration dance on deck before toppling into the water, it comes as a surprisingly gory shock. The final scene, in which Mature enters the ocean as the human guinea pig for their repellent is reasonably tense, though there's not much doubt that he'll make it to the end credits intact, ready for some more chaste love talk with his wife.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Director: Roger Corman

Stars: Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson

A team of scientists studying radioactive fallout are stranded on a remote island that is slowly sinking into the ocean. To make matters worse, they're menaced by giant crabs along the way.

Another early effort from B-movie king Roger Corman, this time as both producer and director, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely scrapes over an hour running time, and still manages to get off to an almost unbearably sluggish start. Opening with what feels like ten minutes of stock footage of mushroom clouds, it then spends a good half hour following its cast of characters as they explore and squabble. Thankfully, things pick up considerably in the final act as the giant crabs make their long-promised attack. Brought to life by some cheap but reasonably impressive puppets – all spindly limbs and goggle eyes – the real fun kicks in when it's revealed that not only are the crabs enormous, but they're telepathic as well. Taunting the survivors by speaking directly into their brains, using the voices of their slaughtered comrades, the film quickly goes from turgid chore to hilarious nonsense, with some fantastic examples of baffling movie science (the crabs are “negatively charged” and bullets “pass through them like x-rays”) thrown in for good measure.

Trivia: Much like Monster from the Ocean Floor, Corman makes lots of use of underwater footage, no doubt made possible by another cross-promotional deal with a scuba company. In the scene on the beach, the crab puppet was operated by Ed Nelson, who later found fame as Michael Rossi on TV's Peyton Place.

The Monster That Challenged The World (1957)

Director: Arnold Laven

Stars: Tim Holt, Audrey Dalton, Hans Conried

An earthquake frees giant undersea mollusks from hibernation, and sends them up the Californian coast in search of human-shaped food.

Not the most energetic monster movie of the Atomic Age, this passable potboiler gets by thanks to its slimy creature design and a few moments of what was fairly explicit gore, by late 1950s standards at least. For the most part, it's a typical tale in which brusque military men butt heads with aloof scientists, before finally accepting that giant monsters are killing people. Even then, they don't make much of a fuss. Even with a series of grisly deaths on and around a top secret nuclear research facility, the reaction is one of mild inconvenience rather than a national security emergency. The bulging-eyed sea slugs are good fun though, and get to dribble their slime over plenty of cast members. The discovery of a shriveled female victim under the water is a good jolt, as is the moment where a sailor stabs one of the creatures in the eye, releasing a torrent of custardy goop.

Shark (1969)

Director: Sam Fuller

Stars: Burt Reynolds, Arthur Kennedy, Silvia Pinal

An American gunrunner in the Middle East falls in with a femme fatale and her scheming partner, who use him to dive for stolen bullion in shark-infested waters.

One of those movies where the behind-the-scenes drama is more interesting than the actual story on-screen, Shark began life as a more traditional two-fisted action thriller, under the title Caine. During the shoot, a stuntman was killed by a shark while filming the dive sequences and the producers rather ghoulishly opted to make this the driving force of the film, insisting on using a shark attack scene to open the film and even going so far as to boast about the real life fatal accident on the movie poster. Director Sam Fuller, who was already on bad terms with the producers over the budget, promptly quit the picture. It was eventually released in a drastically re-edited form, much to his disapproval.

As for the movie itself, there are hints of a decent adventure story in amongst the murky sound mix and clumsily cut scenes, but it's hard work picking out the nuggets of quality Fuller left behind. For the most part, it's of interest solely for the brooding and punchy performance by Burt Reynolds, then just breaking out of TV roles and several years from finding mainstream fame in Deliverance.

Trivia: For a better Sam Fuller animal movie, albeit one that suffered an equally troubled production, check out White Dog.

Jaws (1975)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw

An unusually bold Great White Shark prowls the water surrounding Amity Island, putting the town's tourist industry at risk. Police Chief Brody, new to the island, butts heads with the mayor over what should be done.

No exploration of animal attack movies would be complete without Jaws, the unquestionable masterpiece of the genre. Steven Spielberg's second theatrical movie, it not only gave rise to a series of diminishing sequels but inspired a slew of imitators lasting well into the 1980s and remains a dominant influence on the genre today. In particular, the obstinate local businessman or politician who refuses to act until its too late became a recurring feature of “natural horror” movies, and it's not hard to see how that mistrust of myopic bureaucratic hubris tapped into a very real resentment for 1975 audiences still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate. Jaws works wonderfully as a creature feature, but its cultural impact stems from the fact that the shark ultimately represents much more than a simply hungry fish.

Jaws has also been blamed, along with Star Wars, for introducing Hollywood to the summer blockbuster, ensuring that expensive studio versions of what would once have been cheap B-movies came to dominate the box office. That argument misrepresents what Jaws achieved, however. This is always a character driven drama, punctuated by nerve-shredding sequences of shark horror, and culminating in a finale that makes little sense in the cold light of day, but is unrivaled for sheer cinematic tension in the dark of a movie theater. Spielberg can hardly be blamed if those who followed him failed to elevate their sub-standard material to the same high standard.

Much has been written elsewhere about the trials Spielberg faced while making the movie, not least of which was Bruce, the mechanical shark that refused to work as planned. As a result, Spielberg was forced to shoot around the creature, keeping it unseen for most of the movie, and announcing its presence through John Williams' iconic ominous theme music and predatory point of view shots. Of course, this necessary restraint forces the audience to anticipate the shark even more and is a large part of what makes the movie so terrifyingly effective.

The shark attacks are sudden, and the fact that people insist the movie is far more gruesome than it actually is speaks highly of the skill with which these moments are deployed. Most interestingly, most of the shark victims are little more than extras, rather than main cast members. While the slew of copycat movies took the “and then there were none” approach of assembling a large cast and then picking them off one at a time, Jaws stages its attacks at random, the horror coming from Chief Brody's inability to predict or prevent the escalating carnage. The famous dolly-zoom shot on the crowded beach, as Brody's worst fears are realized,  works because we share his rising panic, not because we know the victim.

Beautifully performed by the cast, and shot with style and grace against the odds by the 26-year-old Spielberg, Jaws isn't just a great horror movie about man versus nature, it's a true cinema classic and one that demands to be seen.

Sequels: Jaws spawned three sequels, each noticeably worse than the last. Roy Scheider returned as Chief Brody for the passable Jaws 2 in 1978.  Jaws 3, released theatrically in 3D in 1983, switched locations to SeaWorld in Florida, where another Great White begins feasting on visitors. The last entry in the series was 1987's widely reviled Jaws: The Revenge, which had a shark chasing Chief Brody's widow across the ocean to the Bahamas. Despite several rumors, the franchise has yet to resurface in cinemas. Jaws is also a popular fixture on the Universal Studios Tour ride, and has inspired no less than three video games, one fringe theater musical and a Japanese pachinko machine.

Shark Kill (1976)

Director: William A. Graham

Stars: Richard Yniguez, Philip Clark, Jennifer Warren

A slacker marine biologist and a roughneck salvage diver team up to claim the bounty on a Great White that has attacked an oil rig.

You certainly can't nail this dreary post-Jaws TV movie for false advertising. There is indeed a shark, and it kills. Once. The rest of the running time ambles along in typical low budget, low energy TV style, before fizzling out in one of the most anti-climactic endings in the genre. Having had their rented tub smashed to bits by a rogue yacht, our heroes tread water for twenty minutes, talk about their life goals and then swim to a helicopter before the stock footage shark can even get within nibbling distance. They still blow the shark up, though, so they can claim the bounty, buy their own boat and sail into the sunset together. A toothless yarn in more ways than one, but one that is at least honest about the latent homosexuality boiling away beneath its surface.

Mako: Jaws of Death (1976)

Director: William Grefe

Stars: Richard Jaeckal, Jennifer Bishop, Buffy Dee

A deranged diver discovers he has a psychic bond with sharks, thanks to a magic medallion. When assorted Florida lowlifes harm his shark brood, the diver fights back.

Certainly the strangest of the shark movies to follow in Jaws' wake, Mako combines elements of the 1971 killer rat movie Willard and the 1972 snake picture Stanley with its shark-based carnage. Part horror movie, part vigilante thriller, the film finds Dirty Dozen star Richard Jaeckal practicing his best thousand yard stare as Sonny Stein, the diver with a sociopathic attachment to sharks. The plot first establishes that he's willing to murder those who take pleasure in hunting sharks, and then contrives various ridiculous ways in which his aquatic menagerie can be sold off to people certain to incur his wrath. In perhaps the movie's silliest scene, a small time bar owner decides to spice up his establishment with a live display of an underwater dancing girl and a man-eating shark separated by a thin screen. The result is as predictable as it is disappointing, with Mako being one of those shark movies that always seems to cut away from the horror at the last second.

The film's tone is never stranger than in the closing scenes, as Stein goes on the run after his bloody swathe of shark-related vengeance is uncovered and the mumbo jumbo surrounding his magic medallion comes to the fore. The movie ends on a particularly dark note, making it an interesting – if not entirely successful – entry in the shark movie boom of the 1970s.

Trivia: Even twelve years after Goldfinger, co-star Harold Sakata was still best known for his iconic henchman role in the 1964 James Bond adventure. So much so that he's actually credited in Mako as Harold “Odd-Job” Sakata. Mako director William Grefe previously dipped a cautious toe in horror waters with the 1965 opus, Sting of Death, in which a man turns into a jellyfish. Mako star Richard Jaeckel was equally well aquainted with animal attacks, with vampire bat horror Chosen Survivors , Bill Girdler's bear hit Grizzly and Day of the Animals also gracing his filmography.

Tentacles (1977)

Director: Ovidio G. Assonitis

Stars: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins

Undersea drilling rouses a giant octopus from the deep, and provokes it into attacking a coastal town.

One of the worst and cheapest of the immediate Jaws rip-offs, this Italian-funded, American-shot creature feature moves almost as sluggishly as the clearly normal-sized octopus used for the sporadic stock footage underwater scenes. Outside of a few clumsily edited attacks, the bulk of the film is actually taken up with loosely connected scenes involving a trio of slumming Hollywood legends. John Huston gets the most screen time as a reporter reluctantly reduced to investigating a killer octopus. Shelley Winter co-stars as his sister, and her comedy scenes exist only to establish that her son will be at the boating regatta where the octopus is destined to make its final appearance. And then there's Henry Fonda as the head of the drilling company, graciously agreeing to a single scene in which he sits at a desk and looks distinctly bored.

All these familiar faces, and the rudderless story surrounding them, drift away for the final act, as Bo Hopkins steps up to the plate as the sailor who finally defeats the sinister cephalopod. Even then, he can't do it alone – the killer blow is actually struck by two tame dolphins, in a scene as anticlimactic as it is ridiculous.

Orca (1977)

Director: Michael Anderson

Stars: Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson

Moby Dick with a twist, as a cocky fisherman accidentally kills the pregnant mate of a vengeful killer whale, unleashing its wrath on a small coastal village.

While other exploitation outfits were hurriedly churning out generic shark movies to capitalize on the success of Jaws, shrewd producer Dino De Laurentiis opted to take a different approach.

Orca states its case quite bluntly in the opening scene as a predatory Great White is unceremoniously slaughtered by a killer whale. This black and white behemoth, it says, is the real badass of the ocean. What follows is more aquatic revenge thriller than horror movie, as Richard Harris' delightfully sardonic fisherman is stalked and tormented by his undersea nemesis. Credulity is stretched by the whale's frankly bizarre ability to create calamity on dry land – at one point it not only knows which pipes to break in order to pour flammable gasoline all over the wharf, but which building to shake in order to topple a naked flame into the spreading pool – but the straight-faced cast somehow keep it on an even keel. They're helped enormously by a plaintive and haunting score from Ennio Morricone, which lends the proceedings an epic and almost mythical atmosphere.

Orca actually becomes more interesting the longer it goes on, building to a desolate finale as the whale lures Harris and his crew out from Newfoundland to the Arctic Circle, where the roles of hunter and hunted are flipped and juggled in interesting ways.

Orca is still a frequently silly movie, but it's also far more ambitious and creative than almost all of its peers, and is one of the better films to follow in Jaws' wake.

Trivia: Director Michael Anderson previously helmed The Dambusters, Logan's Run and the 1956 Best Picture Oscar-winner Around the World in Eighty Days. Orca's supporting cast includes a pre-fame Bo Derek and Will Sampson, famous for playing Chief in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

Tintorera (1977)

Director: René Cardona Jr.

Stars: Hugo Stiglitz, Andrés García, Susan George

Two rival gigolos take time out from seducing a British tourist and prowling the beaches of Cancun for casual sex to hunt el tintorera, or the tiger shark.

With its slack pace and oily veneer of sleazy misogyny, Tintorera often feels more like a soft porn travelogue than a killer shark movie. Indeed, the script is so fixated on bronzed bodies, casual sex and attempted rape that it's often easy to completely forget the movie is named after a shark until a quick random insert of undersea footage acts as a reminder. The underwater footage is, at least, authentic and exciting – although the use of real sharks being killed on camera makes it a morally dubious boast.

Cheap and often boring, Tintorera has some cheesy charm thanks to its torrid Mexican soap opera trappings, but as a shark movie it's a complete dud.

Trivia: Director René Cardona Jr was one of Mexico's leading exploitation filmmakers, and several more of his movies can be found in this book. He returned to shark-infested waters for the more lively disaster flick Cyclone and also helmed the notorious killer chicken movie, Beaks  For those with strong constitutions, Tintorera is available in a longer international cut which runs to a stultifying two hours.

Barracuda (1978)

Directors: Harry Kerwin, Wayne Crawford

Stars: Wayne Crawford, Jason Evers, Roberta Leighton

An idealistic young scientist believes that pollution from a nearby chemical plant is poisoning the waters of a small coastal town, causing the local marine life to attack humans. He soon learns that hungry fish are only the beginning.

Barracuda deserves credit for choosing a fishy threat as yet untouched by the flood of post-Jaws exploitation movies, and for coming up with a plot that involves more than the usual plodding exposition punctuated with scenes of swimmers being pulled under in a froth of blood-red foam (though it has those too). The plot in question expands the impact of the pollution to the human population, as the townsfolk become increasingly aggressive as well. Sadly, rather than venturing into the sort of nihilistic territory explored by George Romero's The Crazies, the film steers instead into tired government conspiracy waters, completely abandoning its most interesting ideas in the process. Above-average performances, not least from multitasking writer, director, producer and star Wayne Crawford, at least make this one easier to watch than most of its peers, even if the barracuda themselves make for a less than terrifying threat.

Trivia: Barracuda was originally known by the more thriller-appropriate title The Lucifer Project, which suggests the killer fish element was played up in order to ride the shark movie wave. Wayne Crawford returned to the animal attack genre almost twenty five years later, once again working as writer, director and star on Snake Island

Cyclone (1978)

Director:  René Cardona Jr.

Stars: Arthur Kennedy, Carroll Baker, Lionel Stander

Following a terrible cyclone in the Caribbean, a group of survivors lost at sea struggle to stay alive in shark-infested waters.

Mexploitation auteur Rene Cardona Jr followed Tintorera with this altogether more ambitious effort, which borrowed more from the popular disaster movie genre than anything to do with killer sharks. Indeed, the film spends most of its two hour running time following the survivors as they cope with life lost at sea without food or water, with sporadic cuts back to the mainland to let the audience know that help won't be coming any time soon. As with Cardona's other movies, the script is turgid and the acting is flat but Cyclone has a dark, cynical drive that makes it far more interesting than Tintorera and his laughable killer bird movie, Beaks

The first hint that things might not end happily comes when a pet dog is killed for food, its throat slit on camera and its skinned remains dished up raw with no flinching from the director. Things only get darker from there, as the question of cannibalism inevitably rears its ugly head. Although the film constantly reminds us that sharks are lurking close by, they don't make a concerted attack until the final minutes of the movie. They make up for lost time, though, chomping through the remaining cast with bloody relish, as live footage of sharks guzzling lumps of ragged meat and scraps of clothing make it more graphic than most dedicated shark flicks.

Cyclone is slow and sadistic, but in this particular case it works, giving proceedings a nasty, desperate air that well suits the hopeless tale being told.

Trivia: Cyclone was loosely based on the true life case of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, leading the survivors to eat the dead to stay alive. Cardona's father, also a prolific director, had already committed that tale to film in 1976, under the title 'Survive!'

Piranha (1978)

Director: Joe Dante

Stars: Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy

A shoal of genetically enhanced piranha escape from a military research facility and munch their way downriver towards a children's summer camp.

Easily the best of the post-Jaws flood of aquatic horror movies, Joe Dante's shamelessly enjoyable B-movie confidently walks the tightrope between spoof and homage, finding laughs along the way but never skimping on the bloody mayhem audiences expect. Some bland performances from the leads make the early going a bit of a grind, but once Dante has his fish in the wild there's no stopping him.

The corrupt authority figures are present and correct, insisting all is well even as people are being reduced to gory skeletons, but its the oddball energy and slyly witty script from John Sayles that gives Piranha its staying power. Much like Spielberg's truculent mechanical shark, the piranha puppets used for the attack scenes are hardly convincing, but they're shot in such a way that you can help flinching anyway.

Trivia: Piranha produced an ill-fated sequel in 1981, as James Cameron made his directorial debut with the terrible Piranha Part II: The Spawning. The original Piranha, meanwhile, has been remade several times, first as a TV movie in 1995, then again in 3D in 2010. A sequel to the second remake was released in 2012. Star Brad Dillman can also be found as the lead in the 1975 insect movie Bug , menaced by bats in Chosen Survivors and in a small part in Irwin Allen's killer bee epic, The Swarm

JAWS 2 (1978)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Stars: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Amity is visited by another killer shark, and it once again falls to Chief Brody to save the day.

If you absolutely had to make a sequel to Jaws, and Universal clearly felt it did, then this above average effort was probably the way to do it. Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss were busy on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but pretty much everyone else returns, from star Roy Scheider and writers Carl Gottlieb and Howard Sackler, to supporting cast members like Lorraine Gray as Brody's wife and Murray Hamilton as the mayor who has apparently forgotten everything he learned about shark attacks in 1975. John Williams' memorable theme cements the continuity and incoming director Jeannot Szwarc does a surprisingly good job of matching Spielberg's confident framing.

There's no escaping the fact that the story is a crude and frankly unbelievable rehash of the first movie, however, while the flood of imitators that sprang up in the few years since the original means this sequel inevitably ends up favoring cheap shocks over slow-burning tension and drama just to keep the audience's attention. A woman's burned corpse bobs out of the surf at Brody, a killer whale spills its guts on the beach, but the jolts lack the ghoulish expertise that Spielberg brought to the proceedings.

Scheider is also problematic, his involvement in the movie coming only after bitter contractual wrangling with Universal and his relationship with Szwarc was inevitably strained. The actor clearly didn't want to make the film, and while he was too much of a class act to allow his resentment to manifest on-screen, there's a spark missing from his performance that is noticeable when compared to the effortless charm the character of Brody displayed in the original.

Trivia: Jeannot Szwarc also helmed the wonderfully surreal killer cockroach movie, Bug

Up From The Depths (1979)

Director: Charles B. Griffith

Stars: Sam Bottoms, Susanne Reed, Virgil Frye

A tropical resort is plagued by a prehistoric shark with a taste for tourists.

A willfully camp spin on the Jaws formula, which lurches from broad slapstick humor to grisly horror at unpredictable intervals. The movie treads water for far too long, following seagoing scam artist Greg Oliver as he runs his schemes, but things pick up once the beast's presence is out in the open, prompting a ragtag collection of tourists to grab whatever pointy sticks they can find and set off to kill it. The creature itself is a wonderful rubbery creation, and after a slow start it delivers a few memorable deaths as well. The scene in which our heroes drag the mangled body of a colleague behind their boat as bait is a highlight.

Trivia: R. Lee Ermey, best known as the hard-ass drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, gets an early (and badly dubbed) screen appearance during the scene where the resort manager puts a bounty on the shark's head.

Killer Fish (1979)

Director: Antonio Margheriti

Stars: Lee Majors, Karen Black, James Franciscus

Jewel thieves stash their loot in a Brazilian lagoon while the heat dies down following a daring diamond heist, but retrieval is complicated by a shoal of ferocious piranha.

Many stock thrillers were tempted to incorporate aquatic horror to capitalize on the enormous popularity of Jaws, but this international co-production did a better job than most. The piranha are, at least, integral to the plot and their presence makes sense, which is more than can be said for a great many similar movies which simply stuck a shark into the final reel. Lee Majors makes for a suitably stoic lead, caught as he was between the 1970s success of The Six Million Dollar Man and the 1980s run of The Fall Guy. A less charismatic Steve McQueen, his limited tough guy range is ample for what's required here. James Franciscus is also good value, playing a slippery character in the Lee Van Cleef mold. It's the women who let things down, sadly. Karen Black's screeching soon wears thin, while fashion model Margaux Hemingway – granddaughter of Ernest – was woefully out of her depth, literally and figuratively. The plot motors along, however, opening with an explosive heist and finishing with a tense (if not always logical) survival situation aboard a sinking boat in the piranha-infested waters. The stuffed fish wobbling past the camera won't fool anyone, but Italian exploitation director Antonio Margheriti keeps the pace lively and is ruthless in bumping off his cast. A solid pulpy timewaster.

Island Claws (1980)

Director: Hernan Cardenas

Stars: Robert Lansing, Steve Hanks, Nita Talbot

Genetically altered crabs, designed to grow larger and therefore help solve world hunger, escape into the wild and menace a small island community. The usual alliance of scientists, lawmen and sexy young journalists stumble about and try to figure out what's going on. Then a giant crab appears and renders all further questions moot.

It's not unusual for cheap B-movies to be slackly paced, given that those expensive special effects must be carefully rationed out across a feature length running time, yet even by those elastic standards, Island Claws is an uneventful entry in the genre.

In over an hour, the carnivorous crustaceans claim only one on-screen victim – and that's an old guy who accidentally sets his trailer on fire while trying to swat the advancing crabs with his banjo. Key to the movie's lethargy is the choice of animal threat. Crabs certainly look dangerous enough, but in real life are fairly sluggish and passive beasts. Even in the worst conditions, it's perfectly clear that the hapless victims could escape to safety with a brisk walk.

Island Claws does have a few things going for it, however. One is a vague attempt at social commentary, as the islanders try to blame the spate of half-hearted clawings on Haitian refugees. This plot thread doesn't really come to much, as before it can be resolved the second worthwhile thing pops up: a giant roaring crab that proceeds to pull down buildings and snip a few minor cast members. It's hardly a watershed in special effects technology, but the fact that they went to the trouble of actually building a fairly decent giant crab puppet is almost enough to prevent Island Claws from being a complete waste of time. Almost.

The Last Shark (1981)

Director: Enzo G. Castellari

Stars: James Franciscus, Vic Morrow, Micaela Pignatelli

A large and vicious Great White feasts on swimmers near a coastal resort, but the mayor is slow to act. Two local men take it upon themselves to kill the shark. Sounds familiar.

Even in a genre not known for innovation, Universal Studios successfully sued the producers of The Last Shark (aka Great White) for infringing their Jaws copyright. It's hard to see what The Last Shark does that dozens of similar copycat efforts – such as the shameless Cruel Jaws - didn't also do even more blatantly but the fact that it was deliberately marketed as a direct sequel to Jaws in places like Spain and Japan certainly didn't help the defense.

While some similarities are undeniable – Vic Morrow is clearly playing the exact same role of Robert Shaw in Spielberg's movie – the story itself deviates from Jaws in lots of obvious ways. It's also surprisingly good fun, thanks to its shameless desire to give shark fans what they want.

Where Spielberg created a masterpiece by showing restraint, spaghetti western veteran Enzo G. Castellari is happy to throw blood and body parts around to satiate the audience. He's also far less coy than Spielberg where the shark itself is concerned. Jaws was kept off-screen to better hide the less-than-perfect shark effects. Castellari has no such bashfulness, happily displaying his roaring mechanical toy regardless of how silly it looks. One scene in which a rigid store mannequin, standing in for an actor, is flung into the air by the shark is a masterclass in the cheap B-movie arts. The result is a film that is far schlockier and goofier than the blockbuster that inspired it, but that willingness to go all out in indulging the audience's baser instincts means that it's also ridiculously entertaining and one of the few Jaws rip-offs that won't put you to sleep.

Col (1983)

Director: Prem Lalwani

Stars: Nafisa Ali, Dharmendra, Girish Karnad

A man who appears to be some sort of secret agent or possibly a vigilante gets into lots of poorly staged fist fights and car chases, and eventually ends up on a boat filled with bad guys. He's thrown overboard and fights a shark.

This utterly confusing Turkish B-movie earns a mention solely because it is often found on the bootleg circuit under the title “Turkish Jaws”. It's a rather ambitious description, given that the shark sequence lasts for only a few minutes and arrives over an hour into the 75 minute running time. The rest of the film is made up largely of hilariously staged and enthusiastically performed martial arts fights that must be seen to be believed. It's certainly not a shark movie then, even if it does steal the Jaws theme  music (along with the Rocky theme and Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love) but Col does boast what is undoubtedly the most wonderfully fake shark ever put on screen, and as one of the most barking mad movies you're ever likely to see, it's worth seeking out anyway.

Jaws 3D (1983)

Director: John Alves

Stars: Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong, Simon MacCorkindale

Yet another killer Great White goes on the rampage, this time at the SeaWorld theme park, and Chief Brody's adult sons just happen to be nearby.

The third Jaws film marks the point where the series seemingly gave up all pretense to the classic drama of Spielberg's original. The remaining crew members had dwindled to a handful, John Williams' majestic theme was only used for the shark sequences and having hated Jaws 2, Roy Scheider had no intention of returning. This left a small army of scriptwriters – including genre legend Richard Matheson – to contrive a piecemeal tale in which the Brody boys have grown up, with one (a young Dennis Quaid) working at SeaWorld and the other terrified of the water. Then, inevitably, yet another Great White makes its presence known. The plot is painfully thin, and really no better than the low quality imitators the series had already inspired. The shark kills are stupid and gimmicky, and once you add in some risible 3D effects – severed arms and fish heads floating unconvincingly in front of the screen, because “the third dimension is terror” according to the poster – you've got a film that, title aside, has precious little in common with the 1975 classic. Of course, worse was still to come...

Trivia: An early abandoned concept for this film was to make it a spoof under the National Lampoon brand, called Jaws 3 People 0. Joe Dante, director of Piranha was attached to direct, until Spielberg himself put a stop to it. This, apparently, prompted Jaws producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown to walk away from their posts at Universal Studios.

Given the even more ridiculous direction the Jaws series took afterwards in the risible Jaws: The Revenge , it's hard to imagine how a Joe Dante comedy version would have done more damage to the brand than this limp effort.

Shark's Paradise (1986)

Director: Michael Jenkins

Stars: David Reyne, Ron Becks, Sally Tayler

A crack team of law enforcement agents try to stop an extortionist who threatens to unleash his army of sharks on the Australian town of Surfer's Paradise.

Yet another cheesy crime thriller riding the diminishing wave of post-Jaws infamy, with its casual sports jackets and shoot-outs on yachts this Australian effort plays more like an episode of Miami Vice than anything you'd recognize as a shark-related horror movie. The combination isn't without charm, however, and the painful 1980s style offers plenty of ironic amusement starting with the chirpy TV-style opening credits, during which the cast members smile at the camera as their name appears. There's also a gunfight set to a pounding synth-rock ballad about a heartbroken man whose lover left him like a shark attack, whatever that means.

Trivia: Shark's Paradise provided a rare venture into live action for legendary animation producers Hanna Barbera. Maybe a Yogi Bear cameo would have livened it up.

Night of the Sharks (1987)

Director: Tonino Ricci

Stars: Treat Williams, Antonio Fargas, Janet Agren

A hard-living beach bum is caught between his obsession with a one-eyed man-eating shark and the mobsters who murdered his brother.

One of the many schlocky shark movies churned out by the Italian movie industry over the years, much like Shark's Paradise this is a particularly misleading effort, spending far more time on its supposed “thriller” plot than any shark action. Playing out like a particularly dull episode of The A-Team with occasional slightly bloody shark attacks, it's not even worth the 80 or so minutes it takes to endure. Treat Williams and Huggy Bear deserved better.

Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Director: Joseph Sargent

Stars:  Lorraine Gary, Michael Caine, Mario Van Peebles

Chief Brody's widow retreats to the Caribbean, but it seems a vengeful Great White has followed her there and plans to get payback for all the sharks her family has killed.

What little shreds of dignity remained in the Jaws brand after the half-baked Jaws 3D were thoroughly eradicated by this notoriously rancid final sequel, which at least appears to have ended the franchise in its tracks. The plot is ludicrous in the extreme, the script has more holes than the Orca at the end of Jaws and the cast is clearly embarrassed to be involved in such a craven cash grab. By this point, the only difference between the official Jaws movies and the low budget copycat B-movies was the name on the poster. Director Joseph Sargent had a pretty solid pedigree – he directed Jaws star Robert Shaw in the brilliantly taut Taking of Pelham 123 in 1974 – but his skill for tension and pace abandoned him for this one. There's novelty value in seeing Michael Caine making the most of a bad situation, while the toe-curling Jamaican accent attempted by Mario Van Peebles offers its share of laughs (and clearly inspired the character of Hermes in Futurama). Those brief moments of ironic amusement aside, this is as terrible as legend says.

Trivia: It was thanks to location shooting for Jaws: The Revenge that Michael Caine was unable to attend the 1987 Academy Awards and collect his Oscar for Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters in person. Sigourney Weaver accepted it on his behalf.

Deep Blood (1990)

Directors: Raffaele Donato, Joe D'Amato

Stars: Frank Baroni, Allen Cort, Keith Kelsch

A group of young men, who swore an oath of friendship as children, band together to fight an ancient Native American evil which manifests as a killer shark.

Unusually tame compared to the usual Joe D'Amato project – this being the man who directed the softcore porn/horror crossover Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals among other exploitation classics – Deep Blood has a compellingly strange concept but is really no different to a dozen similar Jaws copycats. Flailing extras vanish into murky red water, while stock National Geographic footage supplies the majority of the shark scenes.

The Native American supernatural angle is ignored for the most part, and only resurfaces whenever the least convincing medicine man in movie history makes an appearance, looking for all the world like a tanned German actor.

Mostly, Deep Blood disappoints because despite the gonzo pedigree of its director and the hokey mumbo jumbo premise, it's painfully uneventful, the sort of film that will gladly waste five or ten minutes just watching its cast silently swimming rather than move its turgid plot forwards. The cast in question is truly wretched as well, giving performances that are hilariously stiff and awkward even by the low standards of Italian shark B-movies. It all adds up to a movie that fails to live up to any of its lowbrow potential.

Cruel Jaws (1995)

Director: Bruno Mattei

Stars: David Luther, George Barnes Jr., Scott Silveria

A beach resort becomes the feeding ground for a tiger shark, trained by the Navy to attack people.

This late Italian shark flick is exceptional in one regard: in a genre already rife with plot recycling, this one takes the blood-stained cake for sheer laziness. Cruel Jaws doesn't just copy scenarios and story beats from its rivals, it uses their footage as well. It opens with a scene lifted directly from The Last Shark and goes on to incorporate footage from Deep Blood as well as the daddy of the genre, Jaws and its sequel  That the film was sometimes advertised as Jaws 5 is almost besides the point – this is a rip-off of rip-offs, and doesn't even have the good grace to use its shot-swiping tendencies to do anything fun. Instead we get a perfunctory plot, bloated with ridiculous storylines about dubious real estate deals, military experiments and the rivalry between two families. The most interesting thing about it is co-star Richard Dew, playing the owner of a troubled marine park. His uncanny resemblance to wrestling legend Hulk Hogan is the only distraction you'll get from this awful, awful movie.

Trivia: Director Bruno Mattei also turned his attention to killer rodents for Rats: Night of Terror , a movie which manages to supply its own special effects shots and features one of the most insanely brilliant endings in the genre.

Aatank (1996)

Director: Prem Lalwani

Stars: Nafisa Ali, Dharmendra, Girish Karnad

Two childhood friends from a fishing village in India contend with various romantic and social tribulations, and a giant man-eating shark.

With its song and dance numbers interrupted by bloody shark attacks, this Hindi version of Jaws is a memorably strange culture clash experience if nothing else. For much of the running time, the emphasis is firmly on Bollywood staples like convoluted melodrama and broad romantic strokes, with the shark remaining inactive and off-screen for most of the first hour. The crude mechanical monster is charmingly hilarious when it finally puts in an appearance, but let's face it – you're not watching a Bollywood shark movie to be amazed by the plot or special effects. You're watching for the sheer WTF factor, and on that Aatank delivers in abundance.

The Beast (1996)

Director: Jeff Bleckner

Stars: William Petersen, Karen Sillas, Charles Martin Smith

A fishing town comes under attack from a giant squid.

Jaws author Peter Benchley cashed in his notoriety with this shameless TV movie, which recasts his popular shark tale with tentacles rather than fins. There's a stoic lawman. A greasy politician more interested in his image than public safety. Grizzled local fishermen who grumble about their livelihood while our hero raises the alarm following reports of attacks on boats. Broadcast as a two-part TV miniseries, there's just not enough story here to fill the nearly three-hour running time, while Benchley's yarn – changed considerably here from his original novel, but no more original for its additions – simply revisits former glories to no great effect. Spielberg was shrewd enough to streamline the author's sometimes stodgy prose for Jaws. With three hours of television to fill, this unfiltered tale is left to sprawl and spread like the gelatinous beast of the title. That beast, at least, is convincingly brought to life when it bothers to show up, but this bloated and bland entry is otherwise forgettable.

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Director: Renny Harlin

Stars: Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, Samuel L. Jackson

Three genetically enhanced “smart sharks”, bred with extra large brains to help provide a cure for Alzheimer's, run riot at a remote undersea research facility during a tropical storm.

The late 1990s saw a brief big screen resurgence of animal attack movies, with Anaconda , Lake Placid and this killer shark romp all hitting within a few years of each other. Deep Blue Sea may not be the smartest of that bunch – it's as gleefully dumb as a bag of hammers – but it's arguably the most shamelessly fun.

Much like the sharks themselves, this is a movie that never stops moving. Renny Harlin, still smarting from the failure of his pirate movie Cutthroat Island, directs with an aggressive energy that few shark movies have managed to match since. A slew of fun character archetypes are briskly introduced and just as quickly begin to fall prey to the sharks once the research station is breached and flooded. This unique setting is just one of the ways the movie sets itself apart from the shark movie herd – rather than causing mayhem at beaches and on the open water, this trio of intelligent sharks pursue the cast down waterlogged corridors and through flooded kitchens. The confined space makes this overly familiar animal threatening in unfamiliar ways, and Harlin uses this shift in perspective to pull off some fantastic shocks. In a genre where you can almost always spot the victims, and even guess what order they'll end up as shark food, Deep Blue Sea delights in killing off its characters when you least expect it. Their deaths are nasty as well, with few given the relative dignity of a frantic scream as they're pulled into churning red waters. Characters are ripped to pieces, used as battering rams, even electrocuted while being bitten in half.

The special effects haven't held up all that well, but they're still among the best computer generated sharks to hit the screen, and they're augmented with some great life-sized animatronics. Despite some cartoony long shots of the aquatic menace, you're never in any doubt that these creatures pose a genuine threat.

In many ways, Deep Blue Sea illustrates why the true independent B-movie is a dying breed. Just as Jaws delivered B-movie thrills with cinematic polish, so Deep Blue Sea sets audience expectations beyond the reach of the lowly exploitation studio. With blockbuster money behind it, Deep Blue Sea is able to show its sharks often, and in gory detail, creating a movie with no room for the long talky passages that used to pad such films out.

Deep Blue Sea pays homage to Jaws in numerous witty ways, but wisely never tries to equal Spielberg's film for drama or pathos. Instead, it offers a hell for leather rollercoaster of blood and spray, and is all the more enjoyable for its lowbrow intentions.

Sequels: Strangely, despite going on to inspire a cottage industry of low budget copycats, and despite its contemporaries like Anaconda and Lake Placid earning a string of cheap follow-ups, Deep Blue Sea  never got a sequel. It's a rare example of a hit monster movie that stands alone, without spawning a needless franchise. That, alone, is worth celebrating.

Shark Attack (1999)

Director: Bob Misiorowski

Stars: Casper Van Dien, Ernie Hudson, Jenny McShane

A scientist using sharks to find a cure for cancer discovers his experiments have made them unusually aggressive. Luckily, his square-jawed college rival is on hand to set him right.

Although Deep Blue Sea was too dumb to paddle in the same waters as Jaws, it had a similar effect on movie production, inspiring a fresh wave of killer shark movies that continues to this day. First into the water was this low budget effort from B-movie factory Nu Image, and looking back it's surprising just how much of a real movie Shark Attack is. Not a good movie, exactly, but it has an actual plot, characters that are almost interesting and – best of all – footage of real sharks and physical special effects rather than the crude CGI that quickly became the option of choice for studios churning out cheap animal attack horror films.

Like a lot of the shark movies from the 1970s and 1980s, Shark Attack often forgets that it's supposed to have sharks in it, and instead becomes an action movie by default, with the shark angle only brought back to deliver the typically ironic gruesome fate for the villain.

Trivia: Shark Attack spawned two sequels. The second movie, released in 2000, was predictable enough but 2002's unbearably cheesy Shark Attack 3, subtitled Megalodon and using a giant prehistoric shark as its antagonist, can take the blame for shunting the genre towards the increasingly silly giant mutant hybrids such as Mega Shark and Sharktopus that now clog up the dustier corners of late night television.

Octopus (2000)

Director: John Eyres

Stars:  Jay Harrington, Ravil Isyanov, Carolyn Lowery

A wanted terrorist is transported back to America in a nuclear submarine, but things get complicated when they cross paths with a giant octopus.

Much like Shark Attack, Octopus was one of the very first entries in the modern creature feature TV movie fad, meaning it keeps the self aware bad-on-purpose shenanigans down to a minimum. The octopus of the title is often an abstract background threat, however, as the unbearably corny script clearly favors the more affordable drama offered by the the prospect of a maniacal terrorist causing havoc on a sub. There's also a lengthy introductory sequence, set during the Cuban missile crisis, in which we learn that those fiendish Russkies were smuggling chemical weapons to Castro – this, somehow, is the cause of the oversized octopus forty years later. Mostly, however, that octopus restricts itself to occasionally whipping the stricken sub with its tentacles, making everyone do the Star Trek swaying-from-side-to-side thing.

It's only in the final act, with the human cast whittled down to a manageable few, that the octopus really gets to show its stuff. Attacking a cruise liner (Titanic was only a few years out of theaters) it gets to thrash its tentacles at a more imposing target and gobble up a few of the bad guys before being blown up. Hailing from the period when these movies were still making an effort to attract viewers, the special effects aren't too bad and the cast – led by future Better Off Ted star Jay Harrington – are personable and manage to navigate the cheesier lines with some dignity intact.

Sequel: Octopus 2: River of Fear followed in 2001, with an unrelated giant octopus taking up residence in the New York harbor. It's as dumb as it sounds, and makes you appreciate the slender charms of the original movie even more.

Shark Hunter (2001)

Director: Matt Codd

Stars: Antonio Sabato Jr., Christian Toulali, Grand L. Bush

A young boy sees his parents killed by a giant shark, and grows up to become a marine biologist, obsessed with finding and killing the prehistoric megalodon responsible. When an undersea research base is destroyed in mysterious circumstances, he gets his chance.

Having the humans hunting the shark gives this direct-to-video effort a point of difference from all the other shark movies that cluttered up shelves at the turn of the millenium, but it's not quite enough to make up for the generally flat and uninspired story. As Antonio Sabato Jr's vengeful scientist takes his experimental sub to the bottom of the ocean, there's lots of running around in cramped metal corridors with blasts of inexplicable steam, and plenty of loud shouty swearing, but the whole can't help but feel like a pastiche of James Cameron movies. There are a couple of nods to previous shark hits – a crack about needing a bigger sub, and a scene which borrows from Deep Blue Sea fairly blatantly – but the shark itself is often an abstract thing, kept off-screen for as long as possible. It's not a bad CG creation when it puts in an appearance, but the hurried ending does little to sell us on the beast's size or threat.

Megalodon (2002)

Director: Pat Corbitt

Stars: Leighanne Littrell, Robin Sachs, Al Sapienza

The owner of a controversial deep sea drilling rig plays host to a TV news crew in the hopes of counteracting bad press about his impact on the environment. Green issues quickly become moot, however, when the drilling attracts the attention of a giant prehistoric shark.

Once you realise that Megalodon was produced, written, directed and edited by people from a special effects company, it's much easier to appreciate what's being attempted here. This is a standard “roughnecks trapped by a monster” flick that owes more than a little to James Cameron's The Abyss. It's sole point of difference is the heavy use of CGI animation for pretty much every scene that doesn't involve the cast standing in small rooms. Every exterior shot of the rig, the submersibles the team uses to explore the sea bed, and of course the giant shark itself: all are created in a computer. It's pretty good work as well, and the choice to go all digital for these scenes means that there's none of that distracting floatiness that comes when cheap digital effects are crudely incorporated into live action footage. The downside is that when the CGI is noticeable, the whole film looks like a cartoon. The other weakness – and it's a big one – is that the megalodon doesn't really do much. It doesn't even appear until well over halfway into the movie, and even then it restricts its actions to ramming into the rig and chasing subs. At no point do the characters really face the beast in any tangible way, which can't help but make it feel uneventful. Some smaller prehistoric fish offer a minor distraction – and the chance for writer/co-star/make-up effects man Gary J. Tunnicliffe to break out the fake blood – but this is a movie clearly created, first and foremost, as a showreel for the Corbitt Design digital effects company and the entertainment value suffers as a result.

Open Water (2003)

Director: Chris Kentis

Stars: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein

A couple on a scuba diving trip are left stranded miles from land, in shark-infested waters, when their boat leaves without them.

Minimalist and genuinely unnerving, Open Water is arguably the first shark movie since Jaws to move the genre forwards rather than simply repeating a formula. Shot on location using handheld video, with the two stars actually in the ocean with real sharks, the realism of the scenario is unmistakable. In fact, apart from a brief introduction and a few cuts back to the shore, the entire movie is simply two people, floating in the sea as death creeps closer. By stripping the story down to its bare minimum, the terror is amplified massively, yet the movie is never over the top or melodramatic. Instead, the hapless man and woman, each playing characters with the same name as the actors, discuss their fate rationally and calmly, awaiting the inevitable. Between this restraint, and the fact it's based on a true story, it can feel a little unpleasant to classify it alongside sensationalist B-movies, but there's no denying that Open Water taps into the deep primal reasons why we find sharks – and the ocean itself – so hypnotic and horrifying.

Sequels: An unnecessary sequel, Open Water 2: Adrift, followed in 2006. In the follow-up, another couple end up in the water by accident, but this time they're unable to get back on their boat because there's no ladder. They've also left their baby on-board, alone. It's not a terrible movie, as these things go, but without the gravitas of a true story, it feels crass and forced after the effective chills of the original.

Shark Zone (2003)

Director: Danny Lerner

Stars: Dean Cochran, Velizar Binev, Brandi Sherwood

Divers trying to retrieve sunken Spanish treasure from a shipwrecked galleon attract sharks to a resort town, where the mayor – surprisingly – is reluctant to close the beaches.

Shark Zone opens with a flashback to the 18th century, but quickly reverts to type as fins slice through water, teeth chew through swimmers and the local authorities refuse to heed the warnings of our bland hero. Shark Zone earns some credit for using real footage of sharks, and for keeping the kills coming at an impressive rate, but the plot is so lethargic that it's impossible to get excited. The cast is just plain bad, and since the film was largely shot on location in Bulgaria, many are badly dubbed as well. A third act diversion into crime thriller territory feels like padding, and the resolution is limp. More forgettable than flat-out terrible, Shark Zone isn't worth your time.

Trivia: Director Danny Lerner is something of a keystone in the modern animal attack TV movie genre. As a director he also brought us the equally risible Raging Sharks and the majestically inept Shark in Venice , while his producer credits include the likes of Spiders , Octopus and Crocodile  He's also credited as a producer on real theatrical movies, like the 2011 Conan the Barbarian remake and the Stallone action sequel The Expendables 2.

Dark Waters (2003)

Director: Phillip J. Roth

Stars: Lorenzo Lamas, Simmone Mackinnon, Jeffrey Gorman

A penniless ocean explorer and his sexy female sidekick are forced to investigate an oil rig under siege from extremely aggressive sharks.

A bone-headed by-the-numbers DTV thriller that is far more interested in the cut-price James Bond adventures of walking ham sandwich Lorenzo Lamas than the more charismatic sharks aimlessly milling around outside the rig. Special effects are passable, by the low standards of the modern shark movie genre, but the whole thing wheezes along on cliches and just enough exposed flesh from the female stars to pass as sexy. It makes a lot of noise, but Dark Waters is so bland and formulaic that you'll forget what happened even before the end credits have finished rolling.

Trivia: Director Phillip J. Roth also brought us the sci-fi snake thriller New Alcatraz but is most prolific as a producer. In that field, he's put his name to such efforts as Python , Boa vs Python , Locusts: The Eighth Plague , Bats: Human Harvest , Copperhead and the limp Lake Placid sequels

Red Water (2003)

Director: Hernan Cardenas

Stars: Lou Diamond Phillips, Kristy Swanson, Coolio

An estranged husband and wife are taken hostage by criminals looking to retrieve a stash of stolen money at the bottom of a Louisiana river. There's also a corrupt oil company with an illegal drilling rig trying to protect its secret. Oh, and a bull shark that has learned how to live in freshwater.

A typically over-stuffed TV horror movie that can't decide what it wants to be. Multiple plot points bump into each other at random, while occasional scenes remind us that there's a shark on the loose. The acting is either wildly over the top (Coolio) or bordering on sleepwalking (Phillips). The special effects are predictably dire, and the whole thing feels like it was shot on home video during a weekend vacation. It does, at least, come up with a fairly unique way of resolving the shark problem, as Lou Diamond Phillips lures it under the rig and then drills it to death.

Snakehead Terror (2004)

Director: Paul Ziller

Stars: Bruce Boxleitner, Carol Alt, Chelan Simmons

Human growth hormone causes snakehead fish in a small town lake to grow to monstrous size.

Every now and then, nature offers ailing movie producers a helping hand. As the wave of shark movies began to ebb, newspapers began reporting on the threat of snakeheads, an invasive species of fish devouring its way through the ecosystem. A needle-toothed apex predator, the great thing about snakeheads – from a horror movie point of view at least – was their special ability: they can breathe air and survive on land, dragging themselves along on muscular fins. If they didn't exist, the B-movies would have had to make them up.

But they do exist, and so a flurry of snakehead movies came out in the mid-2000s. This was one of the first, and while it never lives up to the “terror” part of its title, it's a solid enough monster movie. It's well paced, for one thing, wasting very little time on the dreary lives of the townsfolk and instead getting stuck into the grisly business of having them eaten by fish. The snakeheads themselves are also worthy of praise, with digital effects used sparingly and mostly for murky underwater shots. When they're out of the water, reliable old rubber puppets are used. They're no more realistic than pixels, but they're more fun to watch and add a much-needed tangible quality to the slimy, bloody conclusion, in which Bruce Boxleitner's sheriff, Carol Alt's fish expert and the obligatory screaming teens are trapped in an old house by the critters. You won't be surprised by anything that transpires, but it's never boring.

Frankenfish (2004)

Director: Mark A.Z. Dippé

Stars: Tory Kittles, K.D. Aubert, China Chow

Giant genetically enhanced snakehead fish, reared by a hunter for the ultimate sport, munch their way through hapless victims in the swamps of Louisiana.

Another killer snakehead movie, Frankenfish may not be much smarter than its title, but it's still surprisingly fun. Clearly something about snakeheads rejuvenated the B-movie template, however briefly. An enjoyable cast just about keeps the human interest afloat, but its the film's frenetic pace that makes it worthwhile. Gory deaths come thick and fast, and while the computer generated fish don't convince up close, the movie never stands still long enough for that to be a problem. It's certainly not high art, but Frankenfish is a better than average example of its maligned genre.

Trivia: Special effects artist turned director Mark A.Z. Dippé is best known for the 1997 superhero flop, Spawn. He returned to fishy tales for the 2012 animated children's movie sequel, The Reef: High Tide, not to be confused with the killer shark horror movie, The Reef

Shark Alarm (2004)

Director: Jorgo Papavassiliou

Stars: Ralf Moeller, Julia Stinshoff, Gregor Bloéb

A German marine diver retires to Mallorca after his wife is killed by a shark, but a fresh wave of deaths leads him to realize that the exact same shark has returned – and it's a prehistoric giant.

This German TV movie is every bit as generic and ridiculous as the many US shark attack movies that sluggishly swam onto the scene in the 2000s, but between the hilariously cheesy English dubbing and a generally over-the-top tone, it ends up being a guilty pleasure all the same. Former bodybuilder Ralf Moeller lumbers around unconvincingly in the lead role, and so the plot takes frequent diversions into action movie territory where he's clearly more comfortable. The film is always content to splash around in the stupid end of the pool, however. For example, it opens with Moeller saving a family trapped in a shark cage at the bottom of deep sea trench, using a helicopter and a rope that is clearly six feet long. The script makes other bewildering decisions as well, such as a prolonged introduction in which a small child narrates an old world tale of doomed lovers lost in a shipwreck that has absolutely no relevance to the story about to unfold. Another scene is copied from The Terminator, presumably as a gag, while the editor apparently decided it was a good idea to intercut a car chase with a fat man talking about barbecues. Later on,  the climactic shark attack on our heroes is abruptly halted for a scene at “Miss Jetski 2004” where German pop star Janet Biedermann sings a song about the joys of a good old 69. Then the shark attack continues. Such weird flourishes make Shark Alarm a movie that's easy to laugh at, though that's sadly as far as its entertainment appeal stretches.

Trivia: In its native Germany Shark Alarm is called Hai-Alarm Auf Mallorca, or Shark Alert in Mallorca, a title which has been retained on the opening credits of the English dubbed version, even as a serious-sounding man intones a completely different title - “Shark Attack Mallorca!” - over the top of it. Ralf Moeller is a fairly recognizable face outside his home country – he's had sizable supporting roles in hits such as Gladiator and The Scorpion King, and played the lead role in the Conan the Adventurer TV show.

Blue Demon (2004)

Director: Daniel Grodnik

Stars: DeDee Pfeiffer, Randall Batinkoff, Jeff Fahey

A group of computer-controlled sharks, created by the government as a defense against sea-faring terrorists, are set loose and make their way up the coast towards San Francisco.

Blue Demon is a strange movie. It obviously cost peanuts to make, yet the cast is pretty good, as well as marginally famous, and the special effects aren't bad considering the obvious lack of resources. Yet the tone is all over the place, with a spoofy comedy feel that isn't supported by any obvious jokes or humor. The interior sets are colored and lit like a comic book, while Jeff Fahey chomps so much scenery as a bombastic military man that you'd swear he was in the wrong movie. The sharks are hilariously ineffectual as well, with multiple scenes of people falling into the water and then swimming to safety before the sharks can strike. As a horror, it's a complete washout. And yet for all its quirks – or perhaps because of them - Blue Demon is almost impossible to dislike. Compared to the soulless CG-assisted shark movies churned out by cynical production outfits more interested in quantity than quality, this is clearly the work of people trying to make an actual movie, and do it their own way. They didn't succeed, but it's a commendable effort.

Trivia: Blue Demon marks the only directorial outing for Daniel Grodnik, but as a producer his legacy stretches back to the 1970s. Camp slasher classic Terror Train was one of his, as are the killer dog yarn Man's Best Friend and killer ant farce Glass Trap  Star DeDee Pfeiffer is, of course, the sister of Michelle. She's maintained a fun B-movie career in parallel to her sister's blockbuster success, and is well worth seeking out in cult hits like Vamp.

12 Days of Terror (2005)

Director: Jack Sholder

Stars: Colin Egglesfield, Mark Dexter, Jenna Harrison

New Jersey, 1916, and the city is gripped with panic when a man-eating shark begins prowling the bay.

Most shark movies end up owing a debt to Jaws, but this one can at least tip the scales a little in the other direction, based as it is on the real life case that inspired Peter Benchley to write his blockbusting novel in the first place. The true life angle gives this TV “docudrama” movie a unique flavor, as does the period setting. Watching people cope with the shark attacks without the benefit of modern technology, or even a detailed understanding of shark behavior, adds a few fresh wrinkles to an otherwise standard tale. It's just a pity that the story's interesting aspects are undersold by typically poor TV movie acting and cheap computer-generated special effects.

Trivia: 12 Days of Terror marked the last directorial outing, at the time of writing, for Jack Sholder, best known for Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Hidden. He also helmed the weird spider movie, Arachnid

RAGING SHARKS (2005)

Director: Danny Lerner

Stars: Corin Nemec, Vanessa Angel, Corbin Bernsen

Wreckage from an alien spaceship lands in the Bermuda Triangle, driving hundreds of sharks into a man-eating frenzy because of orange crystals or whatever. The crew of a seabed research facility are stranded and must face the sharks to survive.

Yet another cheesy quickie from the Nu Image production line, Raging Sharks is marginally better than the usual modern shark movie swill, thanks to a lack of poor CGI, but that's a small victory at best. A wonderfully random alien opening aside, the sci-fi origin of the shark menace is really little more than an excuse to indulge in the expected cliches – stern arguments between scientists and soldiers in generic control rooms, divers being eaten in a flurry of handheld camera whirls and red water. But, like so many similar films, the sharks are really just there to offer a marketable title and most of the action takes place between Corin Nemec's milquetoast scientist and Todd Jensen's sinister black ops assassin as they batter each other in what looks like the studio cellar. Then it's all hurriedly wrapped up as the extra-terrestrials retrieve their technology and the sharks immediately disband. The cast of fallen TV stars do their best to look like this is how they saw their career panning out, but it's obvious that nobody's heart is in it, and the film ends up as just another forgettable genre exercise that fails to justify the time it takes to watch.

SPRING BREAK SHARK ATTACK (2005)

Director: Paul Shapiro

Stars: Shannon Lucio, Riley Smith, Justin Baldoni

There's a shark attack in Florida at Spring Break.

Given its title and concept, you'd be forgiven for expecting Spring Break Shark Attack to be a particularly witless modern creature feature with bikini-clad bimbos and hard body hunks on one side, unconvincing CGI sharks on the other, and inept comedy and horror squeezed in between. What's that they say about judging a book by its cover? Contrary to appearances this is actually a surprisingly restrained and effective drama, populated by talented actors (who, admittedly, sport bikinis and bronzed muscles) and, best of all, old-fashioned practical shark effects. This focus on character also sadly means that it's not the most eventful shark movie, as the first hour of the movie is more interested in the struggle of lead character Danielle, a virginal good girl who disobeys her adulterous father to join her old high school friends in Florida for Spring Break. She's quickly schmoozed by oily pick-up artist JT and wooed by sensitive local lad Shane, who prefers bookshops to bars and dreams of nothing more grand than a life fixing boats. It's simple stuff, but briskly written and charmingly performed – particularly by Shannon Lucio as Danielle, who brings depth and sweetness to a role that could easily be sappy. Praise is also due for reliable character actors like Kathy Baker (Edward Scissorhands) and Australian legend Bryan Brown (F/X: Murder By Illusion), who bring just enough adult gravitas to the proceedings. The film even brushes up against some clever commentary, as it draws a none-too-subtle line between the predatory tiger sharks prowling the water and the horny young men cruising the beachfront. Rather than using the Spring Break backdrop as an excuse for sleaze, the script actually has something to say about the hollow debauchery on display. Sadly, having got off to such a low-key start, the film never quite gets up to speed as a horror. There are some effectively staged scenes in which sharks attack a boat, and later a beach party, but they feel more like an after thought, and while the decision to stick with tangible model sharks is admirable, it does mean that the creatures themselves are rarely seen. Spielberg could get away with that level of teasing because he had a spectacularly tight script and a barnstormer of a climax. Spring Break Shark Attack, for all its surprising charm and likeable actors, can't quite pull the same trick off.

Trivia: Riley Smith, who plays nice guy hero Shane, can also be found in the killer spider spoof Eight Legged Freaks

RAZORTEETH (2005)

Directors: John Polonia, Mark Polonia

Stars: Stevan Anselmi, Brian Berry, Todd Carpenter

A lake full of piranha causes problems for a variety of unusual characters.

One of those borderline-amateur movies that seems to mostly consist of a a bunch of friends horsing around with a camera, Razorteeth at least has some rough hewn charm when compared to the TV movie sludge churned out by supposedly more professional film studios. That charm only goes so far, however, and is mostly confined to the enjoyably goofy attack scenes in which rigid piranha puppets are wiggled past the camera while actors try (and fail) to look terrified. It's certainly not the only movie to trade in such bargain basement ideals, but it lacks the relentlessly hilarious awfulness of Birdemic and doesn't have the youthful exuberance of Weasels Ripped My Flesh  Too much time is taken up with stilted dialogue and seemingly endless establishing shots of cars driving, cars stopping and people getting out of cars. Funny, but not especially fun.

KRAKEN: tentacles of the deep (2006)

Director: Tibor Takács

Stars: Charlie O'Connell, Victoria Pratt, Jack Scalia

A young boy watches his parents get dragged to their death by a giant squid. Years later, as an adult, he joins up with a marine archaeologist searching for a mythical Ancient Greek gem that may be protected by the very same squid. What are the chances?

If you always felt that a giant killer squid movie would be vastly improved by the inclusion of cartoon mobsters and vaguely supernatural lost treasure, then Kraken may be the movie for you. It gets so wrapped up in its ludicrous thriller elements – and the burgeoning romance between its leads – that it can take a while for the squid to put in an appearance. When it does, the creature CGI is cheap and obvious but better than most – there's an obvious effort to at least make it look good, even if the budget lets it down – and a couple of the kills are nice and gory.

Trivia: Star Charlie O'Connell is the brother of Jerry O'Connell, who has at least been in a few movies that got a theatrical release. Jack Scalia, who plays the villainous gangster with designs on the magical opal jewel, has dipped into animal horror territory a few more times – in the killer snake movie Silent Predators and the suitably awful Jersey Shore Shark Attack  Director Tibor Takács has even more experience. He directed Rats , Ice Spiders and Mega Snake

EYE OF THE BEAST (2007)

Director: Gary Yates

Stars: James Van Der Beek, Alexandra Castillo, Arne MacPherson

A young marine biologist looking to prove himself comes to a Canadian fishing town to help find out why the nets are coming up empty and people are disappearing. The answer: giant squid.

The best thing you can say about this entry in the apparently endless Syfy Originals series of TV movies, is that there's a genuine attempt to make the characters worth caring about, a stab at ambitious plot points revolving around racial tension between the crusty old fishermen and the local Indian population and a general sense that everyone involved wanted to make an actual movie rather than just churning something out to fill a broadcast slot. That doesn't mean the movie is particularly entertaining though. There's absolutely nothing here to surprise or engage the viewer, but it's an easy watch. Director Gary Yates also gave us the tiger flick Maneater and Eye of the Beast follows the same blandly efficient route to vague success. The most notable thing about it is the star turn by James van der Beek, who finds himself almost literally up the (Dawson's) creek without a paddle. It's a good performance – at its best when he's just hanging out, romancing the town's female fisheries agent – but there's a sense of “so it's really come to this” whenever he has to engage with the fact he's in a killer squid movie. The squid, as with so many other modern monster flicks, is a mid-range bit of CGI that fails to sell the peril needed for a successful horror.

SHARK IN VENICE (2008)

Director: Danny Lerner

Stars: Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa Johansson, Hilda van der Meulen

A college professor investigates his father's death in the waterways of Venice. He discovers that an ancient lost treasure is at stake and the Mafia will stop at nothing to get it. Also, sharks.

Yet another shark movie from the Nu Image low budget factory, and another effort that takes a seemingly can't-miss premise and executes it with neither the wit nor imagination required. This one lifts plot elements liberally from The Da Vinci Code and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but even with mobsters running around, flashbacks to medieval times and booby traps galore, it's a dull and lifeless movie. This is largely down to Stephen Baldwin, looking tired and doughy, playing the lead with all the enthusiasm of a man waiting for a prolonged rectal examination. The sharks themselves are the usual cheap computer generated efforts, the same few shots repeated endlessly, and the historical conspiracy angle ensures that whatever tension the fish may provide is rapidly deflated by the meandering plot.

SHARK SWARM (2008)

Director: James A. Contner

Stars: John Schneider, Daryl Hannah, Armand Assante

A scheming property tycoon dumps toxic waste in the waters of Full Moon Bay, hoping to drive local fishermen out of business so he can build condos on the land. Instead, he creates a swarm of enraged, psychotic sharks. A shark swarm, you could say.

Running to almost three hours in length, it's not clear if this incredibly cheap effort is trying to hark back to the glory days of the TV miniseries, or just the bloated disaster bombast of Irwin Allen  Whatever the motivation, it makes the movie a chore to sit through. The story of plucky locals fighting back against a scheming corporate villain is over-familiar from dozens of similar movies, and certainly doesn't benefit from being stretched to twice its usual length. The cast do their best to fill the dead space in the script, but even with Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham among their number, it's a hopeless cause. The feeble computer-generated sharks don't help either, even in their exaggerated numbers, as repeated animations of them swooping towards the camera quickly lose their thrill. With all the flaws of any cheap shark movie, plus a running time that rivals the most epic movies, this is easily avoided.

Trivia: F. Murray Abraham's character is called Bill Girdler, in honor of William Girdler, director of such animal attack hits as Grizzly and Day of the Animals  If only Shark Swarm had an ounce of Girdler's cheesy showmanship.

PSYCHO SHARK (2009)

Director: John Hijiri

Stars: Nonami Takizawa, Airi Nakajima, Megumi Haruno

Japanese girls on a beach vacation are stalked by a killer who apparently feeds his victims to a giant shark or something.

An absolutely impenetrable Japanese film which runs to just over 70 minutes in length. At least sixty of those minutes are dedicated to scenes of various girls in bikinis sunbathing, showering or just watching TV. Contrary to what the DVD sleeve promises, the astonishingly poorly rendered CGI shark only turns up in the final minutes and makes absolutely no difference to the “plot”.

Trivia: Psycho Shark has also been released under the lawsuit-friendly title Jaws in Japan.

MEGA SHARK vs GIANT OCTOPUS (2009)

Director: Jack Perez

Stars: Lorenzo Lamas, Deborah Gibson, Vic Chao

Frozen for millions of years, an enormous prehistoric shark and a giant octopus thaw out in the present day and have a big fight, causing collateral damage to any aircraft, bridges and 1980s pop stars in the vicinity.

You'd have to try really hard to screw up a movie with a title like this, but the problem is that ultra-cheap studio The Asylum barely tries at all. Outside of a few trailer-worthy moments such as a giant octopus attacking an oil rig and a giant shark leaping 35,000 feet in the air to devour an airplane, this is one of those movies that somehow fills its 85 minute running time without anything of importance happening. The shots of CGI monster carnage last a few seconds at most, and the rest of the film is padded out with recycled shots (sometimes reversed to make them look different), the same handful of sets and props and acting that barely warrants the term. Former 80s pop star Debbie Gibson makes an enthusiastic grab for movie stardom, but she and the rest of her co-stars are drowned out by the tsunami of B-movie cheese that is Lorenzo Lamas. As terrible as he is, he's at least operating at the sort of hammy level a movie like this requires. His scenery chewing is all for nothing, however, as by the end credits Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is still more fun as a random title than as a movie you actually have to watch.

Trivia: Thanks to its online infamy, the movie inevitably spawned a series of equally dumb semi-sequels, including Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus and Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark.

Malibu Shark attack (2009)

Director: David Lister

Stars: Renee Bowen, Remi Broadway, Joel Amos Byrnes

A tsunami hits California, leaving Malibu submerged and at the mercy of prehistoric goblin sharks.

Baywatch still looms large enough in the pop culture consciousness that it seems strange nobody made a lifeguards vs sharks movie before, but this terrible effort isn't likely to linger in the memory. The flooded Malibu location is surprisingly fresh, given how many killer shark TV movies are content to paddle in the shallow end of the narrative pool, but as with so many modern B-movies what sinks it are the twin dead weights of awful special effects and rotten acting. Even by the low standards set in the wake of the original Shark Attack , the cast of this movie are incredibly bad at displaying even the most basic emotions convincingly, while the sharks themselves are laughably dumb to look at. Apparently goblin sharks have protruding noses and a hilarious overbite, making them the gawkiest aquatic predators on record. Even when our heroic hunky lifeguards are fighting against these monsters with a chainsaw, you'd be forgiven for falling asleep, so tedious are the scenes of people exchanging vows of everlasting love and then being munched in a cloud of CGI blood moments later.

Trivia: Star Renee Bowen is better known as a stuntperson than an actor. She faced sharks again, under very similar circumstances, as a stunt performer on the 2012 movie Bait

MEGA PIRANHA (2009)

Director: Eric Forsberg

Stars: Paul Logan, Tiffany, Barry Williams

Giant piranha fish make their way up from Venezuela towards Florida, and only an elite soldier and a busty fish expert can stop them.

Yet another giant fish movie from nano-budget schlock shop The Asylum, blessed with bottom range CGI, terrible acting and an embarrassing turn from a kitschy pop culture figure. In this case, that would be 1980s teen pop star Tiffany, who does little to convince as the sort of scientist you'd want saving America from outlandishly oversized piranha. These are truly mega piranha, you see, growing so large and so fast that by the final act they're able to bite chunks out of battleships and fit an entire helicopter in their mouth. It's ludicrous, but only occasionally does that lunacy result in something entertaining. Paul Logan is a large part of the problem, a stiff and lifeless lead who has both the appearance and acting range of a large side of beef. For the most part, the script has him tangling with corrupt Venezuelan soldiers, since they're cheaper to put on screen than even the lousiest CGI fish. There's a glimmer of Godzilla-esque charm in the final scenes, when the piranha get stupidly large and start launching themselves onto the Miami coastline, but Mega Piranha is otherwise another dim-witted half-hearted schedule filler that flirts with some great B-movie ideas but lacks the budget and enthusiasm to see them through. The concept may amuse for a few minutes, but the ironic humor dries up long before Tiffany sings us out over the end credits.

MEGA SHARK VS CROCOSAURUS (2010)

Director: Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray

Stars: Gary Stretch, Jaleel White, Sarah Lieving

A tourist boat sinks off the Great Barrier Reef, forcing its occupants to swim for safety as a Great White Shark takes an interest in them.

Following the brief glimmer of online infamy that greeted Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, it was clearly decided that this was an actual franchise now, and so the shark was resurrected for this effort, in which a giant crocodile from the Congo is added to the mix. What follows is much the same as when Mega Shark faced Giant Octopus – lots of rushed, indistinct CGI mayhem and lots of actors delivering wooden dialogue in cardboard control rooms. This entry is notable for being even less coherent than usual, with disjointed scenes thrown together apparently at random. Characters can be in a helicopter one moment, back on a battleship the next and then out in the helicopter again all in the space of a few minutes. This utter lack of internal logic stretches to the “story” as well, with both shark and crocodile magically crossing the globe in seconds. They start out threatening Miami, and then moments later there are crocodile eggs hatching and menacing Santa Monica. Shortly after that we learn Hawaii is under attack, and then the action shifts to the Panama Canal. Our heroes are apparently able to rush to these locations, thousands of miles apart, in the blink of an eye. The movie also squanders a reasonably decent cast. British boxer turned actor Gary Stetch made for a compelling villain in the acclaimed 2004 thriller Dead Man's Shoes, and often pops up in small roles for Oliver Stone, yet here he plays his Indiana Jones style scoundrel like a drunk Pierce Brosnan, slurring and chewing his way through scenes. The wonderful Robert Picardo, long time veteran of many Joe Dante movies, is also wasted, his comic timing and skills as a character actor thrown away as a generic military hardass whose purpose is simply to shout and glower.

Trivia: Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, the director, is the son of prolific B-movie man Fred Olen Ray. He had more success with the no-less-stupid but far more enjoyable Two-Headed Shark Attack

THE REEF (2010)

Director: Andrew Traucki

Stars: Damian Walshe-Howling, Gyton Grantley, Adrienne Pickering

A tourist boat sinks off the Great Barrier Reef, forcing its occupants to swim for safety as a Great White Shark takes an interest in them.

Very much in the style of Open Water, this minimalist Australian effort is also based on a true story and also earns its scares by tapping into the primal fear of swimming above hundreds of feet of dark water where carnivorous things can strike at any time. It lacks Open Water's improvisational feel, but the characters are still very grounded and believable. The no-nonsense pacing gives us little time to get to know them, but they're played well enough that you'll feel a tinge of regret whenever another one gets pulled beneath the waves. Bleak and gruelling, The Reef is a great antidote to the great wash of terrible shark movies that infest the genre.

SHARK NIGHT (2011)

Director: David R. Ellis

Stars: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack

A group of college buddies descend on a Louisiana lake house for a weekend party, but find themselves under attack by various freshwater sharks.

This rare major studio theatrical entry in the shark genre finds director David R. Ellis caught in between the crowd-pleasing requirements of a mainstream PG-13 movie shot in 3D, and the sort of gonzo B-movie mayhem he tried to bring to Snakes on a Plane  The result is a movie with reasonably compelling characters, but precious little dramatic momentum as predictable shark attacks pick them off in scenes that are neither scary nor shocking. What the movie does have going for it is a late plot twist that is almost insane enough to work, but by the time the twist hits the movie is almost over, and can only paddle to the finish line in limp fashion. The special effects are obviously more convincing than the slew of CG-assisted shark movies poured out in recent years, but the film just never comes to life. A disappointment, as between a decent budget and studio resources this had potential to be so much more.

SUPER SHARK (2011)

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Stars: John Schneider, Sarah Lieving, Tim Abell

Yet another giant shark terrorizes the American coast, only this time the shark is super. That means it can walk on land and jump high enough to eat planes.

You'd think the shark barrel had been well and truly scraped through by this point, but Fred Olen Ray – who seemingly churns out one of these things every month – still has increasingly ridiculous ideas of how to keep flogging that dead seahorse. This time, it's a bulletproof shark that can attack across land, sea and air, and ranged against it are some stock military extras, one former Duke of Hazzard and roughly six hundred women in bikinis. There's no point denying that this movie doesn't have its amusements – most of which come during the scene where the Army unveils a walking robot tank which proceeds to kick the shark in the face – but the persistent reminders that the movie is being bad on purpose sour whatever lunk-headed charms it may have.

SWAMP SHARK (2011)

Director: Griff Furst

Stars: Kristy Swanson, D.B. Sweeney, Robert Davi

A prehistoric shark escapes into a bayou while being smuggled across state, and promptly makes its way towards the local Gator Fest.

There's an interesting movie somewhere inside Swamp Shark (not literally) but it never gets to fully come out. The good stuff comes with Kristy Swanson's plucky diner owner, and her eclectic entourage of friends and family, as they try to clear their name after a troublesome customer is munched by the shark secretly swimming in the swamp. There's a fun energy to the way they simply grab their rifles and head out to catch the critter that fits in well with the homely crawdaddy-and-gators Deep South setting, and grizzled Robert Davi gives good villain as the corrupt sheriff. That ramshackle adventure, sadly, is constantly interrupted so the script can lapse back into genre cliché, with the obligatory obnoxious frat boys and trampy college girls lining up to romp in the water so they can be eaten. The shark itself is hardly convincing – especially in what should be the film's best scene, where it leaps from the water and bites a man in half – but the mixture of rubbery model and CGI is above average. Judged by any normal movie criteria, Swamp Shark is nothing special, but compared to the poor state of modern shark attack movies, it's more interesting than most.

SNOW SHARK: AnCIENT SNOW BEAST (2011)

Director: Sam Qualiana

Stars: Sam Qualiana, Michael O'Hear, Jackey Hall

A series of bloody deaths in the mountains of Buffalo turn out to be caused by a prehistoric shark that lives in the snow.

Technically no better than the dozens of “sharks in ridiculous places doing ridiculous things” movies that have clogged up the TV networks, Snow Shark is at least a genuine indie movie, produced and directed by local enthusiasts in upstate New York, just across the water from the snowy landscapes of Toronto. The acting, some of which comes from the director's father, is stiff and hammy, the special effects are wonky as hell, and the plot is predictable nonsense but it ends up being charming rather than irritating – not least because of the sight of a full size shark apparently hiding in five inches of snow. There's always more amusement to be had from watching passionate amateurs trying to make something out of nothing, than watching lazy industry veterans barely even try to break a sweat while delivering only the lowest of expectations. That, if nothing else, makes Snow Shark an easy movie to root for and, if you can track it down, it's not without its cornball charm.

DARK TIDE (2011)

Director: John Stockwell

Stars: Halle Berry, Olivier Martinez, Ralph Brown

Kate Mathieson is a daredevil diver, infamous for swimming with sharks without the benefit of a safety cage. When one of her crew gets eaten, she abandons the water but is tempted back when an eccentric millionaire offers to pay off her debts if she'll get him up close and personal with a shark.

Most shark movies, both good and bad, are wise enough to acknowledge the pulpy nature of the genre they're working in. Dark Tide, on the other hand, thinks its a serious drama that just happens to have killer sharks in it. It's a noble ambition, but one that doesn't really pay off since there's just not enough incident to fill the running time. Halle Berry looks tired and disengaged from the material, but dutifully struts around in her bikini regardless, while her real-life partner Olivier Martinez smirks and smarms as her fictional husband. Ralph Brown, best known for his magnificently stoned turn in British cult comedy Withnail & I, is the best thing on offer, playing the vaguely sinister and enjoyably odd client who wants to make a man of his son by putting him in the ocean with predatory sharks. Director John Stockwell clearly loves the sea – he's directed numerous movies and TV shows about surfers, divers and other beach folk – so the film always looks good, but he fumbles with the beats of the shark genre and the disconnect between the laconic character stuff and the frenetic storm-battered finale is jarring rather than energizing. Jaws worked because it was all about the shark, and had compelling characters following in its wake. Dark Tide tries to invert that formula by focusing on the people and putting the shark in the background, but forgets the crucial “compelling” part. A well-intentioned misfire.

BAIT (2012)

Director: Kimble Rendall

Stars: Phoebe Tonkin, Xavier Samuel, Julian McMahon

Following a tsunami, a group of survivors is trapped in a flooded Australian supermarket with two ravenous Great Whites.

We've had snakes on a plane so why not sharks in a supermarket? That seems to be the enjoyably goofy thinking behind this Australian movie, and the film comes tantalizingly close to being as much fun as it sounds. The sharks are pretty convincing, for one thing, with a couple of dubious CGI shots but a pleasing amount of practical life-sized model work to give it some heft. It's incredibly gory as well, unusual for a movie with high production values and a reputable cast. There are dozens of mangled bodies bobbing around and some seriously grisly kills. Lots of shark movies offer blood in the water, but this is one that serves up raw chunks of meat as well, with bodies torn apart and guts hanging from the shark's teeth. It has all the momentum and visceral punch needed for a thoroughly satisfying horror flick, but the script is never intelligent or witty enough to push it to the next level. The remnants of the movie's 3D theatrical origins sink badly on DVD, with objects lunging out of the screen with all the subtlety of a fairground ghost train. Dialogue is also unforgivably clunky – “You don't have to apologize to me, you only have to apologize to yourself” is actually one of the less awful lines – and some of the performances are too corny even for this silly story. It takes a deft touch to find the fun in such earnest cheese and Bait doesn't quite hit the required tone. Still, it's rare to find a shark movie that really sinks its teeth into the horror these amazing animals can unleash, and that alone makes Bait worth catching.

Trivia: Bait marks a return to shark infested waters for director Kimble Rendall. He's an accomplished second unit director on the Matrix sequels and hits such as I, Robot and performed similar duties on the 1986 movie Shark's Paradise  Bait's solid B-movie core can probably be traced to the early involvement of co-writer and producer Russell Mulcahy, the man who brought us cult favorite Highlander, and the trippy killer boar movie Razorback

TWO-headed SHARK ATTACK (2012)

Director: Christopher Ray

Stars: Charlie O'Connell, Carmen Electra, Brooke Hogan

A group of college students are stranded on a coral atoll when their “semester at sea” boat is sunk by a giant shark with two heads.

Just by the law of averages, sooner or later the wheezing DTV factory known as The Asylum was bound to belch out an honest-to-goodness B-movie that worked. Don't get too excited, but Two-Headed Shark Attack is very nearly that movie. It's every bit as dumb as it sounds, the cast are terrible in a way that defies belief and the special effects are woeful, but somehow it all finally comes together as a film that is, at the very least, fun to watch. You'll be laughing at the film rather than with it, but at least you won't be falling asleep. This is largely due to director Christopher Ray, son of exploitation legend Fred Olen Ray, shamelessly hitting the obvious audience buttons marked “sex” and “gore”. The entire cast is almost entirely made up of young buxom women in very small bikinis, with a few hard body hunks peppered in for flavor. Charlie O'Connell, veteran of Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep mostly just hangs around the background looking confused, while Carmen Electra writhes around erotically while sunbathing and tries to remember her lines. She's better at the first one. The gore, meanwhile, comes from the frequency with which the sprawling cast of young flesh is whittled down in fantastically nasty shark attacks. It's so common for modern shark movies to simply have a bit of thrashing in the water, then a cloud of blood. Here, people (or stiff digital figures that are supposed to be people) are torn to shreds almost constantly. Rather wonderfully, the fact that the shark has two heads is entirely superfluous to the story. We never find out why it has two heads, and this mutation seems to have little bearing on how it behaves. It does manages to surf in for a memorable kill inside a tsunami wave, so maybe the two-head thing helps with that. It all adds up to a film that is thoroughly awful, but in all the right ways.

JURASSIC SHARK (2012)

Director: Brett Kelly

Stars:  Emanuelle Carriere, Christine Emes, Celine Filion

Illegal oil drilling releases a prehistoric megalodon shark into a Canadian lake. A gang of vicious art thieves and a trio of female students are trapped on an island by the beast.

The most amazing thing about Jurassic Shark is that nobody had used the title before. The most depressing thing is that such a great title has been squandered on a truly terrible movie. It's yet another barely competent amateur production, seemingly shot entirely on a handheld camera and edited on a home computer. The acting is awful and the script little more than a sequence of loosely connected events interspersed with laughable attacks from a crude digital shark. There's no sense of scale to the creature and no logic to its behavior. At one point this fifty foot monster kills someone in waist high water without making itself seen. In another bizarre moment, it leaps from the lake, over the heads of the good guys, and then entirely off-screen somehow eats one of the villains without landing, turns around in mid-air and splashes back in the water.  Running at just over an hour in length, and padded out by another ten minutes thanks to some of the most hilariously slow-scrolling end credits in movie history, this is a waste of time and effort.

Trivia: Director Brett Kelly can also claim responsibility for the equally terrible 2008 remake of Attack of the Giant Leeches

SAND SHARKS (2012)

Director: Mark Atkins

Stars: Corin Nemec, Brooke Hogan, Vanessa Lee Evigan

Yet another seaside resort, and yet more killer sharks. This time the twist is that they can swim through the sand as well as the water. Science!

You can almost taste the desperation wafting off movies like this late entry in the cheap shark attack TV movie genre. Having exhausted every conceivable permutation of water-based peril, and with Snow Shark already a thing that exists, the race was on to transplant sharks to increasingly unlikely alternate hunting grounds. Here, they move underground, for no good reason, as a biological mutation that is predictably left vague means sharks are able to breathe and swim through sand. The carnage they leave in their wake is the same as always, though, and Corin Nemec mugging for the camera as a sleazy party organizer who doesn't care if some guests get munched is simply the rotten cherry on a moldy old cake.

JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK (2012)

Director: John Shepphird

Stars: Jack Scalia, Jeremy Luke, Joey Russo

Albino bull sharks are drawn to a New Jersey beach town by the vibrations of construction work on a new condominium complex, and its up to the local “guidos” to save the day.

There's a grim circular inevitability to this movie. 1916 saw a real shark attack in New Jersey, which was at least partially responsible for inspiring Jaws. Jaws in turn inspired dozens of increasingly cheap copycat movies. Jersey Shore is now home to a bewilderingly popular reality TV show in which flesh and blood cartoon characters shriek at each other and fornicate like rutting bags of orange meat. Stir it all together and what do you get? Jersey Shore Shark Attack, a movie that can't decide if its a parody of the TV show, a parody of cheap shark movies, or just a cheap shark movie based on a reality TV show. So we just get a cast of bulging goombahs swaggering around, dividing their time between beer, girls and sharks, while better actors slum it in supporting roles. Jack Scalia keeps his head down as the local sheriff and hopes nobody notices him. William Atherton, the memorably slimy character actor who is embossed on the memories of all 1980s moviegoers as both the pompous EPA guy from Ghostbusters and the unprincipled reporter from Die Hard, plays to type as a shady property tycoon. Paul Sorvino, aka Paulie from Goodfellas, turns up for a few minutes as the mayor and receives top billing for his trouble. Even poor old Joey Fatone from N*SYNC, whose name proves to be grimly prescient as he now resembles John Goodman, collects a paycheck playing himself, raising the question of whether its more undignified to play a crowded free concert in a gaudy New Jersey boardwalk, or be reduced to pretending you can attract a crowd to a free concert at a gaudy New Jersey boardwalk in a terrible movie.

And, of course, there's the Jersey Shore characters. The TV show has The Situation, so this movie has The Complication. Snooki found TV fame, so here's an equally brassy young madam called Nooki. That's as inspired as the humor gets, while a subplot which pits the self-professed guidos against a bunch of preppy snobs feels someone grabbed some script pages from a 1980s frat house comedy by mistake.

The sharks themselves are, of course, terrible. Barely animated and devoid of any texture or tone, they're literally gray computer shark shapes lazily slapped on top of the action.

It's not scary and it's not funny, but Jersey Shore Shark Attack's patchwork genre-mashing nature does at least mean it stands out from the mush of similar shark movies. Just don't take that as a recommendation.

Trivia: Jack Scalia can also be found fighting a giant squid in Kraken and snakes on a submarine in Silent Predators

SHARK WEEK (2012)

Director: Christopher Ray

Stars: Yancy Butler, Patrick Bergin, Joshua Michael Allen

An old man lures the people responsible for his drug dealer son's death to a remote location and kills them. With sharks. In one week.

The Syfy Channel and The Asylum join infernal forces for one more shark movie, this time seizing on the popular title of Discovery Channel's annual shark-themed  extravaganza. The plot, meanwhile, is borrowed from the previous year's Shark Night as well as pretty much every “Ten Little Indians” rip-off ever made. The cast of unlikeable idiots gets whittled down in the usual flurries of badly staged CGI, while Christopher Ray hacks scenes into shape with little regard for visual clarity. As always, you'll get more entertainment from contemplating the turn of events that led slumming stars Patrick Bergin and Yancy Butler to such a dispiriting enterprise than from the actual movie itself.

GYO: TOKYO FISH ATTACK (2012)

Director: Takayuki Hirao

Stars: Mirai Kataoka, Takuma Negishi, Ami Taniguchi

Millions of fish sprout bio-mechanical legs, walk out of the sea and invade Japan. They bring with them a putrefying stink of rotten flesh and virus that makes human bodies bloat, rot and expel foul gas from every orifice.

You certainly can't accuse this Japanese animation of following the herd. A nature attack movie like no other, it runs a scant seventy minutes in length and spends most of those coming up with ever more bizarre images to splatter across the screen. The core of the story, for what it's worth, follows a young woman as she battles across the fish-infested city to be reunited with her boyfriend, but the film takes so many bewildering left turns along the way that this soon becomes little more than a thin narrative thread on which to hang a parade of scuttling mechanical fish, farting belching zombies and an utterly inexplicable bit of exposition delivered, for no apparent reason, in a circus tent. Here we learn that the foul smell spewing from human and fish alike is actually a living sentient gas from a parallel dimension, and by that point in the proceedings it sounds like as sensible an explanation as any.

True to national stereotypes, the film contains more than its fair share of dubious sexual horror and has a bleak apocalyptic tone that goes unresolved by the time the end credits come crashing in, seemingly at random. It's hard to know what to make of Gyo, but it's no lazy Jaws rip-off and for that it earns a cautious – if confused – thumbs up.

Trivia: Tokyo Fish Attack crams two entire volumes of story from Gyo, Junji Ito's original manga comic strip, into its brief running time. Ito is best known in the west for Uzumaki, a three-volume horror story about a town obsessed with spiral patterns.

RAVENOUS REPTILES

“Make it snappy...”

The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

Director: Ray Kellogg

Stars: Don Sullivan, Fred Graham, Lisa Simone

Teenagers in rural Texas have their hot-rodding and sock-hopping interrupted by an oversized man-eating lizard.

A rather limp entry in the wave of atomic age monster movies, The Giant Gila Monster spends most of its time following an incredulous sheriff as he investigates missing persons, and interviews the town's teen population as they politely boogie to rock n' roll. Drenching the soundtrack in spooky theremin noises, even during mundane scenes, doesn't do much for the atmosphere while the monster is brought to life by a Mexican Beaded Lizard that looks like it would much rather be having a snooze in the sun than waddling around, knocking over toy cars.

Trivia: The Giant Gila Monster was produced by the grandly titled Hollywood Pictures Corporation. Despite its glamorous title, this small Texas studio only ever produced two movies, this one and The Killer Shrews

Chorakhe (1978)

Director: Sompote Sands

Stars: Nat Puvanai, Ni Tien, Angela Wells

A giant crocodile terrorizes Thailand, until a small group of doctors and hunters set out to destroy the beast.

This low budget Thai/Korean riff on Jaws is virtually incomprehensible, both in its original version and the US edit which was released in 1980. The work of the fantastically inventive and utterly inept Thai B-movie master Sompote Sands, the plot veers from one storyline to another, punctuated by scenes of riverside villages being torn to shreds by a large puppet. There's a goofy Godzilla-like charm to the model work, and the handful of scenes in which hapless extras are munched by an oversized fake crocodile snout, but between the hysterical melodrama, bizarre wacky comedy interludes, brutal editing and parping disco soundtrack, it's the sort of movie that leaves you more stunned by the fact that it exists than by any of the plot twists.

Trivia: This is, remarkably, one of Sompote Sands' more down-to-earth movies. He was more likely to spend his time and money mashing together Thai legends and Japanese “tokusatsu” superheroes in movies like 6 Ultra Brothers versus Monster Army. Much of Sands work was chopped up and reused in various Hong Kong movies, with scraps of footage making their way west in crude compilation movies like Crocodile Hero. His complete oeuvre  has been poorly cataloged, but we do know that Sands returned to croc horror with Krai Thong

The Great Alligator (1979)

Director: Sergio Martino

Stars:  Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Mel Ferrer

The construction of a jungle resort alarms a primitive local tribe, which believes it will make their alligator god Kroona angry. Sure enough, a giant alligator begins feasting on people.

A tiresome and tedious piece of late 70s Italian schlock, The Great Alligator takes forever to get started and doesn't get much better once its scaly antagonists goes on the rampage. The cast and crew are all veterans of numerous grindhouse cannibal and jungle movies, but at least those grotty flicks livened up their ponderous pacing with moments of startling gore and horror. In The Great Alligator, people simply froth and flail in the water before sinking into the red foam while the 'gator itself is laughable – a stiff puppet that changes to a rigid model bobbing in a fish tank for underwater shots. The fact that former Bond girl and Playboy model Barbara Bach is the best actor on-screen should tell you everything you need to know about the quality of the performances. In keeping with other Italian exploitation films, it's also incredibly racist – with the heroes all white and the black natives portrayed as superstitious simpletons who turn to kidnapping and violence in the final act. More people are killed by their spears and arrows than by the alligator. As a final indignity, the creature is dispatched using the exact same method as Jaws, a comparison this sloppy effort is ill-equipped to survive.

KRAi THONG (1980)

Director: Neramit

Stars: Sorapong Chatri, Sombat Methanee, Chamnong Bamphensab

A Thai wizard transforms himself into a crocodile with diamond teeth in order to devour local villagers and steal a human bride. The mighty warrior Krai Thong must train in crocodile magic to stop him.

A truly bizarre curiosity from the prolific Thai film industry, Krai Thong boasts a mind-boggling plot, wonderfully wonky special effects from Chorakhe director Sompote Sands and baffling swings from slapstick comedy – complete with cartoon sound effects – to gruesome crocodile attacks in which legs are ripped off. The climactic showdown between Krai Thong and the evil Shalaman is a real letdown though. The villain is simply subdued, forced to turn permanently into a crocodile and then promise never to hurt anyone ever again. The crocodile nods – just one of many fantastically surreal images in the movie – and then a villager stabs him in the head. Even with that business concluded, the film wheezes on for another fifteen minutes as Krai Thong liberates one of the wizard's crocodile wives, granting her human form. There's an entire postscript about this croc-lady trying to fit in with Krai Thong's existing two wives (he gets around), before a jovial attempt at gang rape by the villagers forces her back into reptile form and she swims away.

Sequel: Krai Thong 2 followed in 1985 (or thereabouts – exact releases dates for vintage Thai movies are notoriously fluid) and found the hero facing off against yet another man who could turn into a crocodile. Krai Thong was, somewhat remarkably, remade in 2003. This new version has much the same story, and slightly better special effects, but spends more time on the barely dressed female cast members than on the crocodiles. Make your viewing decision accordingly.

Alligator (1980)

Director: Lewis Teague

Stars: Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael V. Gazzo

A pet baby alligator is flushed down the toilet, and grows to enormous size in the Chicago sewers after feeding on corpses from an animal research lab.

Transplanting the framework of Jaws to dry land, and mixing in even more political satire, Alligator is one of the smartest and most entertaining killer animal flicks ever made. Written by famed indie auteur John Sayles, the witty script finds a tough but sensitive cop hot on the trail of the rampaging reptile as it chews its way across the city, but the powers that be want to keep a lid on the story. Standard enough fare, but there's a sly rebellious intent behind the creature's feeding pattern, as it devours its way up the social ladder, inching ever closer to the rich and corrupt politicians at the top.

Helped along by impressive practical monster effects, just enough gory stuff to shock and a cast of memorable supporting characters, Robert Forster provides a wonderful human center to the madness. His gruff, soulful detective adds gravitas to a story that could easily be a cheesy pastiche.

There are many memorable scenes, but the arrival – and rapid exit - of a hubristic big game hunter is one, as is the bravura scene in which the alligator disrupts a garden party held by the pharmaceutical company responsible for its mutated size. Never say that reptiles don't do irony.

Sequels: A schlocky and generic sequel, Alligator II: The Mutation, followed eleven years later in 1991. It abandoned all the wit and satire of Sayles' script in favor of the expected monster movie nonsense.

Dark Age (1987)

Director: Arch Nicholson

Stars: John Jarratt, Nikki Coghill, Max Phipps

A wildlife ranger in the Australian outback is torn between orders to kill a rampaging giant crocodile, and the urging of an Aboriginal elder to protect the beast.

One of the last great “Ozploitation” movies of the 1980s, this croc horror benefits enormously from the no-nonsense Australian setting. There's an earthy tone to the film, which often treats the croc as an inconvenient fact of life – more of a bureaucratic problem than the stuff of high drama. That can't help but make the early going a bit of a slog for viewers expecting something with a little more sizzle and pace, but it pays off with well-rounded – if not always well acted – characters. Things threaten to become more formulaic once the token obstinate official turns up, though in a neat reversal on the Jaws formula this time it's the politician who wants the monster dead, while the hero agonizes over whether he should spare its life and communes with the Aborigines for spiritual guidance. That the movie ultimately comes down on the side of the croc feels a little bizarre – we see it gruesomely munching on a child early on, and it's hard to win back audience sympathy after that sort of display – so the final act switch from toothsome horror to eco-friendly save-the-animals thriller is awkward at best. It does result in the wonderfully strange sight of a car chase with a crocodile strapped to a truck bed though, and that's different enough to make Dark Age stand out slightly from the herd.

Trivia: Thanks to the original production company going bust, Dark Age wasn't actually released in its home country of Australia until 2011. Fans of Australian soap opera Home & Away will surely recognize actor Ray Meagher, who plays the officious Garrett. Following Dark Age, he went on to star as Alf Stewart in the show, clocking up over 2000 episodes. Star John Jarratt, meanwhile, is best known for his terrifying turn as an outback serial killer in Wolf Creek. He returned to the killer croc genre in 2007's Rogue

Killer Crocodile (1989)

Director: Fabrizio De Angelis

Stars: Richard Crenna, Ann Douglas, Ennio Girolami

A group of idealistic eco-warrior teens head to a tropical paradise to investigate claims of illegal toxic waste dumping, but fall foul of a giant crocodile.

An enjoyably terrible Italian effort that feels like it was shot in the 1970s rather than on the cusp of the 1990s, Killer Crocodile bears all the scars of low budget, low talent movie making. There's no discernible story, the acting is awful across the board and the English dubbing is distractingly bad. Balancing that out is a wonderfully fake plastic crocodile, that looks like it would be more at home lunging out of the water at the end of a log flume in a rundown theme park, and lots of bottom dollar gore as rubber arms and legs are thrown around with agreeable frequency. Particularly worthy of note is the climax, in which shoving a small outboard propeller in the croc's mouth not only makes the animal explode but also catch fire. Silly and terrible in all the right ways, this is quality trash.

Sequel: Killer Crocodile ends with an ominous shot of a new croc egg hatching in the swamp. That croc must have grown up fast, as Killer Crocodile 2 was released the following year. In reality, it had been filmed at the same time as the first movie, with the special effects technician pulling double duty as director of the even more cheesy sequel.

KOMODO (1999)

Director: Michael Lantieri

Stars:  Jill Hennessy, Billy Burke, Kevin Zegers

A teenaged boy is left traumatized when his parents disappear from their island home. His therapist returns him to the scene of their disappearance, where they discover that the island is overrun with komodo dragons.

Far better than any CG-era creature feature should be, Komodo is a fine example of how an above average cast, a brisk pace and solid special effects can make the difference between a terrible movie and an enjoyable one. Crossing Jordan's Jill Hennessy and Twilight's Billy Burke don't have the best script to work with, but they're engaging enough to paper over the cracks. The story has more than a few holes and leaps of logic, but it keeps moving, has some good jolts and shocks, and never gets bogged down long enough in exposition for its flaws to become a problem. And, crucially, the komodo themselves are brought to life by well crafted animatronics and some really strong CG work from Tippett Studios, the same FX outfit that worked on Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. These lizards look and move realistically, unlike the weightless cartoons of so many modern monster movies. Komodo is the only directorial offering from Michael Lantieri, a special effects supervisor with credits on hits such as Back to the Future, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Indiana Jones movies. He clearly brings an attention to detail and an understanding of pace and tone that lifts what could have been a rote B-movie into something rather enjoyable.

Lake Placid (1999)

Director: Steve Miner

Stars: Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Brendan Gleeson

A series of grisly deaths in and around a picturesque National Park lake attract the attention of local law enforcement, as well as a neurotic scientist and an egotistical adventurer.

There are a great many horror comedies, but few have their feet so firmly planted in both camps as this cult offering from Friday the 13th Part 2 director Steve Miner and Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley. In terms of the script, it's a fast-paced smart-mouthed comic romp, with Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda doing their best screwball romantic comedy routine while Brendan Gleeson and Oliver Platt, both excellent, offer deadpan sarcasm and snappy jibes from the sidelines. Former Golden Girl Betty White can trace her career's second lease of life to her foul-mouthed cameo here as well.

But for all its flippant banter the film doesn't skimp on the horror, as legendary special effects man Stan Winston conjures up a compelling life-sized animatronic crocodile with a ravenous appetite. There are severed limbs and decapitated heads aplenty, as well as an extremely gruesome opening scene in which a diver is bitten in half. The perfect illustration of the film's two-pronged approach comes as Gleeson's morose sheriff is shown a decomposing toe and asked “Is this your man?” With perfect timing, Gleeson wearily replies “He seemed taller.”

Lake Placid's glib tone sometimes becomes a little too smug, but it's still a rare combination of comedic chops and bloody horror, with superb special effects and an excellent cast.

Sequels: Two follow-ups came along in 2007 and 2010 respectively, but as is so often the case there's little connection between them and the original. Certainly none of the wit made it into these predictable killer croc movies. A fourth entry, the optimistically titled TV movie Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, debuted in 2012.

KROCODYLUS (2000)

Director: James D.R. Hickox

Stars: Dax Miller, Kate Fischer, Duncan Regehr

Two extreme sports stars and a TV producer attempt to make it big with “blood surfing” - chumming the water with fish bits then surfing alongside the hungry sharks that show up to feast. However, the unexpected arrival of a giant saltwater crocodile soon proves that the idea is even dumber than it sounds.

Krocodylus, or Blood Surf as it is also known, can barely keep an idea in its head for more than a few minutes. The actual “blood surfing” concept is abandoned in the first half hour, when the cast is stranded on an island, and then a sub-plot with gnarly pirates suffers the same fate in the second act, fizzling out with no real impact. Meanwhile, the frequency with which Krocodylus kills off its characters means that while there's plenty of action, there's precious little room for any drama to evolve. By the end, even the stars are greeting each violent death with little more than a shrug and the film's glib tone weakens what could have been a grisly little B-movie. The crocodile itself is a mixture of terrible CGI and rather fun animatronics. The puppet croc is wonderfully robotic, looking like it's been borrowed from a theme park, but it at least gives some of the scenes a sense of physicality and low budget charm that its digitally enhanced rivals lack.

Trivia: Director James D.R. Hickox is a member of an illustrious B-movie family. His brother is Anthony Hickox, director of Waxwork and Hellraiser III, while his father, Douglas Hickox, helmed the Vincent Price classic, Theatre of Blood.

Crocodile (2000)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Stars: Mark McLachlan, Caitlin Martin, Chris Solari

A group of college students on Spring Break accidentally disturb the nest of a hundred-year-old crocodile and get stalked and eaten for their trouble.

A slasher movie with scales, Crocodile arrived in 2000 as part of B-movie studio Nu Image's quadruple whammy of creature features, along with Shark Attack Spiders and Octopus  Bland and rather obvious, and cursed with a particularly unlikeable cast, Crocodile has two things in its favor. One, it's directed by Tobe Hooper, whose credits include two genuine horror classics – Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. Clearly, Crocodile isn't remotely in the same league as those movies – and it's rather depressing to see how low Hooper's stock had fallen by the end of the 90s – but he at least knows how to pace a movie of this kind, and how to deliver some effective jolts. The second tick in Crocodile's favor comes from KNB EFX, the special effects team responsible for everything from Evil Dead 2 to From Dusk Til Dawn. As with Hooper, Crocodile doesn't represent their best work – the floating crocodile prop is laughably rigid and lifeless – but they deliver better gore than most direct-to-DVD movies can muster, and that's enough to lift this average effort slightly above the herd. A small victory, but a victory all the same.

CURSE OF THE KOMODO (2004)

Director: Jim Wynorski

Stars: Tim Abell, Melissa Brasselle, William Langlois

A gigantic genetically modified komodo dragon runs amok on an island close to Hawaii. The scientist who created it, along with his family, must try to kill it with the help of some fugitive criminals.

Another barely competent effort from Jim Wynorski, director of Camel Spiders and dozens of other zero budget movies. This one is worse than most, with a cast that can barely act and a story that is held together by the stupidest cliches. The script also decides that komodo drool turns people into zombies, presumably because actors with face paint and fake blood are cheaper than CGI monsters. The digital komodo has a cheesy charm, of sorts, in the sense that it's obviously been designed to evoke the creature from Ray Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The film can't fall back on atomic age whimsy to excuse its creaking construction, however, and when all the action scenes – of which there are roughly four – feature people shooting blindly into the air, while the komodo stands there and roars, there's not even a glimmer of excitement to be found.

KOMODO vs COBRA (2005)

Director: Jim Wynorski

Stars: Michael Paré, Michelle Borth, Ryan McTavish

When a remote tropical research base goes offline, the military discovers that giant komodo lizards and enormous cobra snakes are battling for control of the island.

A typical soulless, minimum effort monster movie with poorly animated weightless creatures moving unconvincingly through the environment while bad actors scream and shout, badly. Jim Wynorski has made enough of these things (including the equally dire Curse of the Komodo,  to know how to hit the required targets with the least amount of effort and expense, and that same production line feeling seeps into every frame here. Almost-famous 1980s action star Michael Paré slurs his way through a reluctant lead turn, but the whole thing is so perfunctory and resigned to mediocrity that it's barely even worth the energy required to put the DVD in the machine. A movie made by people who are barely trying, for an audience that doesn't care.

THE BRUTAL RIVER (2005)

Director: Anat Yuangngern

Stars: Chartchai Ngamsan, Chirapat Wongpaisanlux, Worapod Cha'am

A crocodile stalks riverside villages in 1960s Thailand in this “based on a true story” effort.

To begin with, this low budget Thai movie seems to be aiming for something rather more serious and dramatic than the usual killer croc flick, but it quickly loses its way. The main character appears to be a police officer, but he's off-screen for huge chunks of the movie, and seems to spend more time romancing his girlfriend in soft focus montages than he does investigating the gory deaths occurring on his turf. Even after his girlfriend gets chomped, the film still flits about from character to character, never really gaining any momentum or excitement. The croc itself is one of the worst examples of cheap CGI, a crude digital sprite that seems to hover above the water rather than swim in it. What makes The Brutal River stand out is director Yuangngern's heavy-handed approach, slathering the screen in slow motion and ending every scene with a dramatic freeze frame and fade to black, as if shooting a bombastic soap opera with dozens of commercial breaks. The Brutal River's 1960s Thai setting gives it some curiosity value, but can't mask the fact that this is a terrible and dull movie.

Croc (2007)

Director: Stewart Raffill

Stars: Michael Madsen, Peter Tuinstra, Sherry Phungprasert

The American owner of a small Thai zoo teams up with an animal welfare officer and a grizzled one-legged hunter to tackle a giant killer crocodile.

Rote and predictable from the first frame to the last, Croc is every bit as unimaginative as its title suggests. The authentic Thai location almost gives it a personality worth noticing, but sloppy pacing means that the story is constantly getting distracted by a pointless subplot about nefarious property developers and the romantic aspirations of the male characters. As the only recognizable face in the cast, Michael Madsen takes top billing despite not turning up on-screen until half an hour in, and then not even speaking for another twenty minutes after that. Even then, he grumbles and growls, but is hardly engaged with the (admittedly terrible) material. The rest of the cast is TV movie quality at best, with some supporting characters having all the grace and presence of an elementary school play. Some decent gore perks up the final act, but the croc itself changes size and color from shot to shot, and its final moments are a crushing anticlimax.

Trivia: Director Stewart Raffill is best known for his work in the 1980s, which included the low budget Star Wars rip-off The Ice Pirates, time travel yarn The Philadelphia Experiment, McDonalds-sponsored kid-flick Mac & Me in which a boy in a wheelchair bonds with an alien over their shared love of a particular fast food chain, and the creepy sex-doll sequel Mannequin on the Move.

SUPERCroc (2007)

Director: Scott Harper

Stars: Cynthia Rose Hall, Matthew Blashaw, Kim Little

An enormous crocodile emerges from a lake in a Californian national park and proceeds to lethargically make its way towards Los Angeles.

Weak and thin even by the basement level expectations that productions from cheap movie studio The Asylum usually evoke, Supercroc is barely even a movie. For the first hour, there are literally two locations – a threadbare forest where some of the least convincing soldiers ever put on screen blunder around and fire ineffectively at the empty space where a crude CGI crocodile will later be added, and a dark room which is supposed to resemble a high tech government command center. The turgid events in each location are shot in a clumsy handheld documentary style, mostly to help mask the terrible special effects – the camera shakes and goes out of focus whenever the croc does something other than stand around – but the result is to simply make the movie seem more pathetic and amateurish than it already is. It seems like things may pick up in the final act, as the croc finally reaches LA, but then its rampage seems confined to a single empty parking lot with civilian traffic happily driving past in the background, unaware of the vast digital monster right next to the street. The conclusion of the film finds soldiers coming up with the brilliant idea of luring the croc to a pile of C4 explosives – the sort of thing that apparently didn't occur to them during the long hours they were blasting away with assault rifles with no result. Even then, the film's outrageous cheapness holds it back – the explosion takes place entirely off-screen, so we don't even get to see the croc bite the dust. Supercroc is a film with no characters, no story and a monster that might as well not even exist. Truly terrible.

Black Water (2007)

Directors: David Nerlich, Andrew Traucki

Stars: Diana Glenn, Maeve Dermody, Andy Rodoreda

A pregnant woman, together with her husband and her sister, are stranded in a mangrove swamp with a killer crocodile.

There's minimalist horror and then there's Black Water, a movie with one main location and only five cast members. For the vast majority of the running time, that number is reduced to just three cast members and they're stuck up a tree, unable to move. The most obvious comparison is therefore the melancholy shark tragedy Open Water , and this reptilian riff on the same concept is equally effective. There are no movie moments here, no obvious victims or heroes, just three people scared out of their wits. Everything is kept simple. The water is only waist high, but is so murky that it's impossible to know if the croc is around or not. Indeed, in the first hour of the movie, the croc has all of ten seconds of screen time. Escape is a tantalizing prospect – just realistic enough to work, just risky enough to raise the pulse. There's a boat, but it's just out of reach. To get it, someone has to venture into the water. Even the croc itself isn't the usual oversized movie monster but a normal crocodile, yet still more than capable of killing a hapless human. When the deaths come, they're genuinely horrible – not because they're particularly gory, but because they matter. The other characters don't spout vengeful cliches but sob and scream and go into shock. One particularly memorable scene, set in almost pitch darkness, finds the survivors forced to listen to the crocodile eating one of their number. It's grueling stuff and even at the end Black Water stays true to its ruthless and unsentimental approach. If you're looking for a Hollywood ending, this isn't the movie for you.

Trivia: Co-director Andrew Traucki also helmed the similarly streamlined shark thriller The Reef

Primeval (2007)

Director: Michael Katleman

Stars: Dominic Purcell, Orlando Jones, Brooke Langton

An American news team in Africa is caught between a killer crocodile and a vengeful warlord.

A spectacularly misguided attempt to combine the base thrills of a rampaging crocodile movie with political commentary on the tribal violence blighting modern Africa, Primeval, somewhat inevitably, botches both sides of the equation. The crocodile scenes are moderately effective, but too few and far between to build any sustained tension, while the clumsy use of real-life atrocity during the Tutsi-Hutu civil war as a backdrop to a corny critter movie is tasteless in the extreme. Nobody seems entirely sure whether they're making a gritty political thriller or a cheesy B-movie horror, glib humor grinds against poker-faced emoting and the result is predictably unsatisfying.

Rogue (2007)

Director: Greg Mclean

Stars: Radha Mitchell, Michael Vartan, Sam Worthington

An American travel writer takes a trip on an Australian tourist boat, and ends up stranded in the territory of a rogue saltwater crocodile.

Australian director Greg Mclean followed Wolf Creek, his grueling slasher movie calling card, with this equally intense horror, the second of two killer croc movies to come out of Australia in 2007. Following the tried and trusted setup of confining his small cast to one remote location, and letting the threat come to them even as their safe haven is swallowed up by the tide, Mclean maintains the siege mentality through brutal croc attacks and some added friction from a pre-Avatar Sam Worthington, playing an obnoxious outback sleazeball who delights in tormenting Radha Mitchell's reluctant tour guide. The plot tends to rely on people doing stupid things under pressure, however, and the ending comes as no surprise given that our American hero is seemingly destined to be the one to finish off the scaly menace. It's an efficient little shocker though, and while it doesn't offer anything the genre hasn't seen many times before, it's delivered with enough grit, gore and style to make it a worthy entry.

MILLION DOLLAR CROCODILE (2012)

Director: Lin Li Sheng

Stars: Barbie Hsu, Guo Tao, Lam Suet

A gigantic crocodile, destined to be eaten in a restaurant, breaks free and escapes into the Chinese countryside. On its way it eats a bag containing 100,000 Euros, worth one million yuan, leading to a frantic chase to recapture the beast before it digests the fortune.

Billed as China's first monster movie this creature-on-the-loose flick is, as you might expect, a curious combination of genre elements. Comedy outweighs horror quite conclusively, with almost all the main characters being inept buffoons to some degree, while slapstick misadventures drive the plot far more than reptilian terror. Guo Tao is the pick of the cast, playing a hapless police officer who just can't get any respect. His downtrodden demeanor fits nicely with a subplot about his relationship with his young son, and his hangdog expression sells the gags better than his more flamboyant co-stars. It's quite funny, if broad farce is your thing, but the plot is disjointed and leaves more than one thread dangling as it crashes and stomps towards the end credits with all the grace of its surprisingly convincing CGI beast. Those hoping for croc horror should look elsewhere, however. The film is virtually bloodless, and despite lots of talk about preventing people from being harmed, the rampaging reptile only kills one person. An international curiosity, but it pales alongside the thematically similar Korean monster movie, The Host.

FURRED FURY

“Lions and tigers and bears,
oh my...”

Bwana Devil (1952)

Director: Arch Oboler

Stars: Robert Stack, Nigel Bruce, Barbara Britton

Africa, 1898, and a British-funded railroad construction project is held up by attacks from two man-eating lions.

The first American 3D feature film in color, Bwana Devil advertised itself with the enthusiastic tagline “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!” and, unusually for its era, spends far more time on the former than the latter. Indeed, by 1950s standards this is a bona fide rollercoaster of a movie, only pausing for one brief love scene between Robert Stack's reluctant railroad foreman and his wife, shipped in from England, and instead spending most of its running time having nameless African extras scream into the camera before being gently mauled by the lions.

That's not to say the film is particularly exciting. While scenes of actual lions pawing the camera in murky 3D no doubt thrilled audiences sixty years ago, the story drifts and the direction is lifeless. At all times, it feels like the film is relying on the exotic nature of the footage, shot on location in the Congo, to compensate for the half-hearted treatment dished out to the story. Adding a frisson of real life horror to its stiff drama, it's based on the real case of the Tsavo maneaters, which really did feast on railroad workers in the late 19th century.

At least the two male leads are worth watching. Bwana Devil caught Robert Stack at the start of his career, shortly before he found fame as Eliot Ness on TV's The Untouchables, and Nigel Bruce at the end of his, with his bumbling turn as Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes long in the past.

Trivia: The Tsavo maneaters were also the inspiration for the 1996 movie, The Ghost and the Darkness

Grizzly (1976)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: Christopher George, Richard Jaeckel, Richard Prine

Park rangers battle against a monstrous fifteen-foot man-eating grizzly bear as it terrorizes a state park.

“Jaws with claws” was the pretty obvious hook for this killer bear movie, which transplanted not only the concept but large chunks of Spielberg's story from the ocean to the forest. We get the ominous point-of-view shots as the beast stalks its prey. We get the obligatory corrupt authority figure, more concerned with protecting his tourist income than in saving lives. We even get more specific “tributes” such as an attack on a child, a tough guy character who meets a sticky end and a finale in which the threat is blown sky high, in direct defiance of common sense.

While Girdler lacked Spielberg's mastery of the frame, his workmanlike approach at least means Grizzly motors along nicely, and he also benefits from having an actual live bear – trained but untamed – on set with his actors, supplying a genuine sense of power and threat throughout the movie. He also ramps up the gore, with some surprisingly graphic scenes of dismemberment – including a child having his leg ripped off.

Grizzly is utterly derivative, but it stays so close to the Jaws formula, embellished with enough minor tweaks and gaudy flourishes, that it can't help but be one of the better imitations.

Sequels: Grizzly II was shot in Hungary in 1983. It featured another grizzly, this time attacking a rock concert in another national park, and used archive footage from the original to link the two stories. Among the cast were a very young Laura Dern, George Clooney and Charlie Sheen. However, the film ran out of money and was never completed or officially released. An early workprint cut of the film finally turned up on the bootleg circuit in 2007.

Rogue Lion (1977)

Director: Sven Parson

Stars: Bruce Miller, Brian O'Shaughnessy, Tessa Riegler

Two rangers disagree over the best way to care for the wildlife in an African nature reserve.

A perfect illustration of how the impact of Jaws led studios to hastily re-market their films as fearsome natural horror movies, even against all obvious evidence, Rogue Lion is less about an actual rogue lion and more a fairly laidback drama about a stuck in his ways ranger clashing with his more progressive new partner. Being a throwback to the old safari melodramas, there are a few moments of animal peril though these come mostly from short-tempered crocodiles and disgruntled hippos rather than the majestic snarling beast portrayed on the VHS cover. Rogue Lion is not only dull, it's downright misleading.

Maneaters Are Loose! (1978)

Director: Timothy Galfas

Stars: Tom Skerritt, Steve Forrest, G.D. Spradlin

A disgruntled animal trainer releases two Bengal tigers near a small Californian town.

Despite the accurate yet hyperbolic title, the man-eating tigers of this TV movie are not the most energetic of beasts. For the most part they restrict their actions to walking sleepily around in stock footage, clearly nowhere near any actors, with only close-ups of their jaws and over-dubbed growls to let us know when they're about to spring into off-screen action. For the most part, the film plays out as a blandly efficient soap opera, with the inhabitants of the town mired in various brewing scandals – the officials are corrupt, and a nice old man is running a pornography ring – that are brought to light by the sudden rise in tiger-related missing persons cases. Tom Skerritt brings his laconic charm to the role of the detective on the case, butting heads with his captain because he's a goddam long-haired loose cannon, but there's no real urgency to anything that happens, even with fine character actors like G.D. Spradlin, Dabney Coleman and M*A*S*H star Harry Morgan on hand. Thankfully, the movie picks up the pace in the final minutes for a genuinely thrilling showdown between a big game hunter and the tigers, who finally get to share the screen with human beings, thus creating a much-needed sense of peril.

Trivia: Tom Skerrit graduated from tigers to lions three years later, in the theatrical movie Savage Harvest

Prophecy (1979)

Director: John Frankenheimer

Stars: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante

An idealistic doctor and his musician wife head into the forests of Maine to investigate fatal mercury poisoning among Native American children, but find that a mutated bear is a more pressing problem.

Prophecy is a fascinating film, if only for the vast chasm between its high-minded issues-based story and the sheer silliness of the rubbery, glowing monster bear that drives it forwards. Like so many late 70s animal horror movies, there's a strong ecological message being hammered home here, as the local paper mill is responsible for the strife after pumping gallons of mercury into the river. There are also many scenes of Native Americans being stoic, tragic and mysteriously in tune with nature. Both lead characters are impossibly good hearted, the very definition of saintly white liberals from the city, here to save the poor ethnic folk.

But then it's also a movie about a giant rubbery bear mauling its way through the countryside, and the film reaches its infamous peak as the beast attacks a family camping trip. The teenaged daughter hops around in her sleeping bag but is swiped – and exploded – in a burst of blood and stuffing. Prophecy isn't a particularly good movie, but it's an incredibly funny one.

Savage Harvest (1981)

Director: Robert L. Collins

Stars: Tom Skerritt, Michelle Phillips and Shawn Stevens

An American family living in Africa is trapped in their home by a ravenous pride of lions.

To begin with, Savage Harvest has all the makings of a bland TV movie that somehow found its way to a theatrical release. Although shot on location in Africa, the exterior shots look like a cheap backlot set and the plot trickles along. Stick through this stodgy opening, however, and things pick up dramatically from the second act onwards. It starts with a sudden attack on the family's housekeeper, and it's seriously nasty. Using real lions throughout and some brave stunt work, we see the woman knocked down, dragged around and then eaten alive. It's not especially bloody but the ferocity of the attack, amplified by the editing, makes it one the most brutal scenes in the genre. Clever use of meat-filled dummies means that we even see the lions feasting, pawing over the carcass as they tear off strips of flesh. It's grisly stuff, and from that moment on the film hits a terrifying note and never lets it drop. It's a short film, running less than 90 minutes, and the pace means that there's no time for the siege to lose momentum. Every few minutes, the lions attack the house from another angle – even coming down the chimney at one point – and the family's safety zone shrinks with every assault. It's not perfect, though. The lions clearly read the Hollywood handbook since they go for the black people first, while the daughter of the family gets dragged away yet suffers only two small scratches on her arm. These minor wobbles aside, the climax finds the survivors slowly inching to their car inside a makeshift tank made from bannisters and chicken wire as real, scary lions try their hardest to get inside. It's bizarre and nerve-wracking, and as far from the film's turgid opening as it's possible to get.

Trivia: Stoic hero Tom Skerrit already had experience with big cats, having starred in the rather less interesting TV movie, Maneaters Are Loose! only a few years earlier.

Roar (1981)

Director:  Noel Marshall

Stars: Tippi Hedren, Noel Marshall, Melanie Griffith

An American family run a sanctuary for big cats in Africa, but find themselves threatened when poachers attack, making the animals lash out at humans.

A box office disaster a decade in the making, the story behind Roar is ultimately more interesting than anything that happens on-screen. Essentially a $17m home movie, it was the brainchild of Tippi Hedren, star of Hitchcock's The Birds and a devoted animal rights activist. Her then-husband, Noel Marshall, produced, wrote, acted and directed, while their daughter, Melanie Griffith, also co-starred. The basic concept of a wildlife sanctuary under threat from its inhabitants is solid enough, but the personal nature of the project makes it a muddled and meandering chore to sit through.

The film is often at odds with itself, introducing the lions by name in the opening credits and explaining that they were allowed to “improvise” on set. This sentimental streak clashes unavoidably with the fact that so much of the movie's later action requires us to be terrified of the creatures. And with good reason – the film's painful eleven-year journey to the screen was marred by numerous injuries sustained by both cast and crew, including the young Griffith who required surgery after being mauled. This does, at least, lend the movie a certain morbid curiosity and it's clear in the many scenes of lion rough-housing that the actors are genuinely unsure if they're about to be eaten or not.

That wasn't the end of the film's problems, however. Floods and fires damaged the sets, financial problems almost led to foreclosure and a virus even killed off some of the lions. It's a testament to Hedren's tenacity, if not her common sense, that the film was completed at all.
Sadly, and rather inevitably, the film bombed. Having spent around seventeen million dollars and eleven years to make the thing, it lasted only one week in theaters and earned just two million dollars worldwide. It's not hard to see why. As an adventure thriller, Roar's improvisational nature bleeds it of tension, and its intended purpose as a tribute to the majesty of the big cats falls apart because the audience is by turns bored to tears by repetitive scenes of lions running up and down stairs, and left wondering if they're watching an elaborate snuff movie in which a famous film star feeds her real life family to wild animals. Born Free crossed with Jaws was not the recipe for success that Hedren clearly hoped for.

Trivia: Roar's failure as a movie didn't stop Hedren setting up the Roar Foundation to continue her work with wild animals. Today she still runs the Shambala Preserve in California, taking in unwanted and mistreated big cats from across America.

MIEDO A LA MUERTE (1981)

Director: Mario Alcantara

Stars: Ruben Gonzalez, Carlos Agosti, Socorro Albarran

A Mexican karate master travels to Los Angeles on the trail of his missing daughter, unaware she's been killed by a bear and her body has been stolen by a necrophiliac. Along the way he must contend with corrupt officials, biker gangs, gangsters and zombies.

It's almost redundant to include this utterly bizarre micro-budget Mexican oddity, given that the killer bear is just one of about seven outlandish plot elements swimming around in a soup of incoherent nonsense, but the film is so hypnotically strange it'd be a crime not to give it a moment in the spotlight. The bear, for what it's worth, is clearly a man in a costume, filmed murkily in the dark. Most disappointing is the fact that when Ruben goes toe to toe with the beast, he defeats it with a chainsaw, not his karate. Seemingly shot on a video camera, performed by amateurs and edited at random, this is a very bad movie, but it's bad in such a spectacular way that it's almost impossible to look away.

Trivia: Gonzalez began his karate training in the 1960s with none other than Chuck Norris.

Razorback (1984)

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Stars: Gregory Harrison, Arkie Whiteley, Bill Kerr

An American heads into the Australian outback to investigate the disappearance of his wife, an animal rights documentary maker. He soon discovers that she fell prey to a rogue razorback, a gigantic flesh-eating boar. He teams up with a grizzled hunter, whose family was torn apart by the creature, to bring it down.

This lurid and often surreal creature feature makes full use of its Australian setting to deliver something that borrows most of its plot beats from the killer animal movies pouring out of Hollywood, but with a unique flavor all of its own. The script is full of fantastically pulpy lines such as “He's bacon, girl!” and director Mulcahy slathers the screen in bold strokes of comic book color, inserting pop video back lighting and waves of dry ice mist whenever he can. By turns hallucinatory and grungily down to earth, Mulcahy's vision of rural Australia is a nightmarish place where sociopathic punks grind kangaroos into pet food in isolated tin shacks, while giant pigs rampage at night, charging through buildings for no apparent reason. It's not a particularly subtle film, but its oddball tendencies enable it to catch the viewer off-guard more than once, and the fate of the razorback is deliciously gruesome.

Trivia: Russell Mulcahy went on to direct music videos for Duran Duran and Queen, and followed Razorback with the cult favorite, Highlander.

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Stars: Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas, John Kani

Africa, 1898, and engineer John Patterson is overseeing construction of a crucial bridge across the Tsavo river. The project is brought to its knees by the arrival of two rogue man-eating lions which kill dozens of workers over several months. With the locals convinced the lions, dubbed the Ghost and the Darkness, are evil spirits sent to punish them, Patterson, along with a legendary hired hunter, struggles to stop the rampage.

Just as Bwana Devil cast the true story of the Tsavo maneaters in the dominant Hollywood style of its day, so to does The Ghost and the Darkness, a slick and sometime silly blockbuster in the mid-1990s mode. That's not necessarily a criticism, however, as the film thunders along with impressive energy, never losing sight of the fact that the audience has come for killer lions, yet making room for some great character work (Kilmer's wobbly Irish accent aside) and a few sly digs at British colonialism along the way. The lions themselves are impressive, almost entirely played by the real thing, augmented by some superb animatronics from special effects legend Stan Winston, and the scenes where the lions attack have a bone-crunching intensity even if the gory stuff is largely restricted to the aftermath. The script, written by another Hollywood legend, William Goldman (All The President's Men, Marathon Man) veers into action movie silliness towards the end, while director Stephen Hopkins, veteran of such popcorn fare as Predator 2 and the Tommy Lee Jones terrorist potboiler Blown Away, aims for stately drama but can't always rein in his broader tendencies. It's fun and satisfying though, a rare studio animal attack movie that walks between horror and thriller with confidence, and never feels ashamed of its concept.

Trivia: For all the claims to authenticity thrown around in the opening scenes, The Ghost and the Darkness is very much a modern Hollywood twist on the story first written down by Patterson himself at the turn of the 19th century. Remington, the gnarly white hunter played with peppery vigor by Michael Douglas, was a complete fabrication, invented to give the story a buddy movie hook.

The Edge (1997)

Director: Lee Tamahori

Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Elle MacPherson

An eccentric billionaire crashes in the Alaskan wilderness with the man he suspects of having an affair with his wife, but before they can resolve their rivalry they must deal with the attention of a man-eating bear.

With its A-list cast and a script from acclaimed dramatist David Mamet, The Edge is clearly a cut above the usual killer animal movie. Indeed, the bear itself is ultimately as much a symbolic hurdle for its dueling alpha males to overcome as it is a literally ravenous mammal looking to devour their faces. That's not to say the movie doesn't deliver on the horrors of nature, with the bear attacks unleashed with ruthless savagery and the final showdown between the men and their nemesis a truly heart-pounding affair. It's appropriate, however, that the bear situation is gruesomely resolved before the final act, leaving the film free to wrap up the dramatic loose ends between its posturing leads. Both Hopkins and Baldwin do superb work here, as Hopkins turns in a typically controlled performance as a socially awkward man of brilliant intellect, who relishes the chance to put his reams of specialist trivia to the test in the wild. Baldwin starts out as a typically slimy yuppie type, but peels back the layers convincingly, revealing a more interesting character beneath. The Edge isn't quite on a par with genre classics like Jaws and The Birds, but it's still a full-blooded and satisfying thriller in its own right.

CEMETERY GATES (2006)

Director: Roy Knyrim

Stars: Reggie Bannister, Peter Stickles, Aime Wolf

A mutant Tasmanian devil is released from a laboratory and goes on a bloody rampage in a nearby cemetery, where local teens are shooting a horror movie.

One sure fire way to overcome the limitations of a low budget and an inexperienced cast and crew is to go all out on the gore, and that's certainly the approach taken by this admirably shameless entry. The film quickly establishes its monster credentials with the messy demise of two idiotic animal rights activists who free the bloodthirsty Tasmanian devil, and then sets up the characters who will be next on the menu. Horny teens, pot smoking hippies, leering hillbillies and hapless hikers are all duly introduced and dispatched in flurries of blood and guts.

Cemetery Gates earns additional kudos for not only choosing an unusual animal protagonist, but for being reasonably accurate in its depiction, even when it has mutated into a eight-foot-tall monstrosity. The creature both looks and acts like a real Tasmanian devil, rather than the more famous – and utterly unrelated – farting and spluttering cartoon version popularized by Looney Tunes.

Bonus points, too, for keeping everything strictly old school – there's no CGI here, just a surprisingly decent monster suit and lashings of fake limbs and intestines thrown at the screen. Cemetery Gates certainly won't trouble anyone looking for character depth or narrative surprises, but it's an incredibly likeable and enthusiastically satisfying gore film and does a fine job of hitting its admittedly easy targets.

Trivia: In keeping with the film's practical special effects, the two drugged-up hippies who end up as mincemeat are played by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB FX, whose 250+ credits include supplying blood and make-up for movies as diverse as Evil Dead II and Casino Royale.

Grizzly Rage (2007)

Director: David DeCoteau

Stars: Tyler Hoechlin, Kate Todd, Graham Kosakoski

A quartet of college students set out on a road trip to celebrate their graduation, but venture off the map into a restricted area. They hit and kill a bear cub with their car, and are hunted down by the mother for their sins.

For a movie with such a ferocious title, Grizzly Rage is a real snooze to actually watch. Many other animal attack movies have spun gold out of small casts and limited locations, but those generally had good actors and an intriguing premise. Grizzly Rage, in comparison, is a great big hairball of nothing. The four characters are paper thin and obnoxious to boot, the dudes defined by their bandannas, backwards baseball caps and fistbumps, the token female in the group little more than a whining shrew. With no real story to tell and no characters with which to tell it, the film simply spins its wheels for long stretches, sending characters off on pointless errands that go nowhere and establish nothing. There are hints that the area they're in is top secret and filled with barrels of toxic waste, but that comes to nothing. One character spends a good five minutes exploring a creepy Texas Chainsaw-style cabin, with no payoff and no explanation. As for the bear, it's rarely seen in the same shot with the human cast, and when it is it's played by a tatty bear costume. With only four characters you're clearly not going to get a rollercoaster of kills, but the sporadic bursts of action are still incredibly weak. Some CGI blood spatters the screen, looking like it's been drawn on with crayon, and that's it. Not that outrageous gore is a requirement of a good movie, but when you've got nothing else to offer it's pretty much the only thing that could save this turgid mess of a movie. For those who do bother to stick around for the ending, prepare to feel cheated.

Trivia: Director David DeCoteau is best known these days for his gay-friendly horror movies, which swap the traditional tight-topped scream queens for hardbody male actors in their boxers. Leeches and Giant Killer Bees are both good examples of his output. But his work stretches back to the 1980s and incorporates cult classics such as Creepozoids, Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama and numerous entries in the Puppet Master series. Those are genuinely enjoyable B-movies, but now he churns out a new movie almost every month, under his 1313 banner, with a predictable drop in both quality and energy.

Maneater (2007)

Director: Gary Yates

Stars: Gary Busey, Ian D. Clark, Ty Wood

An escaped tiger terrorizes small town America, but a local politician wants to keep a lid on the situation so as not to drive away tourists.

With a plot that comes straight out of the Animal Attack Movie 101 textbook, Maneater was the very first entry in the Syfy Channel's low budget TV-driven revival of the genre. This may explain why, compared to the increasingly outlandish movies churned out by the channel since, this one is relatively sensible. The tiger is just a tiger, not a gigantic mutant squid-snake-tiger hybrid, and it just feasts on humans, not airplanes. What the movie does have is Gary Busey, but anyone anticipating the sight of the famously unhinged actor butting heads with a wild animal should prepare for disappointment. This isn't the barking scenery-chewing Busey of Point Break and Predator 2, but a mumbling, sleepy-eyed Busey who acts like he's the one being shot with tranquilizer darts, rather than the tiger.

The movie isn't a complete wash out though. The director wisely keeps the tiger off-screen in the early going, making good use of gooey latex body parts to show the grisly aftermath of its attacks rather than wasting his limited tiger footage and special effects budget at the start, but escalates to an actual live tiger mauling people on camera by the end. There are also some good performances, especially from Ian D. Clark as a British hunter who brings more soul and depth to his role than a killer tiger TV movie really demands. Even so, the final shot, in which Busey tries to contort his rictus grin into something warm and paternal, is the scariest thing in the movie by far.

Prey (2007)

Director: Darrell Roodt

Stars: Bridget Moynahan, Peter Weller, Carly Schroeder

A recently remarried American engineer heads to Africa to oversee construction of a dam. While there, his children and their new stepmother are stranded in a game reserve and hunted by a pride of lions.

If you can judge a movie by its influences then Prey gets a head start on its peers by default. With much of its running time spent trapped in a car, it invites mostly favorable comparisons to Cujo while the brother and sister dynamic brings the T-Rex attack from Jurassic Park to mind more than once. A few cheesy uses of slow motion and corny lion point-of-view shots aside, Prey is agreeably down to earth, spinning its tension from the simple terrifying reality of its situation rather than manufactured peril. That it uses real lions wherever possible adds to the sense of danger – you're made very aware just how powerful and relentless these animals can be – and the grounded tone makes the sudden and gory attack scenes all the more shocking.

The small cast also keeps things lively, even when there's not much happening. Carly Schroeder, veteran of Disney's Lizzie McGuire TV show, impresses as the bratty teen clashing with her hapless stepmom, while the always reliable Peter Weller adds some gravitas to the sidelines as the man searching for his family by any means necessary.

Unfortunately, as with so many other high concept films set in restrictive locations, Prey fizzles out rather than building to a memorable climax and its sentimental streak rather undermines the potential for brutality implicit in its story. Still, it's strides ahead of most of its peers and is well worth seeking out.

Trivia: Prey came during an unusual period of horror movies for South African director Darrell Roodt. It's certainly better than the likes of Cryptid and Dracula 3000, both of which Roodt directed around the same time, but they're all very different from the serious dramas he's better known for. Cry, the Beloved Country, starring Richard Harris and James Earl Jones, was one of his, as was the Whoopi Goldberg starring Sarafina! As for Peter Weller, anyone wanting an animal-themed horror where he takes a more central role would do well to check out the excellent Of Unknown Origin.

Grizzly Park (2008)

Director: Tom Skull

Stars: Glenn Morshower, Randy Wayne, Zulay Henao

A group of young offenders is sent to a national park to do community service, but an escaped serial killer follows them unaware the park is also home to a man-eating bear.

There's a ton of potential in the idea behind Grizzly Park, but shockingly inept execution means that it achieves only a tiny fraction of what it could have been. The characters are tissue thin caricatures, but the script still drags its heels with endless scenes establishing and reestablishing who they are. When they finally reach the park, the pacing gets even more sloppy. The serial killer subplot comes to nothing long before the third act, while other scenes crash into one another seemingly at random. The “killed off at camp” template has been set in stone by dozens of slasher movies, but either through a misplaced attempt to buck the cliches or just lack of ability, writer/director Tom Skull somehow manages to lose his grasp on even this simple thread. Amateurish and inconsistent performances from the young cast certainly don't help. Things pick up in the final moments with the long overdue arrival of some over-the-top gore, and had the film reached that pinnacle earlier it could have had some cheesy merit. It's too little too late for this limp movie though, and the attempt to squeeze a last minute twist in at the end will leave viewers either confused or laughing hysterically at the sheer illogical idiocy of it all.

DIRE WOLF (2009)

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Stars: Maxwell Caulfield, Jim Griffin, Kristen Howe

Scientists reanimate a prehistoric wolf, using human stem cells, in the hope of creating the perfect battlefield companion. Surprisingly, the test subject escapes and starts eating people.

Fred Olen Ray is a difficult director to pin down. A prolific creator of B-movies dating back to the late 1970s, his early efforts crackle with grindhouse energy while his recent output has favored quantity over quality with a spate of barely-trying CGI assisted creature features in amongst soft porn schlock. Dire Wolf finds him back doing what he does best, or at least as close to “best” as the director of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers can get. The story is pure cheese and the acting is rigid, but the wolf itself is portrayed by an actor in a fabulously unconvincing furry suit rather than cheap CGI and the kills are ridiculously bloody. It has the makings of an endearingly amusing monster flick, but the pacing is all wrong. As wet and messy as the kills are, there's no suspense to them and they all play the same way: the wolf pounces on someone, they fall to the floor and thrash about while blood and guts fly everywhere. The camera, of course, goes out of its way to make sure the tatty wolf costume is never visible for too long. With too many characters for such a slender yarn and an ending that simply wheezes to a halt, Dire Wolf gets your hopes up only to dash them.

Bear (2010)

Director: John Rebel

Stars: Brendan Coughlin, Patrick Lewis, Katie Lowes

Two squabbling brothers and their girlfriends are lost in the woods when their car breaks down. Then they're attacked by raccoons. Sorry, bears. They're attacked by bears

Impossibly cheap, horribly inept and mind-numbingly dull, Bear takes the simplest of premises and screws it up in every way possible. The characters are all hideous selfish idiots, while their predicament is just plain stupid. The film spends far too much time inside the car with these irritating jerks, and the inane dialogue does nothing to make us care for their plight. Making the movie even harder to take seriously, rather than an imposing male grizzly, the animal of the title is clearly a small and rather cute brown bear. Standing upright, it's no higher than the car it's supposedly terrorizing and seems more interested in cuddling the occupants than killing them. Even worse, the film is full of amateurish mistakes and illogical moments, such as the bear having a flashback to a previous scene. Despite taking place at night, many scenes were clearly shot in bright daylight and at one point you can even see a crew member, sporting a tatty bear paw glove, standing in the background waiting for his cue to attack. If you go down in the woods with this movie, you're sure to be disappointed.

Trivia: Director John Rebel also made Wolf Town , in which a different group of young people is stranded in the wild and attacked by raccoons. Sorry, wolves. They're attacked by wolves.

Burning Bright (2010)

Director: Carlos Brooks

Stars: Briana Evigan, Charlie Tahan, Garret Dillahunt

A teenage girl is trapped in her house during a hurricane with her autistic younger brother and a ravenous tiger.

From the plot synopsis, you'd expect Burning Bright to be an absolutely ridiculous B-movie so the fact that it's actually a tense and character-driven thriller is a testament to director Carlos Brooks, as he takes the time to establish character goals that go deeper than basic survival. Kelly, the girl in question, desperately wants to go to college, while her brother needs round-the-clock care. Her attempts to find him a place in a care home are undone by her greedy stepfather, who spends all their money on his dream of opening a wildlife park, stocked with black market animals. Including, of course, a dangerous ex-circus tiger that's been kept hungry in order to break its will.

By the time the hurricane hits and the kids are trapped, there's enough at stake that it's easy to forget or forgive the occasional contrivance, and Brooks makes the most of his domestic location, turning laundry chutes and feeble door locks into nerve-wracking setpieces. It all falls apart a little at the end, with a needless plot twist and a spot of painfully on-the-nose ironic punishment for the human villain of the piece, but on the whole this is a distinctive and smart addition to the genre.

WOLF TOWN (2010)

Director: John Rebel

Stars: Levi Fiehler, Alicia Ziegler, Josh Kelly

Shy, lovestruck college student Kyle comes up with an excuse for an unauthorized field trip to a gold rush ghost town, in the hopes of winning the attention of Jess, the girl of his dreams. His plan falls apart when Jess brings her boyfriend, but matters get much worse when the group is trapped in the decaying town by a pack of man-eating wolves.

John Rebel's previous movie, Bear , was pretty dire. Wolf Town is an improvement, but only in the sense that it's below average rather than flat-out terrible. The location is more interesting, for example, even if Rebel never comes up with anything interesting to do there. Almost the entire film is spent with three characters hiding in one building, arguing about going outside, going outside, getting chased by wolves, hiding in a different building, arguing about going outside and on and on and on. The characters are stronger than those in Bear, but there's very little depth or development – a fatal flaw for a film with such a small cast. Kyle, in particular, is hugely annoying. A whining, mewling milquetoast wimp, it's inexplicable why he's the hero, and his sudden transformation into an action star in the final minutes is laughably hard to believe.

And then there are the wolves themselves. There's no cheap CGI here, which is a bonus, but the film crunches up against the limitations of what can be done with live animals. There's no more wolves than there are people, so force of numbers is never an issue, and the trained animals are clearly far too docile to scare. Desperate cutaway close-ups of the animals snarling lose their power when the film returns to the wide shot and the beasts are looking more like they want to play fetch. Inevitably, the attack scenes are mostly created in the edit, with blurred lumps of incoherent motion supposed to sell us on the terror of being mauled by wild animals. There are a few gruesome shots of the aftermath, but nothing memorable. Wolf Town certainly shows more ambition than Bear, but only a little more skill behind the camera, and as such is too easily overwhelmed by dozens of better movies.

The Grey (2012)

Director: Joe Carnahan

Stars: Liam Neeson, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo

A plane carrying oil company roughnecks home crashes in the wilds of Alasaka, stranding a handful of survivors in territory belonging to a vicious wolf pack.

Joe Carnahan, best known for kinetic action movies like Smokin' Aces and The A-Team, reins it in for this taut and melancholy survival thriller. Liam Neeson anchors a cast of largely interchangeable men, as his suicidal shooter, employed by an oil company to keep wolves away from their facility, undergoes a spiritual epiphany amongst the ice and fangs. The freezing temperature puts paid to as many of the survivors as the wolves do, but it's the wild beasts who supply the allegorical backbone of the story, setting the fight or die standard by which the men's character is judged. This is a world where death creeps up on you and strikes out of nowhere, and Carnahan wrings every drop of tension out of the wilderness setting with ferocious attacks that are genuinely terrifying. Smart and savage, with a powerful finale, The Grey shows that there's still room for the animal attack horror movie to work in a modern blockbuster framework.

VICIOUS VERMIN

“In horror movie,
rat exterminates you.”

The Killer Shrews (1959)

Director: Ray Kellogg

Stars: James Best, Ingrid Goude, Ken Curtis

A science team and the sailors who supply them are trapped on an island during a hurricane, and attacked by giant man-eating shrews.

Plenty of movie monsters from the 1950s were created by scientists eager to solve the problem of world hunger, but only Dr Radford Baines, just one of the humans on the menu in The Killer Shrews, had the intriguing notion of shrinking humanity rather than enlarging the food. Not that it matters – his experiments result in over-sized critters all the same, or at least dogs dressed to look like shrews. Quite why shrews were chosen instead of the more likely, and far more scary, rats is never clear but the film muddles along regardless, delivering thrills that are more gruesome and rougher around the edges than most other creature features of similar vintage. As with most 1950s genre flicks, the bland human drama is barely worth watching, but The Killer Shrews gets weird and nasty enough to make the payoff worthwhile.

Trivia: Director Ray Kellogg provided “special photographic effects” for such classic hits as The Seven Year Itch and The King & I. An unlikely prospect for a sequel, Return of the the Killer Shrews was nevertheless filmed in 2010, with a fresh group of victims stranded on the same island and gnawed to pieces.

Willard (1971)

Director: Daniel Mann

Stars: Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Elsa Lanchester

A hen-pecked young man fights back against his bullying boss when he discovers he has the ability to control a growing army of rats.

Willard was something of a sensation back in 1971, and in many ways foreshadowed the widespread fascination with animal attack movies that Jaws would capitalize on. It's a slow moving film, but one with enough interesting characters to make the gradual build-up successful. Even though there are only a handful of rat attacks, the overall tone is still scary and there's a clear inspiration from Psycho, with Willard's strident mother (played by the Bride of Frankenstein herself, Elsa Lanchester) dominating him in a very Norman Bates manner. Ernest Borgnine also classes things up, playing Willard's cruel employer with sleazy relish. The rat scenes are of variable quality – you can often tell they're being thrown in front of the camera – but Bruce Davison's compelling performance as Willard compensates, playing up the creepiness and making us root for the underdog and his furry vengeance. His scenes with lead rats Ben and Socrates are both convincing and eerie.

Sequels: The 1972 sequel, Ben, is famous for its Michael Jackson theme song. Willard was remade in 2003 with Crispin Glover taking over the lead role. Bruce Davison went on to enjoy a fruitful career. Most modern audiences will know him for his recurring role as Senator Kelly in the first X-Men movies.

THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! (1972)

Director: Andy Milligan

Stars: Hope Stansbury, Jackie Skarvellis, Noel Collins

The Mooneys, an inbred family of English werewolves, argues about their future and is occasionally troubled by man-eating rats.

One of the more restrained movies from zero-budget auteur Andy Milligan, this fantastically titled effort is both unbearably dull and bizarrely compelling. It's certainly not a movie for those who like action, as almost the entire running time is spent with the same characters bickering and yelling at each other in murky rooms. In one memorably bad scene, the youngest Mooney daughter casually tells her new husband that they keep her mentally handicapped brother locked up downstairs and that her father's previous wife was mysteriously poisoned. Her husband responds by explaining how his father raped and murdered a six-year-old, his mother committed suicide and he was sent to a school where he was whipped by nuns. Neither offers any noticeable reaction to this catalog of depraved exposition, which is delivered in great lumps of dialogue in clipped English accents with no trace of emotion. It's both exhausting and tedious at the same time. The killer rat angle doesn't even start to make itself known until over halfway through, and even then it hardly kicks the film into gear. Legend has it that the movie was originally shot as a werewolves-only yarn, but came in at just 72 minutes long. With Willard such a hit the previous year, and a longer running time required, Milligan allegedly shot some new scenes with killer rats, and then simply edited them into his existing movie as best he could. As with all these borderline amateur productions, it's hard to know where myth ends and fact begins, but the crude way the rat storyline crashes into the film with no real connection to anything else certainly supports the theory. It's all absolutely terrible moviemaking, yet it's so bad that it attains a sort of zen-like state of sleazy 1970s awfulness that is almost hypnotic. As such, The Rats Are Coming is not a movie you should rush out to find, unless you're a connoisseur of truly terrible B-movies from the furthest reaches of the fringe, in which case it's essential viewing.

WEASELS RIP MY FLESH (1979)

Director: Nathan Schiff

Stars: John Smihula, Fred Borges, Fred Dabby

A space probe returning from Venus crashes in Long Island, where its radioactive contents transform a common weasel into a giant man-eating monster.

Filmed by 16-year-old Nathan Schiff in and around his neighborhood for the princely sum of $400, you'd expect Weasels Rip My Flesh to have gathered dust on a VHS tape in some attic somewhere. That it has endured as a genuine cult movie, granted a professional remastered DVD release in 2004, and enjoyed as much for its youthful ambition as for its cheesy amateurish hilarity is a testament to its enormous charm. The sort of thing that could only be made by kids weaned on a diet of drive-ins and Famous Monsters of Filmland, it's part throwback to the monster flicks of the 1950s and part tribute to the low budget gore of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Overflowing with frothy pink stage blood, crude puppetry and rubbery severed limbs, it's a riot of backyard special effects and an absolutely charming remnant of a more practical film making age.

Trivia: The title is a reference to the 1970 Frank Zappa album, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which in turn took the name from a lurid cover story in Man's Life magazine published in September 1956.

Deadly Eyes (1982)

Director: Robert Clouse

Stars: Sam Groom, Sara Botsford, Scatman Crothers

Steroid-infused grain results in a swarm of oversized rats scuttling around the sewers of Toronto, where only an idealistic health control officer and her basketball coach boyfriend can save the day.

A truly international enterprise, this Canadian-shot adaptation of British author James Herbert's novel, The Rats, was produced by Golden Harvest, the legendary Hong Kong film studio famous for countless kung fu movies.

The global production ultimately proves more interesting than the film itself, which follows the broad beats of Herbert's story but still ends up as a middle of the road effort. Things get off to a nasty start, with a small child dragged into the cellar and eaten by rats, but the story soon gets needlessly bogged down in the love life of its bland stars, leaving the rats to spice things up with sporadically bloody attacks on the supporting cast.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Deadly Eyes is that, much like The Killer Shrews , the rats were played by dogs in rat costumes, an affordable and almost ingenious special effects solution that sadly looks hilarious far more often than it looks convincing.

Trivia: Robert Clouse is best known as the director of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. Deadly Eyes pays an awkward tribute to the martial arts master as Game of Death, the film Clouse and Lee were filming at the time of the kung fu superstar's death, plays in a theater besieged by the rats.

Of Unknown Origin (1983)

Director: George P. Cosmatos

Stars: Peter Weller, Jennifer Dale, Lawrence Dane

A hotshot banker finds his life falls apart when he wages war on a tenacious rat in his New York townhouse.

Proof that you don't need hordes of creatures or constant death to craft an effective animal-themed horror movie, Of Unknown Origin spins a nail-biting yarn with just one man and a rat. It helps that the man is Peter Weller, whose slightly cold and oddball demeanor lends credence to his descent into rodent-assisted mania. The rat itself is shot in pure horror movie terms, all sinister close-ups of gnashing incisors and scratching claws, and its intelligence is just ridiculous enough to make it a credible nemesis. When it finally chomps through the wires, cutting off the power and plunging the house into darkness, Weller simply rolls his eyes and declares “I wondered when you'd get round to that.” That's typical of the movie's deadpan humor, which strengthens its satirical qualities. It's no mistake that the rat is the ultimate symbol of urban squalor, waging its relentless war on a high-flying yuppie as he tries to consolidate an important deal, trapped in a rat race both figuratively and literally, driving him to practically destroy his own home in retaliation. One of the most interesting of all animal attack movies, and one of the smartest social satires of the 1980s, Of Unknown Origin is a real cult classic.

Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

Director: Bruno Mattei

Stars: Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni

Over two centuries after a nuclear war destroys the Earth, a small band of survivors seeks refuge in a research lab overrun with flesh-eating rats.

Bruno Mattei was best known for his lurid softcore porn, zombie and cannibal movies but he made an occasional diversion into the animal horror genre. Night of Terror is typical of Italian horror in the 1980s, with over the top acting (not helped by hilariously stiff dubbing) and ponderous plotting. There's little rhyme or reason to anything that happens in the movie – a collection of weird characters, in an assortment of unlikely costumes, argue, have sex, get drunk, stumble around a ramshackle set and get eaten alive at regular intervals. With all the action restricted to a rundown bar that seemingly doubles as a scientific lab for some reason, the science fiction setting soon becomes secondary, and the horror elements are surprisingly tame considering Mattei's track record. A scene in which a rat burrows into a nude woman's sleeping bag and emerges from her mouth, having taken a fairly obvious route from bottom to top, is the gory highlight. For connoisseurs of cheese, however, Night of Terror has much to recommend, not least the action climax in which hazard-suited rescuers arrive on the scene, only to reveal they're not who our heroes were expecting.  The final shot, which should never be spoiled, is one for the ages.

Gnaw (1989)

Director: Damian Lee

Stars: Paul Coufos, Lisa Schrage, Real Andrews

An experimental growth hormone causes a boy to grow to giant size. Hunting for a cure, a university scientist accidentally creates an army of giant rats, which proceed to eat his students.

Allegedly a sequel to the 1976 giant animal movie Food of the Gods , but with no concrete connection beyond the idea of over-sized rats, this movie makes its mark instead by ramping up the gore. The campus setting gives it a slasher movie rhythm, as characters are introduced only to be dispatched moments later in an orgy of furry puppets and fake blood, while the obligatory conflict comes from a pompous dean who refuses to accept there's any danger to the forthcoming opening ceremony of the university's new swimming pool. As if that wasn't enough, there's also a hilariously belligerent detective, a narcissistic rival professor (he's English, and therefore evil), a rape-happy janitor and a gaggle of strident animal rights activists. And, every now and then, we're reminded that somewhere in this story there's a twenty-foot tall child with anger management issues.

It all feels very much like a last gasp for the sort of over-cooked blood-soaked horror movies of the 1980s, and is certainly enjoyable on those terms. The rats themselves are brought to life through some decent puppetry as well as real rats on miniature sets. The scene where they mass in the swimming pool and run rampant at the ceremony is worth sticking around for.

Trivia: The giant child is actually the only vestigial plot point retained from HG Wells' original 1904 story, The Food of the Gods. The original film stayed closer to the book, but only just.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1990)

Director: Ralph S. Singleton

Stars: David Andrews, Kelly Wolf, Stephen Macht

A clean up crew enters an old textile mill with a serious rat problem and gets more than they bargained for when the rats turn against them and they're attacked by a giant creature in the cellar.

Based on a 1970 Stephen King story, this is an unashamed monster flick with no loftier motive than getting its cast of gnarly working stiffs into the shadows and then polishing them off as gruesomely as possible. There are hints at something more under the surface – hints of King's well-observed small town milieu in the first act, a hint of blue collar revolution in the second – but it leads nowhere more challenging than grizzled men battling nasty things. Elevating the proceedings are enjoyable turns from such genre standbys as Andrew Divoff and, as deliciously loopy exterminator, Brad Dourif. David Andrews makes for a dull lead in such colorful company, his stoic glowering presumably meant to mark him as a bad ass when it just makes him seem petulant. It's good and gory though, and when the monster in the darkness finally reveals itself, it does so via a fine old-fashioned giant animatronic puppet. The beast itself is rather confusing, however. The rats seem to operate at its command, but it looks more like a giant bat. The film never explains this, but King's short story clarifies the matter. It's a rat that went to live underground and evolved into a giant bat. Because that's a thing that can happen. That muddled bit of business aside, Graveyard Shift is a solid enough monster movie, even if it does end up being elevated by its cast rather than succeeding on its own merit.

RODENTZ (2001)

Director:  Serge Rodnunsky

Stars:  Allen Lee Haff, Leah Rowan, Guy Vieg

Inept scientists pour their experimental enzymes down the sink and also let their lab rats escape. The lab rats get into the pipes, drink the compound and mutate into killers just as the obligatory horror movie teens gatecrash the lab looking to par-tay. Things get messy.

With perhaps the simplest story in all of horror fiction – people turn up at a remote location and get killed – the truly remarkable thing about Rodentz (aka Altered Species) is how frequently incomprehensible it is. From the garbled origin of the killer rats (are they killers because they've been experimented on or because they drank the lime green gunk poured down the drain?) to the inexplicable motivation of the characters (who stick around the blood-soaked lab of death long after most sensible people would have left) very little here makes sense. The kill scenes are gory – in the sense that lots of fake blood is splashed around – but the manic camerawork and epileptic editing leaves them impossible to follow and not even remotely scary. It's also incredibly slow-moving, with most of the cast not even reaching the lab until the film is halfway over. Small crumbs of kudos are earned for using mostly real rats, and for using endearing puppets when one of them grows to giant size for no reason, but there's just no getting past the fact that this is a hopelessly generic slasher movie by any other name. Twenty-something actors play unconvincing teens, blunder around dark corridors and go down screaming. The knowledge that furry rodents are doing the killing rather than a guy in a hockey mask doesn't make any practical difference.

Trivia: You may know star Allen Haff from his current job, as the host of Spike TV's Auction Hunters.

Ratten - sie werden dich kriegen! (2001)

Director: Jörg Lühdorff

Stars: Ralph Herforth, Anne Cathrin Buhtz, Christian Kahrmann

A heatwave coincides with a garbage collection strike in Frankfurt leading to the city being overrun by vicious rats.

True to national stereotypes, this German TV movie riff on the killer rat genre is coldly efficient and oddly humorless, hitting the expected marks without ever raising a smile or pulse. Its stiff air isn't helped by the horribly flat dubbing of the US version which was released on DVD as Revenge of the Rats rather than the literal translation of its original title, Rats: They Will Get You! That goofy title is more energetic than the movie itself, however, which keeps things deliberately grounded. Indeed, it's more disaster movie than horror, as the emphasis is firmly on how the city copes with the escalating vermin problem rather than the more grisly business of rats eating people. It's an unusual approach, and one that opens up some novel narrative avenues, but with emotionless leads and a story that escalates at a snail's pace, the world of municipal crisis management simply isn't interesting enough to sustain a whole movie.

Trivia: The film was remade in France in 2005 as Alerte à Paris.

HOOD RAT (2001)

Director: Leslie Small

Stars: Isaiah Washington, Ice-T, AJ Johnson

A homeless man befriends a community of man-eating rats, and uses them to wreak revenge on the people who wronged him.

Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington is literally slumming in this urban spin on the 1971 rodent revenge hit Willard   Where Willard succeeded through restraint and character, however, Hood Rat sails shamelessly over the top with its broad ghetto stereotypes. Washington does decent work as Max, the soft-spoken vagrant who finds companionship among the rats, while the supporting cast is better than most rival animal horror flicks, thanks to solid – if hammy – turns from the likes of Taurean Blacque as a slum lord forced to live in his own crumbling building. Ice T plays Ice T, of course, and is very good at that.

Hood Rat can't seem to decide if it's aiming for goofy humor or gruesome tragedy though, and director Leslie Small doesn't help matters by smothering every scene in cheap video effects, gaudy screen wipes, dissolves and every other bottom dollar editing trick he can think of. Rather than giving the movie an injection of hip energy, it just makes it look like it was assembled in Windows Movie Maker by a first year film student. As a result, the rat attacks are barely comprehensible, and usually just cut away to a bloody rubber hand for their impact. You do get to see rats climb out of a toilet and eat a crackhead's butthole though, and that's an achievement of sorts.

Trivia: Hood Rat also goes by the name Tara, after the lead rat that Max bonds with. The film represents a unique diversion into horror for director Leslie Small, who is mostly found shooting comedy specials for the likes of Mike Epps and Eddie Griffin.

The Rats (2002)

Director: John Lafia

Stars: Mädchen Amick, Vincent Spano, Shawn Michael Howard

A rogue colony of unusually aggressive rats makes its home in midtown Manhattan, forcing the manager of an infested department store to team up with a headstrong exterminator to eliminate the threat.

There are usually two kinds of B-movie. One stars inexperienced actors and compensates with nudity and gore. The other stars professional actors but ends up muting the genre elements to a TV-friendly level. The Rats is a rare movie that stars known actors, and yet doesn't wimp out when it comes to the gruesome stuff. Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes it a particularly great film, but director John Lafia, veteran of Child's Play 2 and Man's Best Friend , clearly knows exactly what sort of movie he's making. Mädchen Amick and Vincent Spano make for engaging leads, both having spent careers on the outskirts of mainstream Hollywood without ever quite breaking out of the B-movie world, and their easy charm coupled with a script that is refreshingly focused on the rat problem rather than human drama keeps the movie rattling along at an enjoyable pace. The rats themselves are often real, and in large numbers, and when CG is used it's better than most rival movies. Only a few cheesy shots of snarling evil rats, and a climax that involves them literally erupting into a swimming pool like a geyser, lower the tone. It's a testament to the film's slick energy that it never feels uneventful or slow, even though there are only really two on-screen deaths. They're both pretty grisly though – a man's ear gets ripped off in one – so horror nuts won't feel shortchanged. The Rats may be nothing more than a dependable B-movie, but that's sadly such a rarity these days that it's worth celebrating all the same.

Rats (2003)

Director: Tibor Takacs

Stars: Sara Downing, Michael Zelniker, Ron Perlman

A journalist goes undercover as a patient at a newly privatized state mental hospital to investigate falling healthcare standards, but discovers that things are worse than she expected: an army of psychic rats is devouring the inmates.

This is an impossibly cheap movie, shot in Bulgaria for what looks like the price of a sandwich. All the obvious asylum movie cliches are ticked off during the treacle-paced opening, along with a few women's prison stereotypes for good measure. Things sadly don't improve once the rats turn up, as they're brought to life by some of the worst computer animation you're likely to see. Stiff rigid rat shapes slide and glide over the screen, superimposed on top of the action with all the grace and realism of a 1992 computer game. The plot is equally unconvincing, with a mind-reading janitor gaining a psychic connection with the rats, one of which is a giant for no apparent reason. Everything is explained by elliptical references to the hospital's administrator performing vague and sinister experiments  some years previously. That administrator is at least played by the ever reliable Ron Perlman, so the movie isn't a complete disaster.

Trivia: Tibor Takacs also helmed the rather more enjoyable killer bug movie, Infested , the woeful Mega Snake and the almost-fun Ice Spiders

PETS GONE WILD

“Down, boy!”

NIGHT OF 1000 CATS (1972)

Director: René Cardona Jr.

Stars: Hugo Stiglitz, Gerardo Zepeda, Anjanette Comer

A perverted billionaire picks up beautiful women in his helicopter, flies them to his castle and feeds them to his army of pet cats.

A particularly grubby and sleazy movie, this marks an early pairing for stone-faced actor Hugo Stiglitz and exploitation director René Cardona Jr. The film itself is a curious mess of Hammer Horror gothic cliches and Herschell Gordon Lewis gore, as Stiglitz's killer lures his victims into an unconvincing cardboard and foam dungeon before strangling them and  grinding their bodies up for cat food. The cats are mostly content with this arrangement, making their owner a greater threat than their feline appetites, but the tables are inevitably turned at the end as Hugo himself falls prey to their claws.

Trivia: Stiglitz and Cardona reteamed for the killer shark movies Tintorera and Cyclone.

Night of the Lepus (1972)

Director: William F. Claxton

Stars: Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun

When a little girl takes home a pet rabbit from the laboratory, little does she realize it's been injected with an experimental hormone. Nature takes its course and soon giant carnivorous rabbits are hopping all over the desert...

What amazes most about Night of the Lepus isn't just that a major studio like MGM would bankroll a deadly serious killer rabbit movie, but that they were able to convince genuine stars such as Psycho's Janet Leigh and western legend Rory Calhoun to take part.

The end result is actually a surprisingly serviceable monster film, in structure at least, dutifully following all the requirements both of 1950s atomic age giant creature movies, as well as the popular eco-subtexts of the 1970s. These noble efforts are, sadly, fatally undermined by the sheer ridiculousness of its monsters. Footage of gamboling bunnies is slowed down, with menacing growls played on top and fake blood painted on their furry little faces, but it's never even close to being convincing, let alone scary. It is worth sticking around for the finale, however, purely for the sight of dozens of stuffed rabbits being zapped in a mass electrocution that is both horrible and hilarious.

Trivia: Based on a novel called Year of the Angry Rabbit, the title was changed to the Latin “lepus”, to mask the fact that the threat came from fluffy bunnies. Night of the Lepus was released the same year as the equally risible Frogs , making it a landmark year for unlikely killer animal horror flicks. Watch out for DeForrest Kelley, better known as Doctor “Bones” McCoy on Star Trek, as the president of the local college.

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS (1973)

Director: Fredric Hobbs

Stars: Christopher Brooks, Stuart Lancaster, E. Kerrigan Prescott

Mysterious underground gas creates an 8-foot-tall mutant sheep which proceeds to cause havoc in a historical Old West town.

A true zero-budget drive-in movie, Godmonster of Indian Flats has a story that is largely incomprehensible, a monster that is laughable and a directorial style that seems barely conscious. However, this all combines to create a movie that has the sort of woozy fever-dream appeal that only true grindhouse flicks possess, with scenes seemingly spliced in from at least three different movies and a distracting soundtrack that lurches from choral grandeur to knee-slapping country music to theremin-assisted sci-fi to carnival-style merry-go-round tunes. Most baffling of all, there's a subplot about a mysterious figure trying to buy up all the land under the town, along with the leases to the old gold mines, that gives the proceedings a strange Scooby Doo atmosphere. The black man who is sent to talk to the town into signing over their deeds is first framed for the (faked) murder of a dog and then threatened with lynching, none of which has any bearing on the giant mutant sheep that finally begins its rampage shortly before the end of the film for no good reason. And, no, it's never explained why a rubbery lumpen giant sheep with misshapen legs and a face that looks like a smashed turnip deserves to be called a “godmonster”. A terrible gem.

THE CAT CREATURE (1973)

Director: Curtis Harrington

Stars: Meredith Baxter, David Hedison, Gale Sondergaard

The theft of an ancient Egyptian amulet from a wealthy man's estate leads to a series of grisly cat-related deaths.

The Cat Creature finds director Curtis Harrington mixing up pet attacks with supernatural bunkum to middling effect. For this feline effort, the template is Val Lewton's seminal Cat People, although as a 1970s TV movie it lacks all the subtext, nuance and sensuality of that 1942 classic. Instead we're treated to lots of mild detective work from David Hedison's archeology professor, interspersed with moderately effective deaths, sometimes at the business end of the cat's claws but sometimes thanks to its mysterious hypnotic powers. The cat, of course, turns out to be the reincarnation of a mummified cat goddess which makes the finale – in which the neighborhood alley cats pounce on her and reduce her to dust for no apparent reason – all the more confusing.

Trivia: The script for The Cat Creature was written by Psycho author Robert Bloch.

Trapped (1973)

Director: Frank De Felitta

Stars: James Brolin, Susan Clark, Earl Holliman

A divorced dad is accidentally locked in a department store overnight, with only a pack of vicious guard dogs for company.

Simple but effective, this TV movie shows that you don't need fancy sci-fi explanations to make an animal attack movie work. You just need a plausible situation, dramatic momentum and solid characters. Trapped has all three, and is a tight little thriller as a result.

James Brolin is Chuck Brenner, a desperate father about to see his young daughter jet off for a new life in Mexico City with his estranged wife and her new husband. While buying a doll as a going away gift for his little girl, he detours to the rest room (the only place he can smoke in the store – the times they were a-changin') and promptly gets mugged and left unconscious in a toilet stall. When he wakes up all the power is off, the phones are disconnected and the route to the lower floor is blocked by attack dogs so savage that they have to be kept separate from each other by wooden screens across the escalators. Meanwhile, his family wonder where he's got to, and eventually postpone their relocation to search for him, if only so his heartbroken daughter can say goodbye.

It's a neat little set up, and one that underpins the simple urgency of Chuck's nightmare situation with a solid drama about a family in crisis. The scenes in the store are genuinely tense, unfolding without dialogue as our increasingly delirious hero, losing blood from a bite to his leg, struggles to keep it together. There's even a video game clarity to his mission, literally making his way through each level and facing off against a different dog in each one, with only household goods such as sponge mops, wardrobes and fishing rods and his own ingenuity to keep him alive until morning. An underrated – and under seen – gem.

Trivia: Earl Holliman, playing the new husband to Chuck's wife, will be familiar to sci-fi fans. He played Cook in the 1954 classic Forbidden Planet, in which he famously asked Robbie the Robot to produce a supply of delicious space-booze.

Dogs (1976)

Director: Burt Brinckerhoff

Stars: David McCallum, Sandra McCabe, George Wyner

Pheremone-crazed canines band together in a South-Western town and start attacking people.

Riding the post-Jaws wave nice and early, this attempt to transplant the terror of Spielberg's masterpiece onto the family dog struggles to make its furry antagonists feel truly menacing, since too many of its antagonists are simply too cute and friendly to convince as killing machines. Regardless, the obligatory time is spent establishing that dogs are killing people, while the main characters slowly catch on to a peril the audience is already expecting. Former Man from U.N.C.L.E David McCallum doesn't help, giving our heroic college professor an unlikable sulky quality as he mumbles and glowers his way through scene after scene, looking like he'd much rather be anywhere else than on the set of a killer dog movie.

There's a half-hearted attempt to suggest the dog's behavior is caused by government experiments in the college's physics department, but the script lacks the conviction required to join the dots. Instead, it limps to a predictable conclusion before rather hopefully suggesting the humble feline as the next animal to turn on us. If that was supposed to lead into a Cats sequel, it never materialized. It was, however, an idea that was picked up the following year in the completely unrelated British horror movie, The Uncanny...

The Uncanny (1977)

Director: Denis Héroux

Stars: Peter Cushing, Ray Milland, Donald Pleasance

A paranoid writer begs his publisher to print his next book, revealing how cats are a malevolent and evil species. To prove his point, he recounts three stories involving ferocious felines.

One of the stranger entries in the cycle of British horror anthology movies which flourished in the 1970s, The Uncanny retains much of the heightened camp that made Hammer famous but adds a more contemporary twist.

The three stories contained within are all absolute nonsense, of course. The first sees a rich old widow bumped off by her maid, who is sleeping with the widow's money-grabbing nephew. Their attempts to get hold of the widow's amended will, however, are halted by its new beneficiaries: her many cats. The revenge they inflict on the maid is surprisingly nasty, but since the cats are technically exacting poetic justice on a murderer, it hardly supports the “cats are evil” thesis.

The second story finds a young girl sent to stay with her horrible snooty aunt, and her bullying cousin. Luckily, the girl's deceased mother was a practicing witch, and the girl has her faithful black cat for company. The payoff for this yarn, in which the girl's cruel cousin is shrunk to the size of a mouse, is endearingly silly even by the standards of a killer cat movie.

Finally, we have Donald Pleasance as the magnificently named Valentine De'Ath, a movie star in the 1930s, who schemes to murder his wife on the set of a gothic horror flick and replace her with his young mistress. Once again, the pet cat of the deceased wreaks gruesomely appropriate revenge. When the line “Cat got your tongue?” is uttered, you'll know what's coming next.

Even though all the stories show that its humans who are generally horrible creatures, The Uncanny gets by for two simple reasons. One, the stories are too short and ridiculous to be boring, and the cast – packed with wonderful old British horror stars – is a joy to watch, even when the film itself is corny trash.

Trivia: The Uncanny falls in the middle of director Denis Héroux's bizarre career. He started out making softcore erotica in France, and ended up in the 1980s producing animated action shows for kids such as Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and MASK.

The Pack (1977)

Director: Robert Clouse

Stars: Joe Don Baker, Richard B. Shull, Hope Alexander-Willis

A pack of dogs, abandoned on a small fishing island over the summer months by vacationing tourists, turn feral and place the inhabitants under siege.

A pacy, entertaining thriller populated by a fine array of 1970s character actors, The Pack is something of an unsung cult classic of the animal attack genre. Where other movies would pad out the running time with stock character drama, this movie gets right down to business, filling in the human stuff along the way. Using real dogs for all its scenes, it manages to make its lurid tale surprisingly plausible and comes up with a variety of interesting scenarios to keep the tension high. There's even a spot of social commentary, with the locals paying the price for the casual disregard for life shown by their wealthy tourist visitors. It's probably a stretch to consider the varied breeds making up the pack as an allegory for the multi-racial working class, rising up after being abandoned, but there's still some smarts at work here.

Star of the show is undoubtedly the great Joe Don Baker, the sort of gruff outdoorsman that Hollywood rarely bothers with these days. As Jerry, the hero of the piece, his no-nonsense approach makes even the more outlandish moments ring true. There's no messing around with people refusing to believe the dogs are a threat either – the movie gets up to speed quickly and stays there for the duration. There are a couple of loose ends left hanging by the end credits – the script loses interest in a rescue mission to the mainland, and leaves one deceased character undiscovered at the bottom of a cliff – but for lean, mean animal action The Pack is well worth seeking out.

Trivia: The Pack was written and directed by Robert Clouse, director of Enter the Dragon. He returned to animal horror for the disappointing killer rat movie Deadly Eyes in 1982

DEVIL DOG: THE HOUND OF HELL (1978)

Director: Curtis Harrington

Stars: Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimieux, Kim Richards

A suburban family adopts a puppy, unaware that its mother was possessed by the devil himself and their new pet is demonically inclined.

How do you make a puppy scary? Curtis Harrington, veteran of such weird B-movies as Night Tide and the feline TV movie The Cat Creature , doesn't come up with a compelling answer during this hilariously serious canine caper, quickly jumping forward in time after the cute little pup has set a Mexican housekeeper on fire just by glaring at her with its adorable eyes. The adult dog is more sinister, but the plot still never manages to grapple with the silliness at its heart. The dog's malign influence begins to spread to the family, first through the kids and then their mother, while anyone who gets in their way is killed off in bloodless off-screen accidents. In the end, it's up to Richard Crenna to save the world by traveling to Ecuador, communing with a wise man and then defeating the hell hound by getting a magic tattoo on his palm. It's absolute nonsense, and only slightly elevated by the solid cast who try their best to sell the hokum. Indeed, the only interesting thing about Devil Dog is the way it borrows large chunks from The Omen, while also taking advantage of the notorious Son of Sam killings which took place the year before. Killer David Berkowitz claimed his dog was possessed and told him to murder people with his .44 caliber pistol. Devil Dog includes a scene where Crenna's character hears a similar story on the TV news, prompting him to accept his own pet's demonic origin. Tasteless, but a compelling example, at least, of how the genre can mutate to incorporate popular fears. Sadly, the film never actually explains how terrorizing a single suburban family fulfills Satan's agenda and the horror fizzles out accordingly.

ROTTWEILER: Dogs of Hell (1982)

Director: Worth Keeter

Stars: Earl Owensby, Bill Gribble, Robert Bloodworth

A pack of rottweilers, trained by the US military for use as canine soldiers, escapes from captivity and attacks a small resort town.

Originally released in 3D – cue an array of objects lunging at the camera for no reason – this killer dog flick takes a fun premise and bleeds the life out of it. More time is spent with the domestic dramas of the townsfolk (and an inexplicable mud wrestling match) than on dog-related terror, and while that would be fine in a Robert Altman movie populated by great actors, it just becomes a drag in a supposed horror film performed by well-meaning but painfully stilted amateurs. The pace is tedious and even when the dogs make their appearance, it's shot and edited so lethargically that it's impossible to feel any fear or excitement whatsoever. Too often the film simply shows someone screaming, cuts to a cheap point-of-view shot and then shows the victim lying on the ground, devoid of wounds but smeared in fake blood. The film then ambles on regardless, its meager duty to cinematic tension apparently fulfilled.

WHITE DOG (1982)

Director: Samuel Fuller

Stars: Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Paul Winfield

A Hollywood starlet adopts a stray dog but discovers to her horror that it has been trained to attack and kill black people. She brings the dog to an African-American trainer, who vows to break the animal's inherited prejudice.

Denied a US theatrical release following misguided and inaccurate accusations of racism from the NAACP, White Dog was nevertheless embraced in Europe by audiences who could see that legendary director Samuel Fuller was actually condemning racism with his pointed allegorical film. In fact, you don't even have to look that deeply to see what Fuller was trying to say – never the most subtle of directors, he practically spells it out in numerous scenes – and in protesting a movie it hadn't seen, the NAACP succeeded only in helping to suppress one of the smartest and most challenging movies about race in America.

It's Paul Winfield who carries the show, playing the black trainer so determined to erase the racism that has been bred into the dog. It's a multifaceted role, angry yet idealistic, noble yet flawed, and Winfield hits every emotional beat perfectly. He also impresses by playing all the scenes with the dog himself, exposing bare fingers and flesh to a snapping, snarling beast.

It's easy to see why Paramount balked in the face of politically charged protests – the studio thought it was getting “Jaws with paws” but ended up with a highly charged dissection of a controversial subject, where even the scenes of animal attack were filmed with artistic intent rather than visceral crowd-pleasing in mind.

The ending of the movie, which is ultimately Fuller's final judgment on America's relationship with race, is tense, ambiguous and confrontational. The dark heart of racism lies with those who perpetuate it, passing it on to their children. Until they're removed from the equation, Fuller's prognosis is grim.

Cujo (1983)

Director: Lewis Teague

Stars: Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, Daniel Hugh Kelly

A pet St Bernard dog catches rabies and goes on a killing spree in small town America.

The wave of canine horror films from the late 70s reached its pinnacle with this grueling adaptation of Stephen King's hit novel. Director Lewis Teague (who previously helmed the equally effective Alligator:  takes full advantage of the simplicity and depth of King's prose, introducing us to an ordinary family, tearing them apart through domestic discord brought about by the mother's infidelity, and then making that anguish literal as the rabid Cujo traps the mother and her sick child in a broken down car.

The final act of the movie is almost entirely set in and around this car, and the tension taps into a very pure and primal fear, proving that you don't need atomic giants, genetic mutants or exotic predators to make the most of our all-too-human vulnerability. You just need a credible threat, convincing characters  and the sense that things may not turn out so well. Cujo himself is not only a reminder of how ill-equipped we are to fend off even the friendliest species should it turn against us, but he also acts as a metaphorical force of nature (the name is supposedly a Native American term meaning “unstoppable force”) punishing the guilty for their transgressions against the family unit. The dog attacks are savage and shocking, their power heightened by the fact that young actor Danny Pintauro seems genuinely terrified during his scenes.

Taut, violent and yet utterly grounded in reality, Cujo may not reach the same giddy creative heights as Jaws, but it's still one of the more successful pretenders to follow in its wake.

Trivia: The movie changes the end of King's rather downbeat novel quite drastically. King has since admitted that he came up with the story while in the deepest depths of his alcoholism, and can't actually remember writing it down.

PLAY DEAD (1983)

Director: Peter Wittman

Stars: Yvonne De Carlo, Stephanie Dunnam, David Cullinane

A scheming heiress uses black magic to control her Doberman dog, commanding it to murder her family so she can claim their inheritance.

There's a Goldilocks zone where bad movies are concerned, in which movies are neither so bad as to be unwatchable or good enough to be entertaining on their own merits. These are the movies that are often described as “so bad they're good”. Play Dead is one such film, utterly inept and terrible, but with some ephemeral quality that makes its countless missteps amusingly camp rather than merely annoying. There are few performances to savor here, with Yvonne De Carlo, TV's Lily Munster, the highlight. Even she comes across as slightly sedated and confused, as scenes drag and conversations circle in soporific ways. Thankfully there are some bizarre death scenes, this being a very resourceful dog who apparently understands how cars and electricity work, and there's an abundance of nudity to liven things up, including a kissing scene that almost escalates to full strength pornography before the editor cuts away at the last second. It's the absolute idiocy of the concept that makes Play Dead so memorably awful though. It may be absolute trash, but there are so few movies in which satanic dogs kill people with hair curlers that this one can't help but stand out.

UNINVITED (1988)

Director: Greydon Clark

Stars: Toni Hudson, Eric Larson, Alex Cord

A group of young students on Spring Break talk their way aboard a yacht belonging to a crooked Wall Street dealer and his gangster accomplice, both on the run from the authorities. Also on board: a mutant killer cat.

Some movies are just so deliciously stupid that you can't help but love them. Uninvited fits that bill perfectly, from its pastel 80s fashion and synth-pop soundtrack, to the sheer hilarity of the tatty cat puppet and the screaming terror it inspires. Take away that ridiculous monster and you're left with a drab and frankly boring thriller, but this cat is no ordinary cat. An escapee from a research laboratory, it has a rather brilliant secret ability: it vomits up another cat, a twisted mutant cat, which attacks people. Even that isn't silly enough for this movie. The mutant-vomit-cat has a venomous bite as well. There's just no way to not be entertained by this scruffy, stupid puppet whenever it shows its rubbery face, looking for all the world like an angry baby Wookiee. But Uninvited has other things in its favour too. Stalwart actors Clu Galager and George Kennedy (a long way from Cool Hand Luke) are on hand to lend a little gravitas, while Alex Cord, then still fresh from TV fame on Airwolf, supplies suitably sleazy villainy. There are some fine death scenes as well, gory and messy in the way that only a straight-to-VHS schlocker from the 1980s can be. Cheap and dumb, and all the better for it, Uninvited is a top quality slice of cheese.

Strays (1991)

Director: John McPherson

Stars: Kathleen Quinlan, Timothy Busfield, Claudia Christian

A family's dream house turns out to be occupied by an army of feral cats who don't like to share.

From Emmy-award winning stardom to being menaced by cats in a low budget horror movie. That's the journey that Timothy Busfield took when he went straight from starring in the acclaimed TV drama thirtysomething to this slice of TV movie cheese. Busfield at least brings some life and personality into what would otherwise be a typical Movie Dad character, though he's left high and dry by a story that is by turns boring and stupid. Perhaps inspired by the soap opera drama of Busfield's TV fame, the movie spends much of its time on a subplot about his flirtatious sister-in-law's divorce, all the while assuming ominous feline point-of-view shots will crank up the tension. Yet even when the cats do attack, there's precious little terror to be found. Characters do stupid things and make stupid decisions, all to ensure the action stays in the house, but it's always horribly apparent that they could march to safety with nothing but some scratches to show for their trouble. Cats may be able to give you a mean scratch, but you'd have to be downright suicidal to let them kill you. The final confrontation between Busfield and the dominant male ruler of the cat clan is particularly hilarious, given that it finds a grown man struggling to defeat a single small animal that he could clearly crush with one hand. Lifeless and ridiculous, Strays is neither gripping drama nor grueling horror.

MAN'S BEST FRIEND (1993)

Director: Robert Lafia

Stars: Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen, Robert Costanzo

An idealistic journalist frees a dog from a research lab, unaware that it is an experimental military animal with remarkable intelligence, super powers and serious anger management issues.

Gloriously stupid, this superdog rampage is all the more entertaining for how seriously it takes itself. Former Brat Pack star Ally Sheedy has the unenviable task of keeping a straight face as her new pet slowly graduates from raping the neighbor's dog to plotting against her boyfriend by chewing through his brake line. Other skills in the superdog arsenal include extendable claws for climbing vertical surfaces and – in the movie's best/worst moment – turning invisible thanks to chameleon DNA. The movie also veers from grisly murder to wacky slapstick on a random basis, making it hard to keep track of what reaction the film is expecting.

Even with all its flaws, Man's Best Friend is trash cinema at its most ludicrously enjoyable, made with just enough budget to bring its ridiculous ideas to life.

Trivia: Director Robert Lafia also helmed the more effective killer rat movie, The Rats

ROTTWEILER (2004)

Director: Brian Yuzna

Stars: William Miller, Irene Montalà, Paulina Gálvez

Spain, 2018, and Dante, a fugitive from a chain gang, flees across the barren landscape in search of his girlfriend, pursued by a cyborg rottweiler dog.

The Terminator gets a furry twist in this ambitious but flawed sci-fi horror from Spanish splatter legend Brian Yuzna. The decision to structure the film as a man-on-the-run chase rather than a stalk-and-slay horror is a good one, and the use of flashback to flesh out Dante's relationship with his girlfriend also makes this more than just another formulaic entry in the killer animal genre. Yuzna's ambition isn't matched by his script or cast, sadly, and the story soon falls into a dull rhythm of Dante encountering people who are then torn to shreds by the robo-dog, always following close behind thanks to his scent. The mostly Spanish cast struggles to make these vignettes come to life, while lead actor William Miller is bland and lifeless despite his character's literary parallels. Yuzna at least puts his prior experience as a B-movie mogul to good use, offering a genuinely threatening enemy by augmenting the natural menace of the rottweiler with metal fangs and glowing eyes, and delivering the sticky red gore that made his name. In that regard, at least, Rottweiler is satisfying enough.

Night of the Chihuahuas  (2004)

Director: David Michael Quiroz Jr.

Stars: David Michael Quiroz, Jr., Jennifer Jane, Ron Berg

A cop transfers to a small Arizona town, only to discover everyone has been killed by a pack of vicious chihuahuas.

Shot on home video for what looks like a few thousand dollars at most, this broad parody scrapes along on the incongruity of its tiny yapping threat and lots of cheap gore effects. The acting is terrible, the dialogue often incomprehensible thanks to variable audio recorded in-camera, and scenes clatter into one another in crude, jarring edits. The soundtrack is entirely supplied by a local rock band, and quickly becomes irritatingly repetitive. It's hard to be too down on something so obviously thrown together by enthusiastic amateurs, but scrappy charm will only get you so far.

BLACK SHEEP (2006)

Director: Jonathan King

Stars: Oliver Driver, Nathan Meister, Tammy Davis

Genetically engineered sheep attack a remote New Zealand farm, transforming everyone they bite into mutant sheep monsters as well.

Very much in the bloody vein of Peter Jackson's early splatter movies, this New Zealand horror wears its gutsy comedy on its sleeve and doesn't shy away from the silliness of its premise or the gory aftermath.

The story finds a young man returning to the family farm, despite a lifelong crippling fear of sheep thanks to his older brother's cruel pranks. It's the same brother who plans to use his genetically engineered super-sheep to make his fortune, until the grisly side effects make themselves known. Also stirred into the mix is an idealistic hippy girl, there to expose the animal experiments.

Black Sheep is shamelessly ridiculous, yet also extremely well made and genuinely funny. Blood and guts shower the screen, but there's a rather sweet human heart in the midst of the viscera that makes the carnage more tolerable.

The film also benefits from superb puppetry and gore, courtesy of Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop, which brings the same level of conviction to this low budget splatter comedy as it did to The Lord of the Rings.

Nobody is going to mistake a movie about carnivorous sheep for serious cinema – the tagline was “the violence of the lambs” after all - but that doesn't stop Black Sheep from being a gooey good time.

The Breed (2006)

Director: Nicholas Mastandrea

Stars: Michelle Rodriguez, Oliver Hudson, Taryn Manning

Five college kids take a vacation on an island populated by genetically-enhanced attack dogs.

Five teens in an old house on a remote island? You know how this goes, so the only question is what will kill them off before the end credits? Dogs, is the answer. Director Nicholas Mastandrea is an experienced assistant director, with credits on dozens of well regarded movies, so the film betrays none of the cheap amateur goofs that usually trip these things up. He understands pacing, framing and other simple but vital elements of polish that keep The Breed feeling slick and professional in a genre not short on inept efforts. The cast, too, isn't bad. Or at least they portray their cookie cutter archetypes with a little life and personality. Also raising The Breed's approval rating are the real dogs used for the action, a snarling pack that is convincingly menacing with not a clumsy computer-generated pooch or rubbery puppet in sight. It's just a shame that the script offers nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before, hitting the expected beats with clockwork precision – the black guy dies first, the slutty girl dies next - yet doing nothing to give them a fresh spin. For all its above average production values, The Breed is hopelessly derivative.

Trivia: The Breed was produced by horror legend Wes Craven, no doubt due to the fact that Mastandrea has been Craven's assistant director on movies dating back to the 1990s.

SAVAGE SIMIANS

“Get your paws off us,
you damn dirty apes...”

GO AND GET IT (1920)

Directors: Marshall Neilan, Henry Roberts Symonds

Stars: Pat O'Malley, Wesley Barry, Agnes Ayres

A human brain is transplanted into a gorilla, causing it to go on a killing spree. An intrepid reporter investigates.

One of too many early silent films now lost, apparently forever, this feral shocker is perhaps the oldest example of the “animal attack” genre on record. We'll sadly never know whether the film chose to play up the horror angle  - though the fact it was sold as “Marshall Neilan's super sensational story of the newspaper world” suggests not – but it clearly illustrates how, as our closest cousins, the great apes have always generated a unique mixture of fascination and fear.

INGAGI (1930)

Director: William Campbell

Stars: Sir Hubert Winstead, Daniel Swayne, Arthur Clayton

Documentary makers voyage deep into Africa and discover a lost tribe that sacrifices women to a giant gorilla.

With a plot that sounds suspiciously similar to a rather more famous monster ape movie, Ingagi was a film dogged by bad luck from the start. Presented as an actual documentary, thus predating the modern trend for “found footage” movies, the makers found their initial box office success was undermined by a series of scandals regarding the authenticity of their footage and the treatment of their cast. Eventually, after multiple lawsuits, private investigations and mockery from scientists, the Federal Trade Commission forced the film from theaters and insisted it could not be screened as a factual work ever again. By the time these legal proceedings had ushered Ingagi into obscurity, with all prints apparently lost or destroyed, another movie with a similar storyline was ready to steal the headlines...

Sequel: Son of Ingagi, which followed in 1940, has the distinction of being the first American genre film with an entirely African American cast.

King Kong (1933)

Director: Merian C. Cooper

Stars: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

A sensation-hungry filmmaker sails to an uncharted island in search of the mysterious “Kong”. What he finds is a giant gorilla, living in a prehistoric world. Captured and brought back to civilization in chains, Kong takes out his frustrations on New York City.

Still rightly regarded as one of the most influential fantasy movies of all time, much of King Kong's cinematic power comes from the way it took the safari formula that was so successful in film and literature – director Merian C. Cooper was famous for his wildlife movies - and then gave it an ambitious special effects assisted tweak. Kong, after all, lived in a prehistoric wonderland and could easily have have taken the form of any creature. That Cooper and his producer Ernest Schoedsack chose a gorilla says a lot about how relatable they wanted their monster to be.

The scenes on Skull Island are rousing stuff, particularly given their vintage and the crude technology available for animation wizard Willis O'Brien to bring his creatures to life, but it's when Kong is brought to our world that his influence on the “nature runs amok” genre becomes clear. His giant size gave Hollywood a taste for enormous stop-motion monsters that would return in the atomic age science fiction of the 1950s, but it's the deeper thematic power of Kong that makes him so pivotal in the context of this book. Kong was the first beast from the wild to leap the gap between the wilderness and the city, leaving the jungle to rampage through our world. The safari movie was always safely “over there”, in some distant and savage land. Cooper brought it to America's doorstep, and forced audiences to consider what would happen if that distance was bridged.

Yet despite the mayhem he leaves in his wake, for over eighty years audiences have sympathized with Kong rather than feared him. We feel for him, the big clumsy lug who can't articulate his feelings for the woman he adores. What's especially impressive is that none of this empathy comes from the script. Kong is consistently portrayed as a monster, Ann is constantly trying to get away from him and the cast never suggest that they might understand his motivations. Only the audience gets that connection, and it's due to O'Brien's astonishing effects work, giving Kong a character and transforming a small puppet covered in rabbit fur into one of cinema's most enduring and tragic characters. That, more than anything, is what makes King Kong one of cinema's greatest creations.

Sequels and remakes: Kong was a box office smash, and RKO quickly churned out a forgettable sequel, Son of Kong, the same year. 1938 saw Kong cross the water to star in King Kong Appears In Edo, a now sadly lost Japanese monster movie that is believed to be the first example of the popular “kaiju” - or giant monster – genre that the country would become famous for. Kong's Edo adventure was not made with permission or approval from RKO, however, but the studio later leased the name to various international companies, leading to a series of official Japanese Kong movies, including an infamous showdown with Godzilla in 1962, and a British pseudo-remake called Konga  Kong went on to star in comic books and children's cartoons, and his name became synonymous with any creature of unusual strength and size.

The first official US Kong remake was mounted in 1976 by Italian producer Dino DeLaurentiis, with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges starring. This time, Kong was set in the modern day, with his discovery coming from a petroleum company's exploration rather than a moviemaker seeking him out, In another nod to the changing times, Kong climbs the World Trade Center instead of Empire State, and was brought to life by special effects artist Rick Baker in a costume rather than through time-consuming animation. With the sultry Jessica Lange making her movie debut as the film's Ann Darrow substitute, the sexual undertones were inevitably made more overt. It's not a patch on the original, of course, and the ape suit actually makes it seem cheaper and cheesier than it actually was. The movie was a box office hit, and reasonably well reviewed, but it's credibility has taken a nose dive in recent years and is now often, wrongly, remembered as a commercial flop. That was, however, the fate that befell King Kong Lives, the unwanted and unnecessary sequel to the remake, released in 1986, which paired the giant ape up, somewhat obviously, with Queen Kong.

Kong was revived once more in 2005 by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, a lifelong fan of the 1933 film. Set in the 1930s, and staying far closer to Cooper's original story, Jackson's version upped the ante in terms of special effects, with Kong himself portrayed by a remarkable motion-captured performance from Andy Serkis, but the film itself is a chore to sit through. Perhaps still operating in Tolkien mode, Jackson expands the 100 minute running time to an indulgent three hours, spending far too much time on the bickering crew of the SS Venture as they make their way slowly to Skull Island. It wouldn't be so bad if any of this material paid off later, but almost all these characters vanish from the story by the third act. More damagingly, Jackson wallows in sentimentality, giving Kong a reciprocated relationship with Naomi Watts' sprightly Ann Darrow. The pair bond on Skull Island, and even go skating together in Central Park.

Compared to the loverlorn beast of Cooper's original movie, this Kong is a lovable heroic figure that we're clearly supposed to root for. This gooey soft center means that Kong's tragedy is underscored from the start, rather than allowed to grab the audience organically, and the film is diminished as a result.

Killer Ape (1953)

Director: Spencer Gordon Bennett

Stars: Johnny Weissmuller, Carol Thurston, Max Palmer

Safari savior Jungle Jim encounters mad scientists and a terrifying killer ape.

Former Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller wound down his career playing a less physical – and better clothed – wilderness hero in the Jungle Jim movies, of which Killer Ape is a strange example. The science fiction elements make it stand out from the other stock footage safaris that made up the series, as well as a subsequent TV show, but the killer ape itself is disappointing. Played with undeniable menace by eight foot tall wrestler Max Palmer, the ape is really more of a grumpy caveman than a killer gorilla, but he livens up an otherwise dreary seat-filler.

Trivia: Forever typecast, Weissmuller appeared in two more Jungle Jim movies following Killer Ape, before winding down his film career playing himself in films with titles like Jungle Moon Men and Devil Goddess. He continued to play Jungle Jim on TV before retiring from the screen in 1956.

Konga (1961)

Director: John Lemont

Stars: Michael Gough, Margo Johns, Jess Conrad

A scientist believed lost in Africa returns to London with a remarkable growth formula. He tests it on a chimpanzee and is soon sending his over-sized ape to murder his enemies.

King Kong gets a very British makeover in this delightfully camp effort, which varies between scenes of awfully polite scientific skullduggery, groovy teens clicking their fingers to fab beats and a man in a pot-bellied gorilla costume lethargically lunging at hapless members of the supporting cast. It's the final act that makes the film worthwhile as Konga overdoses on growth serum and grows to enormous proportions, dragging his rubbery feet across a reasonable scale model of London while clutching a rigid model of Michael Gough. It's Gough, best known  as Alfred in Tim Burton's Batman movies, who supplies the movie's energy, taking a decent shot at genteel villainy in the Vincent Price mold. It's not enough to make Konga a good movie, but it's still charming enough to stand out.

Trivia: Producer Herman Cohen paid RKO $25,000 for the right to use the word “Kong” in the title. Konga inspired a spin-off comic book which ran for twenty three issues before being canceled.

The Beast That Killed Women (1965)

Director: Barry Mahon

Stars: Barry Mahon, Delores Carlos, Byron Mabe

An escaped gorilla attacks a nudist camp. What more do you need to know?

One of the strangest examples of the “nudie” movie genre, this half-baked mix of coy titillation and animal rampage is certainly memorable, if only for how charmingly cheap and amateurish it is. There's no plot to speak of, just a series of scenes in which full-figured 1960s ladies walk around nude, though the camera is always careful to avoid any full frontal shots that might attract attention from the censor. This means lots of women performing every day conversations and activities with their breasts exposed, or walking away from the camera so we can see their backside. It's a very strange nudist camp all round, really, as the men almost all seem to spend their time wearing boxer shorts, lest a glimpse of sausage spoil the view.

The gorilla, of course, is simply director Barry Mahon in a threadbare costume and despite the title, he only manages to kill one of the camp's occupants. In fact he's kept off-screen for as long as possible, Mahon clearly understanding that his young male audience would be better served with topless volleyball and endless scenes of young women undressing than by his clumsy stalking.

Yet for all its tame leering, The Beast That Killed Women isn't all that sleazy. It actually seems strangely innocent today, almost coy in its mixture of prudery and mild titillation. The laughable production values – including actors who stand in front of the lights and cast everything into shadow, and entire scenes of muffled dialogue that the in-camera microphone fails to pick up – make it all the more delightful. As a killer animal movie, The Beast The Killed Women is a complete waste of time. As a memento of a more innocent age, it's rather wonderful.

A.P.E (1976)

Director: Paul Leder

Stars: Rod Arrants, Joanna Kerns, Alex Nicol

A giant gorilla escapes from captivity in Korea and rampages through the streets of Seoul, kidnapping an American actress in the process.

Delightfully shameless in the way it rips off King Kong, this Korean-American collaboration was hurried into production to coincide with Kong's 1976 Hollywood remake. This version, running a scant 80 minutes, ignores all the costly jungle business and instead opens with a pair of sailors discussing the 36-foot gorilla they're already carrying in the hold of their cargo ship. One inexplicable explosion later and this nameless simian is loose, lumbering around the Korean countryside while ineffectual American and Korean military types have urgent conversations in rooms with wobbling cardboard walls. Meanwhile, an American journalist embarks on a perfunctory affair with a visiting Hollywood actress, who is inevitably doomed to spend most of the third act as a doll, carried around by a man in a monkey suit.

A.P.E (or just Ape, depending on which of the many titles you see this under) is terrible, but it hits that sweet spot of mesmerizing awfulness, the combination of crude special effects and make-do directing leading to a movie that often feels like an Airplane-style spoof. At one point, the ape even throws a snake at the camera, almost knocking it over. In fact the ape throws a lot of things at the camera, a remnant from the ambitious idea of releasing the film in 3D. That's indicative of the level of cheese on offer. A*P*E is always trashy and never less than hilarious.

Trivia: The American actress that Ape takes a liking to was played by Joanna DeVarona, who would later change her name to Joanna Kerns and find fame as Maggie Seaver on Growing Pains.

In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro (1986)

Director: Raju Patel

Stars: John Rhys-Davies, Timothy Bottoms, Irene Miracle

On the plains of Kenya, the African drought of the 1980s forces thousands of baboons to turn on humans for food.

Somewhere underneath the cheap horror movie cliches, and the exploitative use of a real tragedy as the backdrop for those cliches, there's something about In The Shadow Of Kilimanjaro that suggests it was, at one point, intended to be a serious African drama. Director Patel is a Kenyan citizen, it was all filmed on location and uses real animals and real Masai tribespeople where possible. There is a good movie in the concept, but Patel's prior experience as the producer on the raucous Tom Hanks comedy Bachelor Party makes him a poor choice to bring it to the fore. Inevitably, that more interesting movie rarely gets to show its face, smothered as it is by sledgehammer editing, brief splashes of over the top gore and performances from its western cast that range from John Rhys-Davies as a bombastic mine owner, devouring the scenery with almost as much gusto as the primates devour the extras, to 1970s indie heart throb Timothy Bottoms as a tiresomely idealistic game warden who, true to genre form, finds his desire to preserve nature and save lives constantly hampered by bureaucratic officials. That these officials have black faces is often the only indication that this is an African story, as the script pays almost no attention to the actual Africans, and reduces them to background detail while spending painful scenes developing such memorable white characters as Crusty Old Drunk and Tragic Widow. At least the apes are up to the job, as the decision to use actual packs of baboons (augmented with some shrewdly disguised fakes) gives the attack sequences a feral energy that the rest of this predictable yarn fails to match. That it ends with a magic rainfall that immediately makes everything OK again is the final slap in the face, especially considering the real Africa was still barren and starving by the time this movie was hurried onto screens.

Link (1986)

Director: Richard Franklin

Stars: Elisabeth Shue, Terence Stamp, Steven Pinner

An American student, studying in England, accepts an offer to work with her anthropology professor at his home. What he doesn't tell her is that he shares his home with three apes, and one of them is a tuxedo-wearing, cigar-smoking chimp with a serious attitude problem.

Link would be hard to take seriously if you boiled its plot down to the bare essentials. “Monkey butler rampage” would certainly get your attention, but would do a disservice to a movie that, while undoubtedly cheesy as hell, is also genuinely creepy and well made.

Shue stars as Jane, a student who thinks nothing of going to live with Terence Stamp's smarmy, leering, shock-haired academic. She doesn't even think it strange that his only companions are intelligent apes, or that the alpha male, Link, has a cigar habit that would put Groucho Marx to shame.

Yet director Richard Franklin turns the screws slowly but surely, and he's helped enormously by the fact that the ape playing Link is a superb actor. Through clever editing and presumably phenomenal training, Link delivers an actual performance – sullen, apologetic, sad and, inevitably, furious as the occasion demands.

When Link finally does go crazy, having worked out that his owner plans to have him put down, it's truly unnerving. With seemingly every shot achieved using real apes, the movie doesn't need anything more than one insane simian in order to be really scary. It is, in fact, almost a simian twist on Hitchcock's Psycho, which may not be a coincidence given that director Franklin helmed Psycho II in 1983, and originally wanted Anthony Perkins for the role of the professor.

The story flies off the rails a little towards the end, when Jane's chinless boyfriend turns up with his friends, and the collapse into action movie cliché is a poor substitute for the tense character work that precedes it. Even so, Link is a superior example of the killer ape template and well worth seeking out.

Trivia: Link is supposed to be a chimp, but was actually played by an orangutan with dyed black fur.

Monkey Shines (1988)

Director: George Romero

Stars: Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil

Paralyzed in an accident, Alan Mann is rescued from suicidal thoughts by a trained Capuchin monkey named Ella. What he doesn't know is that Ella is psychic and she begins acting out his darkest impulses.

It's a testament to George Romero's skill as a director that this potentially risible monkey riff on Stephen King's Misery works as well as it does for as long as it does. The film is at its best in the quieter moments, building claustrophobic tension out of Alan's helpless situation and the monkey's seemingly unimposing size. The tension between a protagonist unable to defend himself and an antagonist that would otherwise be easily dispatched leads to some truly unnerving sequences. Where the film flounders is in the more outrageous plot developments, as Ella goes out on the prowl, burning Alan's unfaithful girlfriend to death and generally acting like a weirdly tiny and hairy psycho stalker. The finale, in which Alan and Ella fight to the death, is a strange mixture of undeniably tense smaller scenarios lost in a frankly ludicrous concept that only becomes sillier the more you think about it. Still, Monkey Shines is, to date, the only monkey-versus-quadriplegic movie ever made, and that's got to count for something.

Trivia: Watch out for Stanley Tucci in a supporting role as the sloppy surgeon who fails to restore Alan's mobility and then steals his girlfriend just for good measure.

Shakma (1990)

Directors: Tom Logan, Hugh Parks

Stars: Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Roddy McDowall

A group of medical students playing a live action role-playing game in a university building at night are attacked by an enraged baboon.

Notable mostly for the elaborate lengths it goes to in order to get its young cast in a place where they can be mauled by a baboon, Shakma is essentially a simian slasher movie. The details of the plot don't really bear scrutiny – it's never explained why Roddy McDowall and his students inject magic rage juice into the baboon's brain, or what the purpose of their bizarre Dungeons & Dragons adventure is – but the fact that the film uses a live ape for most of its scenes makes it reasonably effective all the same. With its bushy fur and angry red skeletal face, the baboon in question looks like Phil Spector crossed with a skinned dog, and when it goes berserk it's a genuinely terrifying sight, hurling itself at doors, walls and actors alike with unnerving ferocity.

The film's sloppy pacing never allows it to find a successful groove, however, and with most of the cast killed off long before the end it becomes a tiresome cycle of people ducking through doors as Shakma screams and hammers on the other side. The ending is more downbeat than the genre usually allows, but since we care about none of the humans it lacks punch.

Trivia: If Roddy McDowall was cast because of his prior experience with simian politics  in Planet of the Apes, the script doesn't let on. He's a bright spot in an otherwise turgid cast though. Star Christopher Atkins, who was either trying to shed his Blue Lagoon beefcake image or live up to it, can also be found in the low budget killer bird movie, Beaks

Congo (1995)

Director: Frank Marshall

Stars: Laura Linney, Tim Curry, Dylan Walsh

An expedition to the Congo in search of rare diamonds falls foul of an ancient race of apes that protect the gems.

Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, this rather bizarre movie lurches suddenly from old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure to dubious eco-manifesto to political thriller to action blockbuster with no clear road map as to what genre is being attempted. Just when you think things have finally settled down, it turns into a horror movie as an army of squashed-face albino apes attack the heroes. It doesn't help that our nominal leads are Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh, and both are so vanilla that they can't help but be upstaged by their co-stars, including Ernie Hudson with a wandering English accent, Tim Curry with an outrageous Russian accent and Amy, a gorilla who talks through a sign-language activated voice box. Since the main threat of the film comes from apes, it is technically an animal attack movie, but it tries to be so many other things as well that Congo is ultimately best at illustrating just how muddled and desperate big studio blockbusters were in the 1990s.

Trivia: Director Frank Marshall is Steven Spielberg's long-time producing partner. He had a far more effective venture into animal horror with the hit 1990 movie Arachnophobia

Blood Monkey (2007)

Director: Robert Young

Stars: F. Murray Abraham, Matt Ryan, Amy Manson

A mad scientist leads a team of young researchers to find the missing link. The missing links then eat the young researchers.

Another of the Syfy Channel's “maneater” movies, Blood Monkey is as silly as its name suggests, though the presence of Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham livens things up, giving him free reign to ham it up something rotten. The creatures in question are apes, not monkeys, but they definitely deliver on the blood promise of the title, tearing through the blandly attractive younger cast members with all the gusto you'd expect from a DTV horror movie. The story is predictable enough, but it's worth sticking around for Abraham's death scene, which is both grisly and hilarious.

CREEPY CRAWLIES

The insect kingdom
bugs out...

The Naked Jungle (1954)

Director: Byron Haskin

Stars: Charlton Heston, Eleanor Parker, Abraham Sofaer

A South American plantation owner's battle of wits with his feisty mail order bride is interrupted by a relentless army of soldier ants descending on his property.

One the earliest pure animal attack movies, The Naked Jungle is a true product of Old Hollywood with its lush color, steamy melodrama and big star names. Indeed, for the first hour the only battle being fought is the battle of the sexes between Charlton Heston's lantern-jawed entrepreneur and the headstrong young widow who has volunteered to be his wife, played by Eleanor Parker. It's a sensual movie, pushing at the limits of the Hays Code with lots of euphemistic sex talk where unused pianos and locked doors stand in for bedroom experience. But then the ants come, and the movie changes gears in what would have been a startling twist for viewers in 1954. Native extras are reduced to skeletons, buildings crumble and fires blaze as the insects devour everything in their path. It's just the tonic needed to reconcile Heston and his bride, but it also showed Hollywood that mankind's innate fear of the wild was ripe for exploitation.

Them! (1954)

Director: Gordon Douglas

Stars: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon

Atomic fallout transforms desert ants into giant killers. The standard 1950s coalition of scientists and soldiers lead mankind's fight back.

Rarely has cinema so nakedly reflected cultural fears than in the monster movies of the 1950s, in which uncertainty about atomic bomb testing was openly blamed for the creation of dozens of monsters and mutants, often grotesquely magnified versions of real life creatures. This giant ant movie is one of the most famous, and also one of the best. There's genuine grace to way the story builds, from one isolated incident in the New Mexico desert to a tense stand-off in the storm drains of Los Angeles. It's unusual to find such deft pacing in a monster movie – although being produced by Warner Bros rather than a cheapskate independent outfit certainly gives Them! a more glossy cinematic polish. There's humor and timely parody as well – once the ants are revealed, the search is on for “thefts of sugar, syrups and sweets” to pinpoint their movements, and the way the authorities try to track the flying queens by following reports of flying saucers allows the movie to give a nod in the direction of that other great post-war atomic age mythology. Mostly, though, Them! works as a fantastically well-made science fiction horror story. The ant puppets are shrewdly shot to keep them from looking too ridiculous, and the eerie shrill sound of their screeches remains one of the all-time classic sci-fi sound effects, borrowed and reused by dozens of lesser efforts.

Trivia: Them! was originally planned as a color movie to be screened in 3D. At the last minute, Warner Bros cut the budget, unsure that a giant ant movie was worth such investment. As a result, the opening title is the only part of the film not in black and white, and many scenes remain of objects being thrust at the camera. As it turned out, Them! went on to be the highest grossing Warner Bros release of the year, and its success opened the floodgates for many more nuclear-themed creature features.

Beginning of the End (1957)

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Stars: Peter Graves, Peggie Castle, Morris Ankrum

Secret agricultural experiments result in over-sized locusts, which make their way to Chicago devouring crops and bystanders along the way.

An utterly shamless rip-off of Them!, right down to the eerie screeching noise of the gigantic insects, Beginning of the End at least stays true to writer, producer and director Bert Gordon's “monsters first” ethos, spending more time on blown-up footage of actual insects superimposed on scenes of panicking civilians and soldiers, and a lot less time on the half-baked love story between a plucky female reporter and the entomologist who helps her break the story. The movie also deserves credit for allowing its story to go big. So many giant monster films constrain their critters in the easily affordable world of rural locations and studio backlots, so the fact this one leads to the evacuation of a major city is worthy of note.

Trivia: Although the characters continually refer to the creatures as locusts, they appear to be grasshoppers or crickets, since they never fly. Bert I. Gordon would return to the world of giant insects in 1977 for Empire of the Ants which uses much the same special effects techniques, unchanged twenty years later.

The Deadly Mantis (1957)

Director: Nathan Juran

Stars: Craig Stevens, William Hopper, Alix Talton

A giant prehistoric praying mantis is freed from the Antarctic ice by a volcanic eruption and heads for Washington D.C.

Yet another of many giant bug movies that filled up the matinee schedules in the 1950s, The Deadly Mantis at least avoids blaming radiation or scientific tampering for the size and temper of its chitinous creature. Instead, the giant mantis is presented as a simple throwback, a monstrous animal kept in suspended animation by its glacier home.

The early running of this short movie is taken up with the expected B-movie filler, as experts and square-jawed pilots ponderously debate what could have destroyed a remote research station in the Antarctic. Thankfully, The Deadly Mantis becomes a lot more interesting whenever its creature is on-screen. Using a charming mixture of stop motion, puppeteering and better-than-average miniature sets, the film offers some robust action sequences as the mantis perches on top of the Washington Monument, battles the Army and Air Force and eventually hides in the Manhattan Tunnel. The Deadly Mantis may be a lesser known entry in the over-sized bug genre, but it's actually one of the best.

Cosmic Monsters (1958)

Director: Gilbert Gunn

Stars: Forrest Tucker, Gaby Andre, Martin Benson

Experiments with magnetism cause a small English village to be bathed in cosmic radiation. A local vagrant is driven insane, insects grow to enormous size and then an alien turns up...

This quaint British sci-fi potboiler, also released as The Strange World of Planet X, ambles along pleasantly but takes an agonizing amount of time to actually unleash its giant insects on the terribly polite populace. When it does get going the action is surprisingly robust, with some fun scenes of gigantic grasshoppers laying siege to a house, and soldiers battling the bugs. There's even one surprisingly gruesome moment, as we're treated to a close up of a mangled corpse with insects emerging from its face. Things take a turn for the weird when it's revealed that a newcomer to the village is actually an alien, who has come to town to help sort out the problem, just as soon as he's sampled the delights of an English pub. High on charm but short on thrills, Cosmic Monsters is enjoyable fluff.

THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE (1971)

Directors: Walon Green, Ed Spiegel

Stars: Lawrence Pressman

An ostracized “heretic” scientist spells out his research, suggesting that the human race is doomed and that insects are destined to rule the planet.

The Hellstrom Chronicle is different to every other movie in this book. It's a documentary, based on genuine science and made up of actual footage of real insect life. What makes it so interesting, and so deserving of its place in these pages, is the style in which the information is presented.

Actor Lawrence Pressman stars as Nils Hellstrom, the only fictional element in the film. He talks the viewer through his research, and the findings that have led him to be labeled as a crackpot and lunatic by his peers.

Hellstrom is convinced that mankind is doomed, and that the truly dominant species on Earth is the humble insect. Through what was groundbreaking close-up photography at the time, he illustrates his point with footage of such grisly sights as swarms of locusts plastered over the windshield of an airplane, worker bees devouring an unwanted queen bee larvae, the black widow killing her mate and termites battling black ants for the right to inhabit a nest.

Combining the hysteria of a sci-fi thriller and the calm grace of a nature film, The Hellstrom Chronicle is a deeply strange experience, often both beautiful and gross at the same time, and it's made all the more effective for its unorthodox mixture of hard science and melodramatic prophecy. Despite not featuring any scenes of people under attack, it is more creepily effective at making the viewer doubt their place in the world than almost any other movie in this book.

Phase IV (1974)

Director: Saul Bass

Stars: Michael Murphy, Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick

An unexplained cosmic event bestows supernatural intelligence on a colony of desert ants. The ants lay siege to the scientists studying them, in a stand off where the fate of the world may hang in the balance.

Following rather appropriately on the heels of The Hellstrom Chronicle, Phase IV is a curious blend of naturalistic drama and psychedelic sci-fi in which the pulpier aspects of the plot are balanced out by a genuinely eerie tone and a core concept that is intellectually stimulating.

Right from the start, it's clear this won't be a normal horror film, as the first ten minutes are made up of ominously obtuse  narration and wordless scenes of real ants going about their business. Moments of genre cliché slip in later – in the shape of two elderly farmers who refuse to leave their property, even when threatened by the insect menace – but the meat of the piece plays more like a siege from a war film, as two scientists trapped inside their lab try to outwit the ant community outside.

Packed with striking imagery, and only slightly undermined by some flat performances and stiff dialogue, Phase IV is certainly one of the weirdest killer ant films you'll see.

Trivia: Phase IV is the only feature film directed by Saul Bass, the graphic designer famous for his work on the opening credits of many Hitchcock movies, including Psycho.

LOCUSTS (1974)

Director: Richard T. Heffron

Stars:  Ben Johnson, Ron Howard, Katherine Helmond

1943, and a young man is sent home in disgrace from the Navy, much to the disgust of the local townsfolk and his own father. When a swarm of locusts descends on the town, he seizes his chance for redemption.

More of a rural wartime drama than a full-blooded horror thriller, this TV movie is amiable enough though it never really sells the threat that its insect attackers pose. Keeping the drama afloat are Peckinpah regular Ben Johnson as the grizzled farmer, whose feckless son, a suitably indignant Ron Howard, is an endless source of disappointment to him.  The quality of the performers makes up for the long slow passages in which the locusts suddenly disappear, but the climax – in which Howard risks his life by taking to the sky in a crop duster to save the town and redeem himself in the eyes of his father – falls rather flat. Interesting for its cast rather than its story, Locusts is forgettable fluff.

Bug (1975)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Stars: Bradford Dillman, Joanna Miles, Alan Fudge

An earthquake releases a race of flesh-eating fire-starting roaches from the depths of the Earth. Obsessed with discovering their secrets, a local college professor becomes dangerously obsessed.

One of the best things about Bug is that it refuses to stick to the formula set in place by other killer insect movies. Things start out in typical style, with a flurry of horrific attacks in rural small town America, but where other films would have the lead characters spin their wheels for most of the first and second act, working out what was causing the havoc, Bug cuts to the chase nice and early. College professor James Parmiter uncovers the bugs almost immediately, but rather than escalating the threat to disaster movie proportions the story instead gets smaller, focusing on Parmiter's increasingly deranged attempts to understand the insects bizarre biology after his wife dies in a firebug attack. Their ability to spark fires from their rear end, their diet of ash and their sluggish movement are all given vaguely plausible explanations that at least make more scientific sense than the usual “radiation did it” explanations offered up in similar flicks.

Helped along by a jarring discordant electronic soundtrack, the final act plunges into seriously weird and claustrophobic territory, as Parmiter's experiments seem to suggest intelligence – and even a possible demonic origin – for the creatures. For all the silliness of the concept, and some occasionally clumsy model work, the final shots are genuinely eerie. Taken with the previous year's Phase IV and The Hellstrom Chronicle, all three films offer an impressively surreal detour in a genre not known for its introspection.

Trivia: Director Jeannot Szwarc also helmed Jaws 2 while star Bradford Dillman took the lead role in Piranha , and had supporting parts in The Swarm and Chosen Survivors  The interior of Dillman's house was filmed on the old Brady Bunch set after the show was canceled. Bug was co-written and produced by legendary B-movie showman William Castle, the man who put electric buzzers in theater seats for The Tingler, and was the final film to bear his name before his death in 1977.

It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977)

Director: Robert Scheerer

Stars: Robert Foxworth, Lynda Day George, Gerald Gordon

Construction work near a hotel resort disturbs a nest of mutant ants, whose toxic bites can cause instant death.

Also released on home video under the more direct title of Ants!, this benign TV movie follows all the beats of a horror/disaster movie but with none of the tension or urgency. Soap opera subplots abound, with a scheming developer looking to buy a hotel from its elderly wheelchair-bound owner, and a hunky lifeguard embarking on a romance with a pretty backpacker. The script is vanilla to the point of invisibility, while the direction from TV veteran Robert Scheerer is flat and lifeless. Credit where it's due, the movie gets some mileage out of its concept by covering its cast in thousands of real ants, but it's not enough to make it actually scary. People touch the ants, look at their hands or legs in horror, then fall over. At all times, you're uncomfortably aware that they could simply wrap themselves in a blanket and stroll to safety.

Trivia: Several of the stars of Lakewood Manor had greater TV success elsewhere. Lynda Day George was already famous for her role on the original Mission: Impossible TV show, and can also be found battling nature in Day of the Animals  Suzanne Somers would go on to enormous sitcom success in Three's Company, while Robert Foxworth would later be one of the stars of vineyard soap Falcon's Crest and now provides the voice of Ratchet in the Transformers movies. Watch out for an early appearance from Brian Dennehy as the fire chief at the end of the movie.

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: Christopher George, Leslie Nielsen, Richard Jaeckal

Radioactive sludge transforms ordinary ants into gigantic monsters, but their plan involves something more sinister than simply eating people.

Joan Collins headlines a hapless cast of ant victims in this hoary chestnut from Bert I. Gordon, king of B-movies about small things made big. Collins plays an unscrupulous realtor trying to woo a small group of investors into funding her half-baked swamp development, but the giant insects soon spoil the party. The film is notable for its climax, in which it's revealed that the giant ants are actually enslaving humans to run a nearby sugar factory, providing food for the oversized queen ant.  The movie has a definite camp appeal, particularly when Collins is nuzzled to death by a giant ant puppet, but is otherwise an unremarkable slice of B-movie cheese.

CENTIPEDE HORROR (1984)

Director: Keith Li

Stars:  Hussein Abu Hassan, Chu-kwong Chan, F.C. Chan

An insane sorcerer uses his magical powers to get revenge on beautiful women, by making them vomit live centipedes which then eat the women.

Unpleasant and disturbing even by the elastic standards of 1980s Hong Kong horror, this boundary pushing effort follows the template set by a great many other transgressive grindhouse movies by offering long stretches of outright boredom, punctuated by sudden bursts of revolting action. Action, in this context, meaning sleazy nudity, implied rape and toe-curling shots of live insects crawling over – and inside – various screaming, squirming actresses. By turns sickening and tedious, this is strictly for those with an iron constitution.

The Nest (1988)

Director: Terence H. Winkless

Stars: Robert Lansing, Lisa Langlois, Franc Luz

In a bid to find an alternative to pesticides, scientists develop a strain of cockroach that feeds on other bugs. Unfortunately, the cannibal roaches develop a taste for human flesh and set up home in the midst of a small island community.

In the early going, this creepy crawly creation from Roger Corman's production outfit is as predictable and bland as a dozen other killer bug flicks. Stick with it, however, and you'll find a slimy gonzo horror with some unforgettably strange twists. Chief among these is the revelation that the bugs are able to reanimate their chewed up victims with roach-like traits. This leads to a fantastic scene with a zombie cat-roach, and a brilliantly gross encounter in which one of the characters transforms into a mangled human-roach hybird, a change that involves their eyeball falling out and being squished underneath their own insectoid foot. Even the normal kills are agreeably gruesome – one man has no sooner been bitten by a bug than his arm literally drops off. Being a Corman production, the “homages” to other successful movies come thick and fast – scenes from The Thing, Gremlins and The Fly are all blatantly copied – but there's still too much dead air in between the grisly stuff as the cast go through the motions. Worth seeing, but you may want to keep one finger on the fast-forward button.

Trivia: Director Terence Winkless also has a sideline as an actor. He appears in The Nest, and also turns up in Mega Snake and Lake Placid 2

Skeeter (1993)

Director: Clark Brandon

Stars: Tracy Griffith, Jim Youngs, Charles Napier

A struggling desert town is plagued by giant mosquitoes, caused by toxic waste illegally dumped by an unscrupulous developer.

There are several reasons to enjoy Skeeter. One is that it hails from the final days before CGI came to dominate the low budget movie industry, so its over-sized bugs are enjoyably cheesy puppets and the blood is actual sticky red stuff splashed on and around the actors. Another reason is that the supporting cast is made up of wonderful character actors, such as Rambo veteran Charles Napier as a sleazy sheriff, William Sanderson of Blade Runner and TV's True Blood as a fidgety environmental scientist, and Michael J. Pollard, from such cult action classics as Tango & Cash and I Come In Peace. They're all a treat to watch, even in something as low rent as this.

Stacked up against these basic plus points is a terrible lead performance from Jim Youngs, who cruises around on a chopper with his shirt open, carefully sculpted mullet firmly resisting the breeze. Looking for all the world like Jean Claude Van Damme, but without the muscles, moves or cornball charisma, he spends most of the movie having long, boring talks with the girl who left town years before and broke his heart. Which brings us to the real reason Skeeter never lives up to its meager promise: it's painfully dull. Apart from a couple of attacks, the mutant mosquitoes don't make much of an impression until the final twenty minutes, and even then they're kept carefully contained in a mineshaft while our hairspray-assisted hero has a shootout so stiffly staged it wouldn't have passed muster on The A-Team ten years earlier. Even with so much dead air, the movie still has gaping plot holes – such as the evil land baron who causes the whole problem in the first place. He literally vanishes from the movie – one minute he's in a scene with our hero, the next he's gone and is never seen again, his fate – and indeed purpose – never even explained.

Infested (1993)

Director: Tony Randel

Stars: Rosalind Allen, Ami Dolenz, Seth Green

Mutant flesh-eating ticks get a serious case of the munchies when a field of steroid-infused marijuana is burned close to their nest. A group of troubled teens on an outward bound retreat are trapped in the path of the hungry bugs.

Directed with all the gross-out aplomb you'd expect from Tony Randel, a special effects guy whose previous movies include the incredibly gloopy Hellraiser 2, Infested is essentially a live action cartoon served bloody and raw. A pre-fame Seth Green is our nominal hero, a nervous young thing with a collection of phobias, and he's joined by the always reliable B-movie veteran Clint Howard as well as Alfonso Ribeiro, aka Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Clearly desperate to shake off his prissy TV alter ego, here he plays a supposedly hardcore gangsta called Panic, with hilarious results. He gets by far the most bizarrely messy send-off, but thankfully there's enough silly puppetry and old-fashioned slime and gore to mask the terrible script. Far from a classic, but an enjoyably dumb midnight movie all the same.

Trivia: Infested has also been released under the alternate title of Ticks.

Mosquito (1995)

Director: Gary Jones

Stars: Gunnar Hansen, Ron Asheton, Steve Dixon

A UFO crashes in a National Park. When mosquitoes feed on the alien blood of the inhabitants, they become giant killers.

They say don't judge a book by its cover, and the same holds true of goofy B-movies. Judging from the uninspired title, you'd be forgiven for expecting Mosquito to be yet another drab tale of small town folk banding together to fight back against an infestation. Well, that's sort of what happens, but the execution is far from drab.

Director Gary Jones is a veteran of Sam Raimi's production family, having worked on numerous movies and TV shows with the director but most notably as a special effects coordinator on Army of Darkness, the third and silliest of the Evil Dead trilogy. Jones brings a decent facsimile of that same screwball energy and practical expertise to Mosquito, and while the resulting film is still often amateurish and stilted, it's an absolute blast when it comes to the genre elements.

The mosquitoes themselves are wonderful, brought to life through enormous life-sized puppets, slimy props and some delightful stop motion animation. The horror, too, is just the right kind of over the top. A fisherman gets an oversized mosquito proboscis in his eye. A naked woman gets one in her buttocks. Eyeballs pop out on stalks and explode, while giant mosquitoes aplenty are squished, sliced and splattered in bursts of gloopy gore. It's a wet, messy, gloriously tasteless romp, just how a no-budget B-movie should be.

Of course, the script is awful, the story lacks momentum and most of the actors struggle to deliver even the simplest line convincingly, but if you're in the mood for a gory knockabout creature feature stuffed full of old fashioned special effects, Mosquito is more fun than its name suggests.

Trivia: Director Gary Jones went on to helm Spiders and Crocodile 2 , neither of which have the same spirited energy as Mosquito. Ron Asheton, who plays the hapless Park Ranger Hendricks, is better known as the Stooges guitarist who co-wrote many of Iggy Pop's best songs.

Bug Buster (1998)

Director: Lorenzo Doumani

Stars: Randy Quaid, Brenda Epperson, Katherine Heigl

A lakeside town calls in an eccentric exterminator when experimental pesticides create a race of giant flesh-eating super-roaches.

Wacky comic-horror is one of the hardest tonal bullseyes to hit, so it's perhaps no surprise that this broad scattershot effort misses the target. Characters and scenes that should be funny end up grating, while the movie never strikes a balance between its goofier interludes and the surprisingly gory death scenes. As with so many of these films, it's the cast that does the most to make it worth the effort. Randy Quaid holds nothing back as General George S. Merlin, the bug buster who is clearly intent on stealing the crown for Most Bombastic Comic Exterminator from John Goodman in Arachnophobia  Star Trek alums George Takei and James Doohan pop up to supply some cult kudos, while then-unknown Katherine Heigl pays her dues in numerous scenes of gross bugs crawling all over her. The ingredients are here, but director Lorenzo Doumani fails to find the right recipe. Too wacky to work as a horror, but too irritating to fly as a comedy, Bug Buster was always destined for the bottom of Hollywood's shoe.

Legion of Fire: Killer Ants (1998)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: Mitch Pileggi

Volcanic activity in Alaska warms up the ground and creates perfect conditions for a displaced colony of deadly soldier ants to settle in, right next to a small town.

For the last ten years and change the creature feature TV movie has been dominated by the CGI-assisted factory line efforts churned out for the Syfy channel. That makes Legion of Fire (aka Marabunta) one of the last gasps of the old style TV movie, a more sedate mainstream affair designed to elicit mild shocks and manageable thrills between commercial breaks. And it does so with aplomb and anonymous style, as the plot unfurls at an unhurried pace, the actors convince without really making any impression and the occasional gory jolt – a glimpse of severed finger here, a human skull there – is just enough to lodge in the memory of any kids watching past their bedtime. It's a low energy affair though, and while it's an easy film to digest on a lazy afternoon, it's sorely lacking in the visceral charge a real animal horror needs.

They Nest (2000)

Director: Ellory Elkayem

Stars:  Thomas Calabro, Dean Stockwell, John Savage

A small island community off the coast of Maine is infested by flesh-eating armadillo bugs, with paralysing bites and a fondness for nesting inside human hosts.

One of those pleasant surprises, where a movie turns out to be far better than it has any right to be, They Nest rises above the swarm  of similar movies thanks to good old fashioned craft and solid performances from a reliable cast. Melrose Place star Thomas Calabro is the alcoholic surgeon who retreats to the isolated island after being forced to take a leave of absence from his city hospital. Inevitably, he locks horns with the ornery locals who resent his fancy ways and the fact that he bought an old family home that one of the more belligerent islanders believes is his by right. It's a stock set up, but director Elkayem keeps it moving. The animosity feels authentic, the actors are real adults rather than groomed teens fresh from central casting and the script doesn't linger on any one aspect long enough for the cliches to take hold. The bugs, too, are well used. Elkayem clearly knows what he's doing in this department – he came to prominence with his witty 1998 insect horror short Larger Than Life and would go on to direct the tongue-in-cheek spider shocker Eight Legged Freaks as well.

The horror escalates nicely, growing from creepy but bloodless solitary attacks to more squirmingly gruesome scenes as bugs begin to hatch from the townsfolk. By the time the bugs sprout wings and take to the sky in a vast swarm, any concerns about the low budget have been laid to rest.

They Nest never goes the extra distance that would make it a truly great B-movie, but it comes closer than most and is deserving of your attention.

ISLAND OF THE DEAD (2000)

Director: Tom Southam

Stars: Malcolm McDowell, Talisa Soto, Bruce Ramsay

A property tycoon plans to develop New York's Hart Island, home to a vast cemetery where hundreds of thousands of unidentified bodies have been buried over the decades. The restless dead are not happy with being disturbed, and strike back as a swarm of toxic supernatural flies.

There's an absolutely fantastic movie somewhere in Island of the Dead's concept. Hart Island is a real place, with a genuinely ghoulish history, and it represents rich pickings for a scary and smart allegorical horror story. This, sadly, isn't it. McDowell does his usual good job of supplying a solid villainous anchor, but the plot spends more time squirming like a maggot than buzzing like a fly. Deaths are mostly off-screen, or obscured by the film's often impenetrable dark palette, though there are some juicy shots of decomposing bodies for those who hunger for gore. An incongruous hip hop soundtrack, and a cameo from rapper Mos Def, try to draw a line between the tragedy of the forgotten corpses laid to rest in the Long Island Sound and the Bronx ghettos surrounding them, but the intended commentary remains as murky as the cinematography. It's clear that director Tim Southam wanted to create something more meaningful  than the usual TV movie creature feature, and that's to be applauded, but  his ambition seems to have outstretched his budget and ability.

They CRAWL (2001)

Director: John Allardice

Stars: Daniel Cosgrove, Tamara Davies, Dennis Boutsikaris

A series of mysterious deaths has the LAPD stumped. That's because they don't know the culprits are electronically controlled cockroaches, who burrow into their victims and eat their insides.

The cockroaches in this patchwork thriller may crawl, as per the title, but they don't do much else. This is one of those movies where the killer bugs that are all over the DVD cover quickly take a backseat to more predictable thriller elements, most obviously a half-hearted conspiracy mystery. Half the fun, if you can call it that, comes from working out how the film was pieced together based on what footage could be licensed from other movies and which actors  could be lured in for a day of shooting. That's why B-movie veteran Tim Thomerson turns up as an exterminator, only to get munched two minutes later. That's why rapper Tone Loc has one scene as a shady character who tells our female detective hero some information that we already knew. Most surprising of all, Mickey Rourke shows up for a single inexplicable scene as a man who might be the leader of a cockroach cult, before making his getaway by putting his hood up and turning into a stuntman for an extended foot chase that goes nowhere. Clearly, Rourke may have been in one of his many down periods where nobody else would hire him, but whatever money was on the table for They Crawl wasn't enough to justify him breaking a sweat.

Some of the other action scenes are more impressive, but that's because they've been bought in from more robustly budgeted efforts like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat and Last Action Hero, the Keanu Reeves thriller Chain Reaction and the Jackie Chan hit, Rush Hour. Watching the script wriggle itself into position so these borrowed explosions and stunts fit into a story about cockroaches is often more entertaining than the actual plot.

Having spent the entire movie as little more than a scuttling MacGuffin, the cockroaches finally earn their keep in the dying minutes of the film, after the villain has been inexplicably revealed and his nonsensical plot vaguely explained. They join up to form a giant super-cockroach called Asimov, like some insectoid Voltron, but it's too little way too late for a movie that seems more interested in marking time than filling those minutes with anything that makes sense.

BUGS (2003)

Director: Joseph Conti

Stars: Antonio Sabato Jr., Angie Everhart, R.H. Thomson

Construction on the world's deepest subway line disturbs a colony of gigantic prehistoric bugs. An FBI agent, an entomologist and a SWAT team enter the tunnel to eradicate the creatures, but find themselves trapped with the flesh-eating horde.

Unlike so many other creature features, Bugs strikes out into relatively bold new territory: rather than swiping its plot beats from Jaws, it takes them from James Cameron's Aliens instead. So you get a crew of colorful roughnecks fighting a losing battle against skittering insect-like beasts (these look pretty good – director Joseph Conti is a special effects guy who worked on Men in Black) and a series of technical obstacles that must be overcome as the dwindling humans scramble towards their only escape route. The power is out! The oxygen is running low! And now – surprise! - there's a queen bug! There's no futuristic mechanical loader for our heroes to strap into to face her, but there is a small forklift and that has to do. It's cripplingly unoriginal, but not without base charms. It's gloopy and gory, and while the supporting characters are little more than Black Man, Hispanic Man and Woman, star Antono Sabato Jr has a sort of Stallone-esque lunkheaded quality that suits the corny tale being told and stage veteran R.H. Thomson brings more pathos to the role of the tunnel's architect than the movie strictly requires. Certainly not a movie worth going out of your way to see, but if it's coming on TV and you've nothing better to do, it'll pass the time well enough.

CENTIPEDE! (2004)

Director: Gregory Gieras

Stars: Larry Casey, Margaret Cash, Trevor Murphy

American tourists exploring an ancient cave system in India find themselves stalked by a giant centipede.

There's precious little that makes sense in this inept monster movie. A group of friends, none of whom even seem to like each other all that much, decide that the best way to celebrate an upcoming wedding is to fly to India and explore an obscure cave. Despite apparently being experienced cavers, the first thing they do once underground is get hammered on champagne, which is what all the professional spelunkers do. What really kills this clunker is the fact that the whole film is shot so poorly, with awkward claustrophobic camera angles rendered incomprehensible through murky colored lighting. Dark reds, blues and greens smother every scene until it's not even clear what's happening to who. The final act ends up as little more than indistinct shapes grunting and screaming in the gloom. The centipede itself looks like it could be fun – a large rubbery puppet that could be related to the killer molluscs from The Monster That Challenged The World - but, inevitably, the clumsy camerawork means you never get a good look at it.

Locusts: DAY OF DESTRUCTION (2005)

Director: David Jackson

Stars: Lucy Lawless, John Heard, Dylan Neal

A strain of hybrid locusts, able to breed faster, fly further and immune to all pesticides, escapes from a government lab and soon grows to create a giant mega-swarm that threatens America.

A strangely airless disaster movie, which copies all the right elements from similar apocalypse tales, but serves them up so blandly that no sense of peril or threat survives the process. Crucially, while there are many scenes of CGI locust hordes buzzing around and flying towards the camera, the devastation they're supposedly causing remains almost entirely abstract. They bring down a cargo jet, and one character gets nibbled and promptly dies (from no more than minor face wounds, it seems), but for all the grim faces staring at computer consoles in dark government offices, watching a vast green and black cloud cover the entire eastern seaboard, there's simply no indication that anything is actually happening outside. Against such a thin backdrop, attempts to stir up drama by making Lucy Lawless fret about her unplanned pregnancy and estranged husband fall flat. The solution to the locust plague, when it comes, is both preposterous and anti-climactic.

Locusts: THE EIGHTH PLAGUE (2005)

Director: Ian Gilmour

Stars: Dan Cortese, Julie Benz, David Keith

Giant red locusts created by the government to devour other crop-eating insects escape from their laboratory and lay waste to Idaho.

An utterly generic yarn – genetic manipulation, government cover-up, idealistic hero, yada yada yada – served up with the sort of half-assed CGI we've come to expect from Syfy Channel TV movies. There are even the obligatory roles for B-movie veterans like Jeff Fahey and David Keith, as well as a recognizable face slumming for dollars (Dexter star Julie Benz, as stiff and wooden as always). This certainly isn't a movie with innovation on its mind but this effort, also released as Wild Swarms, corners the market in dumb plot twists (the locusts don't attack the hero because he eats organic food) and unlikely scenarios (the military gives a low level USDA lab assistant final say over the plan to unleash pesticides on the bugs). It at least hits the ground running, with none of the trudging first act clutter used to pad out rival flicks, and you're never more than a few minutes away from a gory locust attrack. And it surprisingly gory, given how neutered the TV movie format usually is. The locusts apparently fly fast enough to literally burst through people like bullets, and there are plenty of gooey mangled bodies left in their wake. There are even a few genuinely inspired scenes, such as when the swarm attacks an amusement park, eating the people strapped into the roller coaster and other rides. Locusts: The Eighth Plague is a bad killer insect movie, but at least it's pretty good at being bad, which inches it ahead of the competition.

Glass Trap (2005)

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Stars: C. Thomas Howell, Stella Stevens, Siri Baruc

Giant radioactive ants invade a skyscraper by hitching a ride on illegally imported decorative trees. A small band of unlucky weekend workers must survive the infestation.

The idea of taking the restricted location made popular by movies like The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and giving it an animal attack twist is a good one but prolific B-movie director Fred Olen Ray fails to make the most of the skyscraper setting in this limp low-budget effort. C. Thomas Howell is a black hole at the center of the movie, his ex-con janitor making for an unremarkable hero, and the supporting cast can't seem to work out if they're in a serious horror movie or a goofy spoof. Numerous subplots are dangled – someone is trying to steal data from a computer, there's a glamor photo shoot on the roof and a Department of Agriculture agent is slowly investigating the smuggled trees that carried the ants – but none of them come to much. Things get even more ridiculous when Karate Kid villain Martin Kove turns up as a trigger happy SWAT captain who apparently kills both his own men and civilians with impunity. The ants themselves are a disappointment, brought to halfhearted life by bland black rubber models and inept CGI. Their attacks are neither scary nor gory, and the most gruesome moments come from a couple of gooey skeletons. With a bigger budget and a lot more ambition, a skyscraper swarming with killer ants could make for a fantastic movie. This isn't it.

INSECTICIDAL (2005)

Director: Jeffrey Scott Lando

Stars: Meghan Heffern, Rhonda Dent, Travis Watters

A dowdy student's insect experiments result in a night of horror, as giant bugs lay siege to her sorority house.

Blood, boobs and bugs. That's the low-hanging fruit aimed for by this low-tech romp, and it does a surprisingly good job of delivering on its lowbrow promise. Nobody will be walking away with acting honors, though Maghan Heffern brings a welcome touch of depth to the ugly duckling biology student whose vague thesis inexplicably results in the giant bugs. Don't come looking for logic either. Despite clearly being in a populated area, not once does anybody come to investigate the screams from the sorority house, or notice the eight-foot praying mantis hanging around in the yard. The bugs themselves are good fun though, digitally created but animated with a jittery style that makes them look more like stop-motion puppets. The film is most entertaining in the early stages, as it racks up kill after sleazy kill, and loses steam towards the end once the cast has been reduced to a few determined heroes and the bitchy sorority leader who has turned into a scabby faced zombie thing for no apparent reason. Even so, Insecticidal is a good example of how even the lowest budget can produce a good, goofy time if spent with enough enthusiasm.

Destination: Infestation (2007)

Director: George Mendeluk

Stars: Jessalyn Gilsig, Antonio Sabato Jr, Serge Houde

A flight to America is infested with a colony of black bullet ants from the rainforest.

A standard airborne disaster movie with a mild insect twist, this TV movie is a more complete effort than many of its ironic modern B-movie contemporaries, but conviction and earnestness aren't enough to make up for the predictable plot and cliched characters. The ants themselves are realized through some decent close-up photography augmented with less convincing CGI specks for wider swarm shots, but even though the real life bullet ant is a pretty nasty little creature the film does little to sell us on the idea that they're a legitimate danger to the characters. “Stronger, faster, they may even be smarter, but they're definitely deadlier” intones a pre-Glee Jessalyn Gilsig as the entomologist who just happens to be on board the troubled flight, but as the ants seem to pose more of a threat to the hydraulics than the passengers, their danger remains largely abstract.

The Hive (2008)

Director: Peter Manus

Stars: Tom Wopat, Kal Weber, Elizabeth Healey

While fighting a colony of soldier ants in Asia, an American team of scientific bug-busters discovers that their insect enemies have taken on other-worldly characteristics.

The Hive sneaks up on you. It starts out like a dozen similar movies, with workmanlike actors menaced by swarms of computer generated dots that are supposed to be killer ants. Then, just as you think you've worked out how this is going to go, it starts to get weird. At first, it's just the revelation that our heroic entomologist exterminators are packing Ghostbusters-style backpacks that seem to blast the ants with blue lazer bolts. Then the ants start forming undulating tentacles and leaving behind pheromone trails in the shape of molecular symbols. By the time our heroes have entered the ant's nest and discovered an ant-powered super-computer that bargains with them for control of the Earth, all bets are off. And that's without even mentioning former Duke of Hazzard Tom Wopat, looking a lot like Mel Gibson, and suffering from an ant lodged in his brain that makes him hallucinate and mumble like a crazy person. Those weak CGI effects still let the movie down, and the finale is never quite as outrageous as the plot twists that lead up to it, but when most killer insect TV movies are content to be as generic and obvious as possible, this one earns a lot of credit for being absolutely nuts.

GiANTS (2008)

Director: David Huey

Stars: Mel Novak, Tina-Desiree Berg, Eric Von Kritlow

Thousands of giant ants run rampant in California after being extracted from prehistoric ice.

The punningly titled GiANTS commits many of the sins you'd expect from a recent straight-to-DVD low budget monster movie. The special effects range from average to poor, the cast wouldn't know subtlety if it bit them on the ass, and the story is really just a loose compilation of scenes that sounded cool on paper. There are a couple of ticks in the plus column though. For one, the movie is endearingly sincere, buoyed along by an apparently genuine desire to make an epic monster movie on a budget that could barely cover sandwiches for the average movie crew. The movie doesn't let this hinder its ambitions, and happily comes up with ways to show its scuttling critters attacking the Hollywood sign (leading to one of the better sight gags in the film) and the Golden Gate Bridge. So many cheap movies try to hide their lack of resources by shrinking their stories, and GiANTS earns credit for attempting the impossible.

Infestation (2009)

Director: Kyle Rankin

Stars: Chris Marquette, Brooke Nevin, Ray Wise

Lazy office worker Cooper wakes up covered in webs and discovers that the world has been taken over by giant bugs that are putting people in cocoons and mutating them. Together with a small group of survivors, Cooper tries to work out what they should do next.

Clearly modeled on British cult movie Shaun of the Dead, Infestation's unusual take on the killer insect genre is effective in more ways than one. The bugs themselves are a mixture of practical and CGI effects, and given the evidently small budget they're surprisingly good. There's the requisite amount of goo and gross stuff, but never so much that it becomes disgusting or mean-spirited. It's a horror comedy, but the script never lets those dueling elements overwhelm each other. The situation is horrific, but the characters are funny – in particular star Chris Marquette who channels 1980s John Cusack to good effect. There are plot twists, shocks and genuine character growth, a romance that works and deaths that have emotional weight. It's a pity that things that should be a basic requirement of any movie warrant special praise, but in a genre where too many movies are content to make the minimum effort , Infestation stands out as an example of how low budget indie horror doesn't have to be constrained by formula.

A STING IN
THE TALE

“We're gonna need a
bigger bug spray...”

Monster from Green Hell (1958)

Director: Kenneth G. Crane

Stars: Jim Davis, Robert Griffin, Barbara Turner

Scientists in America launch a rocket containing insect samples to test the effects of cosmic radiation on living tissue. The rocket crashes in Africa, and disgorges its cargo of mutated wasps which quickly grow to giant size and start stinging their way across the savannah.

For a movie set in the wilds of Africa, with giant killer wasps as its antagonists, Monster from Green Hell is an extraordinarily dull movie. For one thing, it's made up largely of stock safari footage, padded out with scenes taken from the 1939 Spencer Tracy movie, Stanley and Livingstone. The scientists whose experiment created the wasps journey across country to put an end to the menace, but the special effects are rarely up to the job. Stop motion animation and puppets are used to bring the beasts to life, but they appear so rarely, and look so pathetic when they do, that the film is more chore than pleasure to sit through.

Genocide (1968)

Director: Kazui Nihonmatsu

Stars: Keisuke Sonoi, Yûsuke Kawazu, Emi Shindo

US soldiers stationed on a small Japanese island find themselves facing a swarm of mutated insects whose stings lead to insanity and death.

Genocide, or Konchû daisensô to use its original Japanese title, is an unpleasant movie. Digging around in the cultural resentment between Japan and the US, it quickly sidelines its insect threat in favor of ridiculous melodrama and cheap exploitation. Risible Holocaust-related plot twists soon pile up, and numerous scenes of torture and attempted rape give it a sordid aftertaste. Slow, and sorely devoid of thrills or excitement, it's best left on the shelf.

Killer Bees (1974)

Director: Curtis Harrington

Stars: Edward Albert, Kate Jackson, Gloria Swanson

The prodigal son of a Californian wine family returns home with his new wife, but his domineering matriarchal grandmother has a way of dealing with those who defy her, and it involves a swarm of unusually obedient killer bees.

As much a Gothic melodrama as a horror film, this TV movie manages to evoke an enjoyably brooding atmosphere despite the limitations of the format. Kate Jackson, still a few years from finding fame as one of Charlie's Angels, makes for an appealing ingenue, thrust into a grand old lineage with dark secrets aplenty, but it's Gloria Swanson, grand dame of the silent era, who steals the show. Her turn as Madame Von Bohlen is by turns bizarre, camp and thoroughly entertaining, snapping and smiling through a thick European accent as her beloved bees swarm all over her. The movie draws a thin line between the matriarchal Von Bohlen family and the relationship between the workers and queen of the hive, but mostly it's content to have fun with its over-the-top yarn of sinister vineyards and bee sting revenge.

Trivia: Killer Bees was one of Gloria Swanson's final roles. She'd been off the screen for eight years when it came around, and she managed only one other movie – Airport '75 – before retiring for good. She died in 1983. Director Curtis Harrington preceded Killer Bees with another animal-themed TV horror, The Cat Creature and later returned to the genre with Devil Dog in 1978.

The Savage Bees (1976)

Director: Bruce Geller

Stars: Ben Johnson, Michael Parks, Paul Hecht

A swarm of African killer bees reaches the United States on a freighter, and makes its way towards New Orleans as Mardi Gras approaches.

If you want a neat illustration of how Jaws changed the animal attack genre forever, just compare The Savage Bees, released the year after Jaws hit, to Killer Bees, released the year before. Where Killer Bees was a strange melodrama with a bee motif, The Savage Bees is essentially Jaws with stingers. Our heroes are civic-minded cops, pathologists and scientists, aware of the danger before anyone will believe them. There's the big public celebration that threatens to be derailed by nature's fury, and money-minded officials opting to protect the town's income rather than its population. That's not to say The Savage Bees is a wash out. It's formulaic, but with enough pace and energy to make it worthwhile, and the scene where a cop pulls the grisly remains of a sting victim out of the water is pretty strong stuff for a TV movie.

Sam Peckinpah regular Ben Johnson makes an appealingly ornery lawman, seemingly more concerned with avenging the death of his dog, while Michael Parks, now a Tarantino favorite, brings his usual laconic charm to the proceedings. The New Orleans setting offers a few fun twists as well. One tragic plot twist hinges on the fact that someone has dressed as a pirate for the festivities, while the tense and surprisingly low-key climax takes place in the shiny new Superdome, which opened the previous year.

Sequel: The Savage Bees was popular enough to earn a sequel, Terror out of the Sky, in  1978. In the time in between, writer Guerdon Trueblood scripted two more creepy crawly TV movies – the killer ant flick It Happened At Lakewood Manor and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo  He also went on to provide the story, such as it was, for Jaws 3

The Swarm (1978)

Director: Irwin Allen

Stars: Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark

A swarm of billions of lethal African bees descends on the south western United States, starting with a missile base, then working its way up through a small town until Houston itself is in their sights.

“Bees! Bees! Millions of bees!”, cries an ill-fated helicopter pilot early on in this spectacularly awful effort from self-proclaimed master of disaster Irwin Allen, handily illustrating both the nature of the antagonists and the depths of the dialogue at the same time.

Michael Caine occupies the starring role, playing a shouty entomologist who shouts a lot about killer bees. He's joined by a typically star studded cast, as Allen follows the formula that served him so well on The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Katharine Ross, Fred MacMurray, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia DeHavilland, Patty Duke, Jose Ferrer – it's a veritable buffet of top class Hollywood talent, and Allen squanders them all.

The risible script doesn't give them much to work with, and Allen's soap opera plotting doesn't help either, but the performances are so consistently bad across the board that somebody clearly asked these screen legends to ham it up beyond all human endurance. Poor DeHavilland's theatrical squawk of dismay upon seeing school children stung to death – a sort of strangled “Neeyooaargh!” noise – has to be seen to be believed.

But the problems don't end there. The film is stupefyingly overlong, running at two hours in its original release and a mind-numbing two and a half hours in its extended DVD cut. There's little of consequence in that time, other than halfhearted romantic subplots and endless scenes of Michael Caine shouting very loudly in front of banks of flashing science equipment, so the actual bee attacks are so widely spaced out that all tension is lost.

It's not just that The Swarm is a bad movie. The “animal attack” genre being what it is, this book is full of films with weak scripts, hammy performances and laughable plots. No, what makes The Swarm so insufferable is the hubris of it. It's in the interminably self important running time, the prestige cast and Jerry Goldsmith's bombastic score. This is a movie that thinks itself above the common drive-in herd, while committing all the same crimes.

The Swarm was a critical and commercial flop on its release, barely making back half its inflated budget in the few weeks theaters managed to keep it in circulation, and it conclusively spelled the end of Irwin Allen's box office reign.

Trivia: The production hired people to individually remove the stings from thousands of bees for the film's swarm sequences, so that the actors could let the insects crawl over them without risk.

The Bees (1978)

Director: Alfredo Zacarias

Stars: John Saxon, Angel Tompkins, John Carradine

African killer bees are smuggled into the USA and proceed to take over the country.

When jumping aboard a popular bandwagon, the humble low budget exploitation movie has two options. One is to play it down the middle, and deliver the exact formula the audience expects for a fraction of the cost of rival studio films. The other option is to go weird, and take the story in directions that more respectable productions might otherwise avoid. This wonderfully insane effort from Alfredo Zacarias thankfully opts for number two.

John Saxon, apparently channeling Adam West's Batman, stars as a vaguely defined businessman-slash-scientist-slash-karate-kicking secret agent. He's helped in this regard by a frail looking John Carradine, sporting a marvelous German accent, and Angel Tompkins as Carradine's niece, who inevitably falls into bed with Saxon almost immediately.

They all become embroiled in a needlessly complex plot to smuggle deadly bees into the US to harvest their royal jelly for cosmetics, but a series of bizarre accidents and unlikely contrivances find the bees let loose on America. The early going is pretty standard fare for the genre, but things get brilliantly silly in the second half. Some of the goofy moments are nothing more than small croutons of insanity floating in the film's wacky soup. A cowboy asks two young boys to catch some bees in a paper bag because their stings help with his rheumatism, for example. Other weird flourishes are more closely tied to the plot, such as Saxon's plan to use pheromones – pronounced “ferones” for no good reason – to turn the bees gay. That doesn't work, and so we're treated to what is certainly one of the best final act twists in movie history, as Saxon finds a way to talk to the bees, and learns that their deadly swarm is a way of warning mankind to stop polluting. This leads to a fantastic climax, in which a swarm of killer bees crashes into the United Nations to lay down its insect ultimatum. The best ever conclusion to a killer bee movie? Absolutely.

Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare (1995)

Director: Rockne S. O'Bannon

Stars: Robert Hays, Nancy Stafford, Ryan Phillippe

Africanised killer bees reach American shores and begin forming a primary colony near a small town.

Director Rockne S. O'Bannon is best known as the creator of TV shows like Farscape, Alien Nation and SeaQuest DSV, but whatever charm or ambition he showed there is absent for this rote retread of the usual animal attack cliches. If anything, Deadly Invasion earns credit for taking an unusually realistic approach to its creatures – the bees are shown as deadly only in large numbers and they act much as real bees do. The science may be sound but the plot flounders badly in the second half, as the action switches to focus on one family taking refuge in the house from the swarm. With Robert Hays playing precisely the sort of reluctant hero role he memorably lampooned in Airplane, it's very hard to take seriously.

HELL SWARM (2000)

Director: Tim Matheson

Stars:  Boyd Kestner, Kathryn Morris, Amanda Welles

An executed convict is brought back to life as a secret agent in the battle against alien invaders who want to take over the Earth using killer bees.

As incomprehensible as it sounds, this weak riff on the rambling conspiracies of The X-Files sells itself on the threat of death by alien-powered bee stings, but is really little more than a jumble of genre cliches in search of a coherent story. The bees themselves don't make an appearance until the very end, and the whole thing is directed like a 1991 music video for an unsigned R&B act hoping to get on MTV. Once again, you'll find that the animal attack elements make for an eye-catching and alluring title, but often fail to manifest in the movie itself.

Trivia: Hell Swarm was directed by Tim Matheson, best known as one of the stars of National Lampoon's Animal House. Hell Swarm was one of his first efforts as a director, but thankfully he managed to calm down the garish edits and limp hip hop beats in his subsequent outings behind the camera. He's now helmed episodes of dozens of hit TV shows, such as Burn Notice, Suits, A Town Called Eureka, The West Wing and more.

FLYING VIRUS (2001)

Director: Jeff Hare

Stars: Gabrielle Anwar, Craig Sheffer, Rutger Hauer

Genetically engineered killer bees, designed to spread a deadly plague, get loose on a flight from the Amazon to New York.

A film with a real identity crisis, Flying Virus starts off with a jungle-based action sequence that looks like it came from a 1980s Chuck Norris movie, as mercenaries under the command of Rutger Hauer's pot-bellied villain lay waste to an Amazonian village. There's a weird soap opera interlude as we meet our heroes – British actress Gabrielle Anwar and her estranged husband, played by Craig Sheffer. The film is vague as to what these characters actually do, so they simply chase after trouble and put themselves in danger because it's a movie and that's what happens. There's another sharp narrative turn once a case of killer bees is loaded onto a plane to the US at which point it segues into a 1970s style disaster movie, as Sheffer becomes the de facto leader of the passengers struggling to contain the insects using duct tape and curtains, while Anwar chases a serum on the ground for the virus that the bees carry.

There are also conspiracy elements galore, slightly odd diversions into wacky comedy and a vague stab at politics once an idealistic eco-terrorist known as Savior enters the mix.

It's as if someone took five or six direct-to-DVD thrillers at random, tossed them in a blender and then tried to juggle with the messy result. What you get is an often incomprehensible but still rather enjoyable guilty pleasure, even if the killer bees are often lost in the genre pile-up. There's some weak CGI, of course, but the reliance on old school stunt work, with people somersaulting away from explosions as jeeps are overturned in slow motion, gives it a scrappy retro appeal. Praise too for Rutger Hauer, who is so clearly unconcerned with the quality of the movie that his bizarre spaced-out performance becomes incredibly hypnotic. His fate, when it inevitably comes, is so hilariously leftfield for a killer bee movie that it's worth sticking around for.

Trivia: Keep an eye open for the creepy doctor who attends to Anwar rather too closely when she's hospitalized early in the movie. It's a weird and ultimately pointless cameo from David Naughton, star of American Werewolf in London.

Killer Bees (2002)

Director: Penelope Buitenhuis

Stars: C. Thomas Howell, Tracy Nelson, Fiona Loewi

The rural Washington town of Sumas is being bled dry by a ruthless mayor who wants to sell out to a giant MegloMart store. Then the African killer bees arrive...

With its subplot about a retail conglomerate disrupting a small community, a smarter movie might have done more to play with the parallels between the corporate hive mentality and the literal killer bees that torment the cast, but Killer Bees sadly shows little interest in being smart. That's not to say it's bad though, or at least not terrible by killer bee TV movie standards. There are some well-sketched and likeable characters, not least Fiona Loewi as a bee expert with multiple sclerosis who uses stings to stimulate her immune system. She even manages to keep a straight face when forced to act shocked that the swarm is heading for – cue ominous music – the town's honey festival! Sadly, despite a couple of reasonably effective scenes of swarm terror it all fizzles out at the end, with a rather dull and illogical scene in which a handful of survivors – including the estranged family of star C. Thomas Howell's sheriff – are trapped in a schoolhouse with the lethal swarm. Add in bees that are often little more than computer-generated black specks, flying in hilariously neat lines, and you've got a movie that tries harder than most, but fails to stand out.

DEADLY SWARM (2003)

Director: Paul Andresen

Stars: Shane Brolly, Kaarina Aufranc, J. Patrick McCormack

A truck crashes outside a small Mexican town, releasing a swarm of lethal Guatemalan wasps, being smuggled across country by a sinister American doctor. The expected trio of stoic lawman, hunky scientist and feisty journalist combine their efforts to save the day.

The Mexican location is all that sets this typical DTV thriller apart from its peers, and it's easy to pick out the familiar elements seen in a dozen other movies. There's a villain who wants to use the wasp venom to create a miracle cure for cancer, regardless of how many people have to die along the way. There's the small town preparing for a festival in just a few days. And, of course, there's an obstinate and corrupt mayor who ignores the warning of our heroes until it's too late. There are a few perfomances to savor in amongst the cliches though. Kaarina Aufranc brings more personality and spark to the character of the flirty investigative journalist than the script demands, while Mexican character actor Pepe Serna (a dead ringer for George W. Bush) brings salty, laconic charm to the local policía commandante. It's a lifeless, inert movie though, running through stock scenarios with little energy and papering over the large wasp-free gaps in the story with low budget action scenes that fail to convince. The wasps themselves are too often just a speckling of black CGI dots, and the overall effect is yet another standard shelf-filler that isn't worth making an effort to track down.

Trivia: Irish actor Shane Brolly followed his lead turn in Deadly Swarm with a major role in the 2003 vampires vs werewolves hit Underworld. He's stayed with that series through three sequels. Director Paul Andresen, on the other hand, was last behind the camera for the Insane Clown Posse movie Big Money Rustlas. He's also the cinematographer for such reality TV hits as Ax Men and Storage Wars: Texas.

SWARMED (2005)

Director: Paul Ziller

Stars: Michael Shanks, Carol Alt, Richard Chevolleau

An experimental pesticide turns normal yellowjacket wasps into incredibly aggressive killers with lethal stings. Inevitably, the swarm heads for a small town about to hold a big celebration.

A blandly efficient run through a familiar formula, Swarmed doesn't waste any time in getting its wasp yarn started but nor does it bother to do anything that might surprise or excite the viewer. Everything unfolds exactly as it does in dozens of similar films, and the cast plays it straight down the middle as well, never bad enough to be distracting but never invested enough in their characters to draw you in. There's one good gory jolt, when a wasp stings a character in the eyeball and their body is later discovered with a gruesome bloody empty socket, but that's the limit of the movie's horror credentials. Perhaps most memorable is how ridiculous the movie gets as it fights to stay as close to formula as possible. The Indiana town of Dundas is celebrating its annual burger cook-off, an event so enthralling that not only will it be broadcast on national television but it's been sponsored by a colorful and corrupt businessman who sells “tastee” barbecue sauce. For some reason, the success of the burger cook-off and the success of trading in stock options in the barbecue sauce company are inextricably linked, a little bit of corporate intrigue that predictably never amounts to anything.

Trivia: Swarmed reunited director Paul Ziller and co-star Carol Alt after they worked together on the killer fish movie Snakehead Terror the previous year. The barbecue sauce salesman was played by Tim Thomerson, veteran of the Trancers series and many other low budget gems. He can also be found in a small cameo in the killer cockroach movie They Crawl

KillER BeeS (2005)

Director: Norihisa Yoshimura

Stars: Saki Kagami, Nana Kasai, Yuriko Sakuma

A group of young Japanese girl scouts head into the wilderness on a camping trip, but provoke the anger of extremely aggressive and venomous bees.

You'd be forgiven for expecting a Japanese killer bee movie to be an outrageous and over the top live action anime, perhaps with stings that cause people to mutate and explode. With expectations duly warped by years of “extreme Asian cinema” imports, the fact that Killer Bees (or Killing Bee to give it the literal title translation) is actually a sombre and moody survival thriller comes as quite a surprise. For over half the movie, it doesn't even rely on the easy scares of giant swarms. Instead, it plays on the instinctive panic we all feel when a single bee is buzzing around us. Amplify that with the knowledge that a single sting could kill you, and you're close to understanding how this film manages to make solitary tiny insects into credible threats. The story never really builds up much steam, however, focusing too much on the wailing and sobbing of the girls as they're picked off one by one and doing little to escalate things in an exciting way. This does at least give the proceedings a bleak tone, as it's never clear whether any of them will make it back to civilization alive. Cheap computer generated bees are the film's biggest failing, with otherwise effective attack scenes undone by cheesy point-of-view shots and a general lack of punch. Still, it's a refreshing change from the usual US disaster movie template, and a curious little film worth checking out.

Black Swarm (2007)

Director: David Winning

Stars: Sebastien Roberts, Sarah Allen, Robert Englund

Genetically altered wasps set up home in the New York suburb of Black Stone, where their stings begin turning the residents into mindless shuffling drones.

There's a fine art to B-movie acting. Call it the Vincent Price factor. It involves walking a delicate line between taking the material too seriously, and not taking it seriously enough. The masters of the form are able to engage with often ridiculous scripts and elevate them by finding just the right tone.

Robert Englund, best known as Freddy Krueger  in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, is one such master and his presence in this alternately tedious and insane killer wasp flick, playing a bug expert who is both sinister and avuncular, works wonders for its entertainment value. The plot lurches wildly between dreary soap opera nonsense and bizarre sci-fi excess, as the new deputy sheriff in town wrestles with her feelings for her dead husband's twin brother while townsfolk stagger around like zombies, occasionally vomiting swarms of wasps at each other. Those wasps, at least, are pretty well realized and don't look overly digital, and there are some fun gloopy wounds and sores to go with Englund's knowing performance (there's a close-up of an Elm Street sign, of course).

It's just a shame that having come up with the the rather brilliant concept of bug-spewing wasp-zombies it all fizzles out with scenes that make no sense – a blind woman drags a child outdoors to keep her safe from the swarm at her window, for example – and it all leads to a drab confrontation underground where it becomes clear that the whole human-wasp-host idea was used because it's cheaper to have extras shuffling around pawing at the heroes than insect special effects.

Die Bienen - Tödliche Bedrohung (2008)

Director: Michael Karen

Stars: Janin Reinhardt, Klaus J. Behrendt, Stephan Luca

A trainee doctor returns home to the island of Mallorca, where her father ends up in intensive care following a bee sting. She discovers that a deadly hybrid species has been released from a science lab.

A flat and tedious German TV movie, most commonly available outside of its home country under the title Killer Swarm. The actors involved may well be masters of their craft – it's hard to tell with the awful English dubbing – but the fact that the film is both shot and structured like a bad 1970s soap opera doesn't do much to raise expectations. As flimsy a piece of plotting as you'll find in the genre, the story clatters along propelled by contrivances and coincidences that are stupid enough to distract but not audacious enough to amuse. Would you believe that the taxi driver who collects our female doctor from the airport turns out to be a retired entomologist? A retired entomologist with a six-pack and bulging biceps? That's the level the film is working at, and it doesn't get much better when a fellow insect scientist descends into gun-toting villainy for no obvious reason other than the need to get the plot moving. The bees themselves are variable in quality. Real bees are used for close ups, but for the most part you'll be seeing computer-generated clouds of black specks, swirling over footage of sunbathers as they scream and roll around on the ground. Even then, there are very few deaths and no scenes that will even come close to scaring the viewer.

The ending is particularly unsatisfying, with the bees defeated in the most anti-climactic fashion possible, and a series of lame denouements that follow, padding out the running time while resolving plot threads you've long since stopped caring about.

DRAGON WASPS (2012)

Director: Joe Knee

Stars: Corin Nemec, Dominika Juillet, Benjamin Easterday

A scientist searching for her missing father in the jungles of Belize joins forces with US soldiers when voodoo drug smugglers and giant fire-breathing wasps attack.

A low rent version of Predator, with indistinct digital blurs that are supposed to be terrifying giant wasps, this is one of those movies that somehow manages to fill eighty minutes without anything important happening. There's lots of noise and smoke, but if you look any closer there's almost nothing underneath. Also largely absent: killer wasps. They're on-screen for maybe three minutes in total, with the bulk of the running time spent following Corin Nemec's bland Army man as he schleps around repetitive green scenery. The fact that these wasps breathe fire is barely even referenced, and it certainly isn't used to create any kind of interesting challenges for our stock heroes to overcome. There are a couple of moments of decent gore towards the end, as wasps hatch from human hosts, but otherwise this is a movie that buzzes past without leaving a single memorable scene or character in its wake.

AGGRESSIVE ARACHNIDS

“Come into my parlor,
said the spider to the fly”

Tarantula (1955)

Director: Jack Arnold

Stars: Christopher George, Leslie Nielsen, Richard Jaeckal

A scientist working on a new kind of radioactive nutrient in small town Arizona accidentally unleashes a gigantic spider on the local population.

Smart and pacey, Tarantula doesn't fully reveal its oversized spider until very close to the end of its economical running time, yet the film never feels slow or padded out with superfluous chatter. That's thanks to a witty script, well-rounded characters and a genuinely creepy sub-plot about human deformity brought about by the experimental hormones,  all of which help the story to keep moving forwards without relying too heavily on its monster. Not that the movie shirks its responsibilities in that department. The spider is brilliantly realized through sophisticated matte effects, allowing a real tarantula to appear towering over highways and mountains. It's just a pity that the movie comes to a typically abrupt 1950s B-movie ending as the heroic Air Force bombs the creature and kills it instantly, with the end credits crashing in before the audience has even realized that it's all over.

With its corny dialogue, fear of science and love of military strength, Tarantula follows the 1950s B-movie template to the letter but that's because, along with the similarly impressive Them! , it helped to put that template in place. It's just a shame that so few of the movies that followed in their wake could pull off the same confident balancing act.

Trivia: Watch out for the fighter pilot who leads the military attack on the spider at the end of the movie. It's a young Clint Eastwood, making his movie debut.

The Black Scorpion (1957)

Director: Edward Ludwig

Stars: Richard Denning, Carlos Rivas, Mara Corday

A 9,000 foot volcano erupts in Mexico, releasing a race of giant man-eating scorpions from their subterranean lair.

In many ways The Black Scorpion follows the 1950s giant bug template to the letter. It's slow to start, features a perfunctory romantic subplot, a precocious imperiled kid and a daring American scientist who saves the day. The plot, too, follows a familiar trajectory as an uneventful first act follows the characters as they slowly close in on a fact the audience has known all along – it's giant scorpions! - before building to a climax in which the creatures face the military in a final showdown.

What The Black Scorpion has in its favor is Willis O'Brien, the stop motion animation genius who brought King Kong to life. This was one of the last films O'Brien worked on, but even with retirement looming his attention to detail makes the scuttling behemoths more convincing and awe inspiring than the surrounding movie actually deserves. His skill also ensures that where similar movies would hold back on the monster action, this movie at least serves up some memorable sequences, such as a passenger train being derailed by a horde of scorpions and the climactic battle inside a stadium, where the biggest scorpion fights tanks and helicopters.

Sadly, the movie's limited budget wins out, and O'Brien's charming effects work is augmented rather too often by a crude scorpion puppet (complete with facial hair and drool) and, in the movie's cheapest moments, ghostly matte shadows projected on top of the live action.

Even with those goofy elements, and despite uniformly bland performances, flat photography and sluggish pacing from veteran TV director Edward Ludwig, The Black Scorpion is required viewing for aficionados of stop motion special effects.

Trivia: Heroic lead Richard Denning is better known for his role in Creature from the Black Lagoon. He went on to play Governor Paul Jameson on Hawaii Five-O.

Earth vs The Spider (1958)

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Stars: Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson

The inhabitants of a small town band together to fight a giant tarantula that emerges from a nearby cave system.

While most giant bug movies start slowly before finally getting to the good stuff in the final reel, Bert I. Gordon followed his giant grasshopper movie, Beginning of the End , with this spider flick that inverts the usual genre formula. This is a movie that hits the ground running, with a gruesome car accident, and wastes no time in getting its over-sized arachnid on the screen. Within the first half hour, the beast has not only been found and identified, but seemingly defeated. Its bug-sprayed body is brought back to the high school gym, where it lurches back into life, seemingly revived by the toe-tapping beats of the local rock and roll band. A fun little rampage through the town follows, but it's only in the final scenes, when most B-movies are just getting into gear, that this story runs out of juice. Two teens get trapped in the caves with the spider, and spend far too long wandering around, moping and screaming. By the time the spider is finally finished for good – thanks to an electrical rig rather clumsily foreshadowed earlier in the film – the momentum has been lost. Even so, this is a decent enough entry and the combination of a live tarantula, made gigantic thanks to impressive matte effects, and some creepy corpse puppets makes for an enjoyable drive-in throwback.

Trivia: Bert I. Gordon was sure to include a movie theater in the town, so he could plug his earlier hits, such as The Amazing Colossal Man. He went on to helm more giant animal movies – Food of the Gods and Empire of the Ants - in the 1970s.

The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

Director: Bill Rebane

Stars: Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Robert Easton

A miniature black hole crashes on a Wisconsin farm, and begins spitting out rocks that hatch into tarantulas. Soon, a fifty foot spider is roaming the state, causing havoc.

The Giant Spider Disaster, as director Bill Rebane calls it, was the first in a brief flurry of spider movies to hit in the mid to late 1970s.  “You know the movie Jaws?”, asks the sheriff at one point. “Well this makes it look like a goldfish!”

Bold words, and not ones supported by the actual movie he's appearing in. The plot is a wonderful stew of steaming nonsense, ditching the usual “atomic radiation” angle of most giant bug movies and instead sending its eight-legged critters into action through a pan-dimensional rip in space-time. Not that this changes them in any way – they're all clearly normal Earth tarantulas, crawling around while various bad actors scream and flail around in fake cobwebs.

It's the titular giant spider that makes this collection of poorly shot scenes and clumsy edits so memorable though. Built on a car chassis, its huge furry legs look more cuddly than terrifying, while its enormous light bulb eyes are strangely cute. It is, however, occasionally effective. One scene, in which it looms over a hill towards our heroes, is genuinely sinister – and all the more so because there's no camera trickery involved.

Even so, The Giant Spider Invasion is a special kind of terrible. Looking a lot like a low budget porno, it's a true drive-in movie, the sort of film where NASA scientists calmly accept a dimensional space-warp in Wisconsin as a statistical inevitability, and decide to close it down by dropping a bucket of neutrons into a hole in the ground.

Trivia: Actor and co-writer Robert Easton was probably the most experienced member of the crew. A veteran TV actor, he had bit parts on dozens of famous shows, voiced one of the main puppets on British kids show Stingray and appeared with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon.

Kiss of the Tarantula (1976)

Director: Chris Munger

Stars: Suzanna Ling, Eric Mason, Herman Wallner

Susan Bradley, a beautiful and reclusive mortician's daughter, uses her army of pet tarantulas to wreak revenge on everyone who crosses her.

An arachnid twist on the killer rat movie Willard which had been a surprise hit only a few years earlier, Kiss of the Tarantula is no great shakes in the story department, but still has much to recommend it. First and foremost is Suzanna Ling, who plays the role of the spider-obsessed ingenue with a compelling ethereal air. She seems to drift through the movie as if it's all some terrible dream, and the strange discordant electronic soundtrack adds to this uneasy quality. It's also notable because this is a killer spider movie in which the spiders never bite anybody. All of Susan's victims are finished off by their own panicked reactions to the eight-legged invaders. Susan's own mother, who she discovers is having an affair and plotting to murder her father, is the first victim, succumbing to a fatal heart attack when the vengeful young Susan sets a spider loose in her bed. Years later, it's the local gang who break into her home and kill her favorite tarantula who meet sticky ends, killing themselves in unlikely ways as they rush to escape a spider-filled car at the drive-in. Another unlucky soul is trapped in an air conditioning vent with the critters and suffocates. There are other deaths too as Susan's uncle, a local police detective, is a lecherous sort and is happy to kill witnesses to protect the niece he lusts after. He gets the nastiest fate of all, which doesn't even involve the spiders, but has a gruesome Tales from the Crypt twist all the same. Slow and strange, Kiss of the Tarantula isn't necessarily a good movie, but it is a surprisingly effective one.

Trivia: Kiss of the Tarantula was Suzanna Ling's only film credit.

Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977)

Director: Stuart Hagmann

Stars: Charles Akin, Charles Frank, Deborah Winters

Dozens of vicious tarantulas hitch a ride in a shipment of coffee beans and crash in small town California, where a veritable buffet of expendable supporting actors awaits them.

The Deadly Cargo is a stock post-Jaws TV disaster movie, with a small town caught between creature-related carnage on one side and economic ruin on the other.

This effort at least had one eye on the newspaper headlines and urban myths, tapping into fears that imported food can come with unwelcome tropical stowaways. The film also deserves some credit for correctly identifying the Brazilian wandering spider as the species most likely to attack and kill humans (even if they don't actually use those spiders for any shots) and also for coming up with a couple of entertaining scenarios. An early scene in which three border-hopping immigrants are trapped in the cargo hold with the spiders is creepy enough, while the finale set in a blacked-out warehouse overrun with tarantulas is similarly effective.

Aside from a couple of colorful turns, the film suffers from the usual flat TV acting and the lumpen pacing is clearly written around the need for commercial breaks. Not the greatest killer spider movie ever made, but a decent enough attempt.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode

A colony of tarantulas, made more aggressive and venomous thanks to overuse of pesticides, lays siege to a desert town.

Filmed in the fallow period between the end of the Star Trek TV show and its rebirth as a blockbuster movie franchise, Kingdom of the Spiders finds Shatner in one of his few interesting roles that didn't require a Starfleet uniform. He turns the charm dial on the Shatnometer all the way up to eleven as the small town doctor whose laid back demeanor gives way to a more familiar man of action as the spiders attack. The film itself has a languid air, opening with a country rock ballad and kicking its heels with some home-cooked comedy to begin with, but it delivers the goods in the second half with scene after scene of tarantula panic guaranteed to creep out arachnophobes. A large part of the movie's effectiveness comes from its use of real spiders for almost every scene, often in their hundreds. These innocent spiders are also on the receiving end of some squishy boot-related payback, making it a poor choice for those keen on animal welfare. Kingdom of the Spiders found a second life as a cable TV perennial, but it's enduring cult appeal is not undeserved. The final shot, in particular, is surprisingly chilling.

Arachnophobia (1990)

Director: Frank Marshall

Stars: Jeff Daniels, Julian Sands, John Goodman

A previously undiscovered Venezuelan spider makes its way to America inside a coffin, and then breeds with domestic spiders to create a deadly and vicious new breed. A struggling small town doctor with a crippling fear of spiders must face the eight-legged menace.

Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg's long-time producer, stepped into the director's chair for this enjoyable spider-filled spookhouse movie, and while the result may not be up to the standard set by his more famous collaborator, Arachnophobia is still one of the most fun entries in the genre.

There's immense confidence in the way Marshall balances his tale, filling it with colorful characters and taking his time between spider bites without ever feeling like he's treading water to fill the running time. Key plot points are foreshadowed, set up and paid off with perfect timing but it's the spiders themselves that give the movie its squirming longevity. Marshall excels at letting the audience see where the spiders are hiding, then lets us wriggle uncomfortably as characters inch closer to the slipper, lampshade or popcorn bowl where that fatal bite awaits them.

The tone is more lighthearted romp than grueling horror though, and John Goodman's memorable turn as a larger than life exterminator kicks up the comedy just enough to sweeten the scares. Things start to go off the rails slightly at the end, with Jeff Daniels' likable doctor fighting for his life against a giant hissing “queen” spider, brought to life by a less than convincing puppet, but by that point the roller coaster ride has already cast its spell.

Trivia: Marshall still produces all of Spielberg's movies, but his own big-screen directorial career only gave us two more films, the 1993 survival drama Alive and the 1995 killer ape adventure Congo

Spiders (2000)

Director: Gary Jones

Stars: Lana Parrilla, Josh Green, Oliver Macready

A shuttle crash unleashes experimental spiders, mutated by cosmic radiation.

Skewing as much towards comedy as gross-out horror, this likeable but unambitious mash-up of monster film and X-Files episode gets by largely because the young cast make the most of the Scooby Doo story. The twist here is that the spiders of the title have escaped from a crashed space shuttle, where they were bombarded with cosmic rays for some vague experimental reason. Back on Earth, they get loose and scuttle around the cheap concrete corridors of an anonymous military base while a trio of wise-cracking journalists try to get to the bottom of the story. There are some nice gloopy make-up effects to go with the gonzo comedy, but the cheap computer-generated spiders let them down badly.

Sequel: A vaguely related follow-up, Spiders 2: Breeding Ground, arrived in 2001 and featured mad scientists on a boat using innocent people as hosts for giant spider larvae. Director Gary Jones also gave us the surprisingly fun Mosquito and the less enjoyable Crocodile 2

TAIL STING (2001)

Director: Paul Wynne

Stars: Laura Putney, Robert Merrill, Shirly Brener

Genetically enhanced giant scorpions get loose on a charter flight from Australia to Los Angeles.

Years before Snakes On A Plane parlayed its winking title into a brief moment of internet infamy, this surprising enjoyable effort offered its own brand of airborne B-movie cheese, earnest in its intentions, organic in its construction and never leaning on irony as a crutch to excuse its rough edges. The characters are broad disaster movie stereotypes – snooty rich lady, hip-talking black dude, swishy gay steward – but the script kills them off (or allows them to survive) in ways that go against the common rhythms of the genre, and the cast do a better than average job of fleshing out these sketches into characters worth watching. Whether through narrative inexperience, curious editing or sly subversiveness, the filmmakers have at least created a story that catches you off-guard with its peculiar beats. The result is a film that has much of the same cornball energy that powered the classic monster movies of the 1950s, a comparison strengthened by the delightfully cheesy scorpion puppets that scuttle and snip at the humans, their appearances making little logical sense and their numbers conveyed through dialogue rather than any scenes that might require more than one scorpion on-screen at a time. In fact, turn down the color on the TV and – a few gory moments aside – this could easily pass as a movie from sixty years ago. That it manages to recall a more innocent B-movie age without falling back on smirking ironic detachment or tongue-in-cheek parody is quietly impressive. Tail Sting may not be a great movie, but it has heart and charm to spare.

ARACHNID (2001)

Director: Jack Sholder

Stars: Chris Potter, Alex Reid, José Sancho

An alien spacecraft crashes on an island off the coast of Guam. A team of scientists and mercenaries who set out to investigate find themselves hunted by a giant extra-terrestrial spider and its mutated offspring.

A typical jungle monster romp, with a cast of broad stereotypes (and nameless, mute native guides) get systematically slaughtered by the thing in the foliage. Predictable as it is, Arachnid does at least deliver where it counts, with enough slime, goo and gross out moments to prop up the otherwise saggy script. A Spanish production, courtesy of Brian Yuzna's Fantastic Factory, it has much the same old-school aesthetic as his cyborg dog movie Rottweiler  Apart from some wobbly computer graphics at the start, depicting the otherwise unexplained spaceship and its alien pilot, everything is achieved through latex and slime, and the final act lavishes some welcome attention on the dripping spider puppet that is pursuing our vanilla heroes. It's not enough to make Arachnid a good movie, but it does mean it belongs in the upper tier of bad movies.

Trivia: Director Jack Sholder, veteran of The Hidden and Nightmare on Elm Street 2, also helmed the shark movie, 12 Days of Terror

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Director: Ellory Elkayem

Stars: David Arquette, Kari Wuhrer, Scarlett Johansen

Toxic waste contaminates the insect food supply for an exotic spider farm, leading to gigantic arachnids running amok in small town America.

Played as much for laughs as chills, this tongue-in-cheek homage to the giant creature features of the 1950s is amiable if never quite as witty as it thinks it is. David Arquette stars as the young drifter returning to home to reopen his father's gold mine, and rekindle his romance with Kari Wuhrer's spunky sheriff, only to discover that the giant spiders feasting on the locals put a dampener on the occasion.

Making decent use of CGI effects to create its reasonably realistic critters, Eight Legged Freaks packs in more monsters and action than the low budget B-movies that inspired it, with spiders chasing and jumping on motorbike riders, toppling trailers and swarming through a shopping mall. What it can't match is their charm, and the cartoon approach sometimes veers too far into silly territory, with slapstick moments such as sneezing and spitting spiders that roar, giggle and scream as they scuttle around, feasting on the supporting cast. Several clunky Spider-Man jokes also date it badly, the Sam Raimi superhero blockbuster having opened only a few months earlier in 2002.

Trivia: Writer/director Ellory Elkayem based the movie on his earlier short film, Larger than Life, in which a woman is menaced in her suburban home by giant spiders. The New Zealand native also directed the 2000 killer bug movie, They Nest

ARACHNIA (2003)

Director: Brett Piper

Stars: Rob Monkiewicz, Irene Joseph, David Bunce

Following a plane crash, a group of archeology students are trapped in a remote farmhouse when a meteorite strike releases giant spider-like creatures from underground.

Arachnia gets off to a terrible start. A good forty minutes – that's half the movie – passes before we even get a sniff of spider action, and it really doesn't have the compelling characters and riveting plot needed to sustain that level of withholding. Instead, the time is spent on silly comedy riffs, utterly random and gratuitous lesbian bath scenes and lots of irritating arguments between the unlikeable characters. However, when the spiders do make their presence felt, things improve drastically. An old school B-movie director with a career stretching back into the 1980s, Brett Piper avoids the expected lousy CGI for his monsters and instead uses some delightful stop motion animation to bring them to life. It's still nowhere close to convincing, but there's a herky-jerky appeal to these old fashioned skittering models that pixels can never replicate. Such retro affectations aren't enough to rescue the whole film from its turgid script, but there's a good twenty minutes near the end that is closer to classic monster movie cheese than any soulless CGI rival can muster.

CREEPIES (2003)

Director: Jeff Leroy

Stars: Lisa Jay, Jeff Ryan, Phoebe Dollar

Mutant spiders – and one giant spider – escape from the military and destroy Los Angeles, just as an all-girl rock band is recording its first demo tape.

As low budget as they come, there's still something strangely charming about this grungy horror comedy. That charm certainly doesn't come from the script, which simply throws random scenarios into each other until they look a bit like a movie, and it doesn't really come from the cast, which is mostly made up of friends of the director and – for no good reason – porn star Ron Jeremy, who appears for thirty seconds. A stronger case can be made for the movie's appeal coming from the special effects, which include outrageously bad CGI, adorable 1960s Godzilla movie miniatures and home-made splatter and gore. None of it convinces, but the cheapness is fun and inventive rather than lazy and distracting. Mostly, Creepies entertains because of something even more intangible: its energy. It feels like a lurid underground comic, ripped from the page of some 1980s California punk scene fanzine, brought to life, ineptly and cheaply, but with a scrappy tenacity that is hard to criticize too harshly.

Trivia: Cult movie fans may notice that the girls in the movie's rock band, Bare Naked Barbies, are named after famous horror movie scream queens Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens. Writer Eric Spudic can sometimes be found in front of the camera, thanks to small roles in Supercroc and Dire Wolf

Sequel: The equally scuzzy Creepies 2, by the same director but with a whole new cast, followed in 2005.

DEADLY STINGERS (2003)

Director: J.R. Bookwalter

Stars:  Nicolas Read, Marcella Laasch, Sewell Whitney

Giant scorpions run rampant in a small town, and the ex-convicts from the local halfway house take the blame.

A straight down the middle slasher movie, with scorpions instead of a masked maniac, Deadly Stingers hits the basic requirements of its genre but fails to elevate itself from mediocrity. The main cast are up to the task, more so than the many cameos from cult scream queens and porn stars who stumble over their dialogue, and there are some decent CGI shots and some fun practical gore to be found. Mostly, Deadly Stingers stumbles because there's simply no story, not even at the rudimentary level you'd expect from a movie about giant scorpions. The script has a habit of killing off major characters when you least expect it, which leads to some genuine surprises but also means that the various half-hearted subplots are cut off before they can be resolved. By the end of its slim 70 minute running time, it's literally nothing more than the last few characters running around and screaming. There's not even a real ending – the movie simply ends, with the origin of the scorpions and the fate of the town completely unresolved.

IN THE SPIDER'S WEB (2007)

Director: Terry Winsor

Stars: Lance Henriksen, Emma Catherwood, Lisa Livingstone

A group of tourists on a trekking vacation in the jungles of Northern India falls into the clutches of a sinister fugitive doctor who has a bizarre fascination with spiders.

While this entry in the Syfy Channel's “Maneaters” series could certainly never be described as a good movie, it is weird and unpredictable which automatically makes it a more interesting experience than most of its tiresomely formulaic peers. There are lots of real spiders, but also a bargain bucket worth of cheap CG and more than a few toy spiders dangling on strings. The whole thing is so obviously thrown together on a shoestring that it's hard to tell if its a spoof or not. Despite its modern TV origins, British director Terry Winsor gives it a bizarre drive-in pace, with sudden sharp turns from jungle horror to  thriller to Indiana Jones adventure. The plot barely stands up to scrutiny, and most of the weirdest elements – such as the deformed brother of Lance Henriksen's mad scientist, shambling around in a spider web hood that makes it look like the Elephant Man fell into a cotton candy machine – are never explained. A veteran of more than a few terrible B-movies, Henriksen gives good villain, as always, performing the most ludicrous of scenes completely straight. He's supported by an offbeat cast, including Belfast-born actor Michael Smiley, best known for the grueling Brit thriller Kill List and as the rave-mashed courier Tyres in cult sitcom Spaced, and Indian actor Sohrab Ardeshir as a downtrodden police sergeant. It's a strange brew, often laugh-out-loud in its low budget awfulness, but with an unforced organic weirdness that makes it infinitely preferable to yet another riff on the Jaws template.

ICE SPIDERs (2007)

Director: Tibor Takács

Stars: Patrick Muldoon, Vanessa Williams, Thomas Calabro

Giant mutant spiders escape from a secret government lab and lay siege to a ski resort where a team of young Olympic hopefuls are training.

How are mutant ice spiders different to normal mutant spiders, you might ask? Simple answer: they aren't. It's just an excuse for a different location to the usual CG-assisted animal attack movie, with the spiders themselves being exactly the same as they would be if they were terrorizing some bargain basement Canadian backlot. The spiders, of course, are also portrayed using the cheapest computer graphics available, which means they look more fake and rubbery than if they had actually been made from rubber. In its lukewarm defense, Ice Spiders at least keeps moving and rarely bothers to stop or even slow down for more than the most basic character development. Add in a decent amount of blood and guts and you've got a movie that's as lousy as you expect, but at least seems like it's trying to entertain you rather than simply existing to fill a DVD case.

Trivia: The role of ski resort owner Frank Stone is played by Stephen J. Cannell, the paper-tossing TV producer behind such kitsch hits as 21 Jump Street and The A-Team. Director Tibor Takács is, of course, no stranger to animal horror movies. If you had to rank his efforts in order, Ice Spiders would fall somewhere between the dumb but fun Infested and the utterly terrible Mega Snake

Camel Spiders (2011)

Director: Jim Wynorski

Stars: Brian Krause, C. Thomas Howell, Melissa Brasselle

Deadly “sand devils” arrive in Arizona, having stowed away in the coffin of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan.

If Camel Spiders has any redeeming quality, it's that it acts as a handy illustration of how the horror genre can seize on zeitgeisty memes and turn them to its own advantage. For the camel spider, that notoriety came about from a photo that hurtled around the internet during the second Iraq war. It showed a nasty looking spider-like creature being held up to the camera by US soldiers. Thanks to the curious perspective of the photo, many thought the creature was far larger than it actually was and the image went viral. Ever quick to capitalize on a creepy trend, B-movie veteran Jim Wynorski churned out this ultra-cheap movie using the same critters. Well, almost. The real camel spider is generally smaller than six inches across, is almost entirely harmless to humans and more troubling for its creepy appearance than any actual threat it poses. It's not even a spider, more a kind of scorpion, though the movie has them spinning webs regardless. None of that matters in Wynorski's film, which can't even keep track of how many camel spiders there are, let alone how big they're supposed to be. Three arrive in the coffin from Afghanistan, but within minutes there are hundreds of them, ranging from normal size all the way up to critters that could swallow a small dog. They're brought to life via the usual standard of CGI, which ranges from passable to laughable, often within the same scene. It's not restricted to the camel spiders either – some attack helicopters early in the movie look like they've flown in from a 1990s computer game, while even a scene of two people driving in a car requires a howlingly obvious CG backdrop to make it look like they're actually moving. The flimsy plot is weighed down with more characters than it needs, as sleazy businessmen try to finagle a diner out from under the owner's nose, whiny liberal college students sneer at the redneck locals, a married couple on the brink of divorce argue constantly...it's too much chatter from characters we could not care less about. Brian Krause tries to look serious as a man who we're supposed to believe is a soldier because he's wearing an Army uniform . C. Thomas Howell, meanwhile, has clearly given up. Having survived Glass Trap and Killer Bees he just hides behind his sheriff's hat and sunglasses and lets everyone else get on with the nonsense. They all end up getting chomped anyway, but there's no reason to stick around and find out how it happens.

ARACHNOQUAKE (2012)

Director: Griff Furst

Stars: Bug Hall, Tracey Gold, Edward Furlong

An earthquake unleashes a race of giant fire-breathing spiders on the citizens of New Orleans.

Arachnoquake, like almost all of its Syfy Channel brethren, is cheap and dumb. Having said that, it at least deserves credit for trying to be an actual movie rather than a reluctant pastiche of one. The scale, for instance, is far beyond the usual “one location and five actors” approach you expect. It's an honest attempt to do a genuine disaster movie on a TV budget, and while that works out about as well as you'd expect, it's hard not to appreciate the effort as the action takes in multiple groups of interconnected characters as they battle the vicious bugs in city streets, infested supermarkets, forests, swamps and underground caverns. Admittedly, the streets are suspiciously devoid of people, while what few cars there are seem strangely unconcerned by the digital spiders supposedly crawling all over them.

The aptly named Bug Hall does a good job of tying it all together as a lazy tour guide who journeys from feckless party animal to brave hero over the course of the story. His performance has an early Kevin Bacon flavor, and he's far more interesting company than former Terminator 2 star Edward Furlong, who gives a lifeless and breathless performance as the coach of a girl's baseball team who just seems to hang around out of contractual obligation rather than any narrative need.

Even the special effects are above average, relatively speaking, with well animated creepy albino spiders. They suffer the same fate as all cheap CGI though, never looking like they're part of the same scene as the actors. The film finally bites off way more than it can chew in the final act, where the enormous Queen Spider straddles a skyscraper. From that point on, everything looks like it was done on a home computer, and the sight of the Army standing around while a tour guide and a Cajun trapper tackle the giant spider is downright ridiculous.

Trivia: Director Griff Furst, son of comic actor Stephen Furst, has prior form when it comes to this sort of thing. He also directed Lake Placid 3 and Swamp Shark , and as an actor co-starred in Boa vs Python

SINISTER SERPENTS

“They're mean and hissed off...”

STANLEY (1972)

Director: William Grefe

Stars: Chris Robinson, Alex Rocco, Steve Alaimo

A Seminole indian, recently returned from Vietnam, tries to cut himself off from society by living in the Florida swamps with dozens of snakes. When a sleazy businessman decides to turn the snakes into belts, the serpents bite back.

After the 1971 success of Willard , there was a small blip of animal horror movies following the same template in which a reclusive human forms an unnatural bond with a deadly species and use them to get revenge on their tormentors. That's the exact same track taken here, with rattlesnakes swapped for Willard's rats. The result is a grainy, grimy rough-edged B-movie which gets by largely thanks to a sad, strange lead performance from Chris Robinson as Tim Ochopee, the Indian whose snake charmed life turns violent. It's an endearingly weird movie, one that often feels like it's about to make an important statement about something – war, racism, animal rights – before slithering away into the cosy warmth of a exploitation movie cliché. There are many weird moments to savor along the way, however, not least the scene in which Tim serves dinner for Stanley, his favorite snake, and Hazel, Stanley's “wife”. As the snakes feast on the live mice on their plate, Tim mournfully questions why they can't be vegetarian, like him. We're supposed to empathize with Tim, but he's such a lunatic – particularly when he decides the best way to find happiness is to kidnap the daughter of the man who tormented him, and force her to be his wife, that the whole thing is impossible to pin down. Throw in some wonderfully corny freeze frames, some utterly inappropriate mellow folk-rock ballads, a supporting cast of swarthy 1970s thugs and a gonzo subplot involving a burlesque dancer and you've got a sluggish but enjoyably odd movie that is definitely worth seeking out.

Snakes! (1974)

Director: Art Names

Stars: Les Tremayne, Janet Wood, Bebe Kelly

A luckless old snake lover in small town California decides it's time to use his serpent friends to wreak revenge on the townsfolk who mock and belittle him.

If Stanley was an odd little snake-based riff on Willard then the self-explanatory Snakes! is even stranger. Shot in the Californian countryside for what looks like a few bucks and loose change, it tells the story of the fantastically named Snakey Bender, an eccentric old man with a thing for snakes. The disrespect he gets from those around him takes on increasingly bizarre aspects, however. His best friend gets married and doesn't want to spend every Wednesday night listening to Sousa marches on the gramophone any more. The local storekeeper, a butch lesbian and her creepy brother, won't extend Snakey's credit. The corrupt preacher considers snakes to be servants of the Satan. Even the prim school teacher gets on Snakey's bad side – she has a deal with him that he'll bring Lucifer, his favorite serpent, to her home every Wednesday so she can pleasure herself with his muscular coils. It's both weirdly charming and horribly sleazy, all the more so for the film's inexplicable fixation with Wednesdays and Sousa music. After a good hour of Snakey getting short shrift from everyone around him, his vengeance is both swift and surreal. Each person in turn is kidnapped, and then forced to face some ad hoc snake trial. Inevitably, they fail, get bitten and die, after which Snakey puts them in their car and pushes it off a cliff. Then he walks home as, yes, Sousa music plays. This happens over and over, until he's pretty much killed the rest of the cast. Snakes! is the special kind of weird that only really happens when dubiously talented people have ambitions their ability can't match, and it's all the more wonderful for its many insane flourishes.

Trivia: Snakes! also goes by the title Fangs, and has been released as Holy Wednesday. Director Art Names was more commonly found in the sound department of a motion picture production. In this capacity he worked on grindhouse fare such as Blood Sabbath and The Corpse Grinders, as well as blaxploitation films like Black Godfather. He also has credits on Dogs and Alligator.

The Killer Snakes (1975)

Director: Chih-Hung Kuei

Stars: Kwok-Leung Gan, Lin Lin Li, Chun Chen

A sexually troubled young man uses his natural affinity with snakes to get revenge on everyone who mocks him.

Much like Willard, Stanley and Kiss of the Tarantula , The Killer Snakes is an entry in the peculiar sub-genre where animal horror crosses over with underdog revenge. This Chinese version, however, is particularly ugly in tone. The bar is set low right from the start, as a young boy listens to his mother having enthusiastic sex, her pleasure heightened by the ingestion of live snake glands. For her son, snakes are a source of companionship rather than carnal satisfaction, and so when he grows up into an awkward outsider with a fondness for masturbating to graphic sado-masochistic imagery, the snakes remain his only friends. Local bullies beat him up, prostitutes make fun of him and even the nice local girl stands him up. It's only a matter of time before he uses his snake friends to even the score. His serpent-aided revenge goes beyond the poetic justice of similar films though, taking on an unpleasant sexually violent form and directed largely towards women. In that context, the Freudian symbolism of the snakes becomes horribly apparent. Ultimately, the snakes are clearly less important to the filmmakers than the sight of women being graphically defiled, so make your viewing choice accordingly.

Rattlers (1976)

Director: John McCauley

Stars: Sam Chew, Elisabeth Chauvet, Dan Priest

Following a series of fatal snake attacks, a Mojave sheriff's department hires an academic snake expert and a feminist photographer to investigate. The trail soon leads to a nearby Army base, where the colonel is being suspiciously coy about a container buried in the desert.

Functional but flat, this snake movie plays it straight down the middle: no gimmicks, no twists, just a roving colony of aggressive rattlesnakes and a perfunctory trail of bodies for the hero to follow. He's not much of a hero, however, as Sam Chew plays Dr Tom Parkinson as a prissy, smug jerk who is almost impossible to root for. His attractive female partner gives an impassioned speech about women's lib, and spent four years documenting the Vietnam war, but then goes on to happily offer to cook his breakfast and even goes all coy and bashful as every male character makes a clumsy pass at her. The first glimpse of a snake and she falls right into the damsel in distress cliché. Character and plot clearly aren't going to drive this thing along, so the movie falls back on its serpent stars, who rise to the occasion thanks to their innate creepiness and some admittedly well staged attacks. One particularly memorable scene has the snakes killing a plumber working underneath a house, then making their way up the pipes to where a woman is taking a bath. It's as cheap and exploitative as horror scenarios get, but it's damned effective.

Venom (1981)

Director: Piers Haggard

Stars: Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed, Sterling Hayden

A kidnap plot in a London town house goes awry when a deadly black mamba snake gets loose.

Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed and Susan George are the criminal trio who hatch a plot to hold a wealthy man's son for ransom, only to find their best laid plans fall apart thanks to the escaped snake slithering around in the shadows and chomping on the cast. Hollywood titan Sterling Hayden is the boy's grandfather and, rather usefully, a man well versed in safari techniques. It's an agreeably over the top genre mix, played to the hilt by a cast of infamous hams. Kinski, in particular, throws caution to the wind as the fiendish mastermind behind the plot, while Oliver Reed suffers for his mistakes when the snake heads up his trouser leg. Venom is a shamelessly camp melodrama, and all the more fun for its lack of restraint.

Trivia: Venom was originally to be directed by Tobe Hooper but he was replaced shortly after filming began. The snake in question was a genuine black mamba, on loan from London Zoo, and quite dangerous.

JAWS OF SATAN (1981)

Director: Bob Claver

Stars: Fritz Weaver, Gretchen Corbett, Jon Korkes

When snake attacks mysteriously increase in an Alabama town, the local priest believes Satan may have come to Earth in the form of a giant cobra.

An obvious attempt to cash in on both the post-Jaws animal attack craze as well as the wave of post-Exorcist demonic horror, Jaws of Satan points listlessly in the direction of some interesting ideas but ultimately can't be bothered to see them through. The plot follows the expected genre beats – the town is opening a new dog track and the mayor doesn't want talk of snake bites driving the tourists away – but the satanic elements are poorly woven into this template. Fritz Weaver brings a forlorn quality to the role of the priest whose dwindling faith is put to the test by the onslaught of serpents, but the story never really takes his character anywhere. Elsewhere, scenes appear out of nowhere and lead to no forward momentum. We see teens making out in the woods, a snake appears, they scream and then the movie continues, these apparent victims never mentioned or referenced by any other characters. Similarly, a scene in which Gretchen Corbett's doctor is chased by a rapist on a motorcycle seems to have been included only to pad out the running time. When the film finally comes to a close in an underground cavern, it answers the question of whether the snake is evil in a manner that is both conclusive and yet utterly disappointing.

SPASMS (1983)

Director: William Fruett

Stars: Oliver Reed, Peter Fonda, Kerrie Keane

An eccentric millionaire believes he has a telepathic link to the giant demonic serpent that killed his brother. When he has the serpent captured and shipped to the US for study, a botched robbery by a sinister snake cult sets the creature loose.

With its heady mix of paranormal mumbo jumbo, pseudo-scientific claptrap, espionage shenanigans and Satanic overtones, Spasms contains enough B-movie insanity for a dozen films. It certainly makes it stand out from the rest of the killer snake genre. Oliver Reed rolls his eyes and chews the scenery with customary aplomb as the barking mad English adventurer with snakes on his mind, while Fonda takes a more groovy, languid path as the swinging psychiatrist caught up in the madness. It's a thoroughly entertaining ride too; the sort of straight-faced genre-hopping strange brew that rarely gets made these days. Sadly, having built up an impressive head of steam with its lunatic ideas and a ferociously staged attack in a sorority house, the movie clearly ran out of time, money or energy and wheezes to the end credits in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner. The Satanic snake cult vanishes completely, its plot unresolved, and the last ten minutes are simply spent with Reed stumbling around his vast mansion, having flashbacks to earlier scenes. There's a brief tussle with the hilariously cheap snake puppet and then it's over. Even with that disappointing finale, however, Spasms does more with its wacky concept than the similar Jaws of Satan and is weird enough to warrant a place on any genre fan's “must watch” list.

Copperhead: THE SNAKE MOVIE (1983)

Director: Leland Payton

Stars: Jack Renner, Gretta Ratliff, David Fritts

A paranoid criminal hides out with his family in the Ozark wilderness, but his trigger happy ways incur the wrath of the local snake population.

Copperhead is one of those films that is so low budget that its cheapness almost becomes a selling point. Few of the people involved ever made another movie, while the shot-on-video look and amateurishly awkward performances give the uneasy impression that the whole grisly story might actually have been caught on camera as it happened. Jack Renner certainly helps to seal the deal, his portrayal of gun-nut patriarch Howard Randall is so naturalistic that you suspect he might be a real crazy person.

Also adding to the reality of the piece is the film's cavalier approach to safety and animal welfare. Numerous live snakes are shot to death on camera, while the scenes in which the serpents fight back involve numerous close-ups of the snakes being goaded into actually biting people. The story is nonsense, the acting terrible and the pace tedious, yet for all its flaws there's something horribly compelling about this glorified home movie masquerading as a serious horror flick.

Trivia: The end credits reassure viewers that, despite what they've just seen, copperhead snakes are actually reclusive, rarely bite and have only mild venom.

CALAMITY OF SNAKES (1983)

Director: Chi Chang

Stars: Lei Chang, Chung-Lien Chou, Tung-min Huang

Hundreds of snakes are killed at a construction site rather than hold up the completion of a luxury condominium. Once the building is occupied, the serpents return in force and get their revenge.

This Taiwanese/Hong Kong production can certainly lay claim to being one of the most insane animal-related horror movies you're ever likely to see. If the sight of a kung fu master battling a boa constrictor doesn't appeal, you'll surely enjoy the sight of snakes leaping out of the ground with a chop socky “peeeyow” sound effect. And if that doesn't amuse, the regular diversions into wacky slapstick farce, complete with Benny Hill fast-forward effects, will certainly raise a smile.

Sadly, the wonderfully goofy excesses of Calamity of Snakes come at a grisly price as there are very few special effects in the film. Almost every shot was achieved using real live snakes, including the many scenes of serpent slaughter. The scene at the construction site is nothing more than several minutes of snakes being crushed and sliced on camera, and that's followed by a scene in which a live cobra is skinned and dissected as it writhes in agony. Later on there's another long sequence in which two mongooses fight and kill more snakes, and in the finale even more are burned alive in long sadistic shots. It's frankly sickening, and the fact that the human actors have to roll around covered in literally hundreds of snakes doesn't really redress the balance.

All of which makes Calamity of Snakes a troubling movie. In many ways it's quite brilliant – a lunatic action horror comedy with energy to spare – but it's also made possible by inexcusable amounts of animal abuse. Viewer beware.

The Serpent Warriors (1985)

Directors: John Howard, Niels Rasmussen

Stars: Clint Walker, Eartha Kitt, Christopher Mitchum

A snake expert is called in to help a construction site overrun by snakes, thanks to a Snake Priestess and an ancient curse.

Taking the insanity of Calamity of Snakes and making it even less comprehensible is quite an achievement, but that's what happens in this US/Hong Kong mash-up which lifts footage from Calamity of Snakes and pads it out with a mostly unrelated storyline starring western actors. Eartha Kitt has as much camp fun as you'd expect playing a vampish snake priestess, and the American filmmakers are careful to edit around most of the grotesque scenes of animal cruelty from the original. The result really is impossible to follow however; a crude patchwork of dubious snake-related ooga booga native hysteria and manically cut-and-pasted scenes from the Hong Kong movie.

Rattled (1996)

Director: Tony Randel

Stars: William Katt, Shanna Reed, Michael Galeota

Construction work on a new lakeside resort drives a colony of rattlesnakes into the town below.

It's always interesting to see how quickly the popular tide of a genre can change. Released just one year before Anaconda shunted the animal attack genre in the direction of giant over-sized CGI reptiles, Rattled is a real throwback to a more sedate TV movie age. Filmed using real snakes, and with a cast featuring such dependable B-movie stars as William Katt, Ian Abercrombie, Clint Howard and Ed Lauter, it's an easy watch. It's also painfully slow, and rather too fond of cheap fake-out scares at the expense of real horror. Only a handful of people get bitten, and several of those survive without any problems. A couple of scenes get suitably creepy mileage from their scaly stars, but considering director Tony Randel helmed the grotesque Hellraiser II and the gooey insect horror of Infested , it's a disappointingly low key effort. Rather than building to any sort of climax, the snakes are simply rounded up by Animal Control and driven away. Realistic, but hardly thrilling.

Trivia: William Katt would face serpents again in Snake Island and also headed up the 1995 remake of Piranha  Co-star Ed Lauter can be found in Cujo and also appeared briefly as a pilot at the start of Python

Anaconda (1997)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight

A documentary crew exploring the Amazon in search of a lost tribe is hijacked by a crazy snake hunter who forces them to help him find and capture a giant anaconda.

In its own sad way, Anaconda is almost as influential in the animal horror genre as Jaws, or at least it is if you judge a movie by how many copycats it inspires. It was the first major studio entry in the genre for many years, and certainly the first to be treated as a legitimate theatrical blockbuster. Within just a few years, the superior Lake Placid and Deep Blue Sea had followed in its wake and killer animal movies were, briefly, big business on the big screen again. Once the mainstream wave subsided, it left behind a slew of cheap imitators whose ripples are still being felt today in network TV movies and straight-to-disc B-movies.

Anaconda itself, however, is a curious effort, saddled with one of the least convincing casts in living memory. Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube as documentary makers for National Geographic? Neither looks like they've ever set foot outside of LA before, and the fact that their crew includes Eric Stoltz (who gets stung by an insect and spends the rest of the movie asleep) and a pre-fame Owen Wilson only makes it feel stranger still. Only Jon Voight seems to get what he's there for, delivering one of the all-time great pantomime villain performances with a bizarre accent and inexplicable physical mannerisms.

The plot itself is formula stuff though. After some clumsy foreshadowing in the first act, the giant snake begins picking off the supporting cast, including tough guy Danny Trejo and Kari Wuhrer from Eight Legged Freaks   There are moments of over-the-top inspiration – CGI allows one character to be vomited up alive, half-digested, and another to be visible trapped inside the snake's belly, like Han Solo frozen in carbonite, as it swims past the camera – but viewed with hindsight it bears all the hallmarks of a movie from that first sugar-rush period of Hollywood CGI, with snake effects that have aged badly and a general bias towards showing off the technology at the expense of the plot.

Anaconda has its moments, moving with a whipcrack pace and never stopping to wallow in its dumber ideas, and has inevitably built up a cult fanbase over the years, but it's important more for the shot in the arm it provided the genre rather than anything that happens on-screen.

Sequels: Anaconda belatedly spawned a series of ever-diminishing follow-ups, none of which had any real connection beyond the presence of big snakes. The first sequel, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid came along seven years after the original in 2004. The prosaically titled Anaconda III followed in 2008, with Anaconda: Trail of Blood heading straight to TV in 2009.

Silent Predators (1999)

Director: Noel Nosseck

Stars:  Harry Hamlin, Shannon Sturges, Jack Scalia

An incredibly venomous tropical rattlesnake escapes near a San Diego town. Twenty years later, construction work drives the rattler's lethal descendents into the town.

Another stock animal disaster flick, with capable actors gamely working their way through a generic script. Jack Scalia makes for a solid villain, as the property developer who puts his profits ahead of safety, but Harry Hamlin is a long way from the glory days of LA Law and Clash of the Titans here. He scowls and frowns in an attempt to bring gravitas to his role as the new-in-town fire chief who takes it upon himself to deal with the snake menace. There is a sheriff, glimpsed briefly, but everyone seems quite happy for a firefighter to set himself up as the man to handle deadly snake infestations. This, apparently, is a town with no animal control or even paramedics. What chills the movie does muster can probably be traced back to the presence of one John Carpenter in the credits. The film began life back in the 1970s as an unproduced script, called Fangs, from the Halloween director. It's doubtful that much remains of that original treatment after two decades floating around the lower rungs of Hollywood, but a couple of the death scenes – one involving a woman on her exercise bike in particular – at least feel like they come from an actual horror film rather than a TV melodrama.

Trivia: Jack Scalia can also be found in Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep and Jersey Shore Shark Attack

King Cobra (1999)

Directors:  David Hillenbrand, Scott Hillenbrand

Stars: Pat Morita, Scott Hillenbrand, Casey Fallo

A scientist creates a giant hybrid snake from a cobra and a rattlesnake, but it gets loose and starts killing people in a small town where, yes, of course, there's a big tourist festival and a mayor who wants to avoid a panic.

As goofy and creaky as King Cobra is, it's a difficult film to dislike. It's biggest crimes are an uneven tone that keeps trying to be a wacky comedy while playing at being a scary horror film and failing at both, and a reluctance to let go of the genre cliches that drive it's wheezing plot. In the plus column we have Pat Morita, better known as Karate Kid's Mr Miyagi, and his grumpy performance as a deadpan snake expert lifts the whole enterprise whenever he's onscreen. Also worthy of praise is the snake itself, mostly realized thanks to a life-sized and well-sculpted rubber puppet. All it can do is raise its head, flare out its hood and open its mouth, but it's just corny enough to work. It's never explained how fangs that could clearly bite right through a person only leave normal sized puncture wounds though. Such simple and obvious inconsistency is sadly typical. The multi-tasking Hillenbrand brothers just can't keep a grip on their tale. Between them they direct, write, produce, star and supply the music for the film, and the result is inevitably muddled. Scott Hillenbrand gives himself the lead role, but lacks the presence to justify his decision, while pointless scenes run too long – there's a musical montage showing how beer is made, for some reason – and too many inexplicable characters slow things down, such as CHiPs star Erik Estrada in an embarrassing cameo as a stereotypically swishy gay man. A bad movie, then, but with enough good stuff to reward the hardy viewer able to sift through the chaff.

Python (2000)

Director: Richard Clabaugh

Stars: Frayne Rosanoff, Robert Englund, Casper Van Dien

A military plane crashes near a small town, and a gigantic python slithers from the wreckage ready for a snack.

It's a testament to how thoroughly recent animal attack TV movies have debased the genre that a ludicrous post-Anaconda confection such as Python now seems fairly well made. There are explosions and gory special effects. Multiple sets and a large cast, not to mention a parade of cult-friendly ringers brought in to liven things up. There's Robert Englund as the eccentric scientist who found the snake in the first place. Casper Van Dien as a bizarrely accented military man tasked with hunting it down. Star Trek's Wil Wheaton as a pink-haired, nipple-pierced wannabe realtor. Jenny McCarthy turns up as a grotesque gold-digging widow, only to be hilariously decapitated. None are what you'd call big name stars, but all are recognizable enough to distract from the bland main cast who dutifully go through the motions. The plot is obvious enough, and the snake varies from convincing to terrible depending on the shot, but if you really want to start splitting hairs over the relative qualities of modern CGI made-for-TV monster movies, this is one of the better examples. Faint praise, but praise all the same.

Trivia: Robert Englund would go on to play almost the exact same role in the 2007 killer wasp movie, Black Swarm.

New alcatraz (2001)

Director: Phillip J. Roth

Stars: Dean Cain, Elizabeth Lackey, Mark Sheppard

An advanced prison, dubbed New Alcatraz, is built deep beneath the Antarctic ice but construction releases a giant boa constrictor which proceeds to devour guards and inmates alike.

The high tech prison setting gives this direct-to-video effort a point of difference when compared to the slew of giant snake movies that followed in Anaconda's wake, but as with so many modern movies of this genre, a reliance on cheap and characterless CGI leaves it feeling unsatisfying. There is at least an attempt to make an actual movie though, derivative of Aliens and dozens of other “stalk the corridors” action flicks though it may be. Dean Cain is as blandly amiable as you'd expect, playing the reptile expert summoned with his wife to help the authorities deal with the serpent, but he spends most of the film standing in the background looking lost while men in uniforms argue with each other. Even when his wife is believed to have been killed, his expression barely changes. A finale in which the snake smuggles itself on board their escape craft only underlines the debt to Aliens, but at least provides a reasonably rousing climax to an otherwise average yarn.

Trivia: Director Phillip J. Roth also directed the killer shark movie, Dark Waters  For another animal attack movie that references Aliens a little too obviously, check out Bugs

Venomous (2001)

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Stars: Treat Williams, Mary Page Keller, Hannes Jaenicke

Animal rights terrorists blow up a government lab, releasing experimental snakes into the wild. Ten years later, those snakes have reproduced and descend on a small town.

Venomous has two things going for it. The first is Treat Williams, the sort of stoic game-for-anything performer who can breathe life into the lousiest hokum. Second is a premise that, while generic in the extreme, manages to avoid being lousy hokum. The twist here is that it's not just the snake bites that are dangerous – they've been bred to pass on a deadly virus, which can be transmitted through blood and saliva. As the military places the town of Santa Mira on lockdown, more to cover up the experiment than to save the populace, you get a decent mix of viral conspiracy thriller and traditional snake-based horror. It's never much more than the sum of its parts, and the climax stretches credulity to breaking point as the President signs off on the complete destruction of an American town based on nothing more concrete than a few phone calls, but there are far worse movies to spend an evening with. Many of them, of course, are also directed by Fred Olen Ray.

SNAKE ISLAND (2002)

Director: Wayne Crawford

Stars: William Katt, Wayne Crawford, Kate Connor

Tourists on an African safari are stranded at an abandoned resort called Snake Island. Turns out it's full of snakes.

Snake Island gets off to an interesting start. The cast, for one thing, are grown ups, not the usual nubile co-eds ready to be chomped. And for at least half the movie, it's all character stuff. Not great character stuff, but the cast do a decent enough job of making us interested in their fate. Then, halfway through, it's as if somebody remembered they were supposed to be making a dumb horror movie and suddenly everyone goes insane and starts behaving like dumb horror movie characters, pairing off for sex or just blundering around in the dark like idiots. Two previously sensible female characters suddenly perform a campfire lesbian striptease for no apparent reason. And what of the snakes? By this point they've been teased so many times that the audience is exhausted by the sheer number of fake outs and dummy scares as snakes slither up to people, then vanish without doing anything. When they finally do make the effort to bite the cast, things are fairly amusing – in one memorable scene a honeymooning woman mistakes a cobra for her husband's erection – but it feels like the movie runs out of things to do, and fizzles to the end credits. Bonus points for at least using real snakes wherever possible though.

Trivia: Writer, director and co-star Wayne Crawford can also be found pulling multiple duties on the killer fish movie, Barracuda  Star William Katt first battled snakes in the 1996 movie, Rattled

BOA VS PYTHON (2004)

Director: David Flores

Stars: David Hewlett, Jaime Bergman, Kirk B.R. Woller

When an 80-foot python escapes from captivity, the FBI hatches an unlikely plan to stop its rampage by making it fight a genetically engineered giant boa constrictor. Because that makes perfect sense.

Yet another CGI giant snake thriller, designed to fill TV schedules and eat up DVD shelf space, Boa vs Python at least has the decency to behave like a true exploitation movie, with outrageous plot twists, laughable comic book characters and a cast largely made up of bodybuilders and Playboy Playmates, who all spend more time taking their tops off than hunting serpents. The attempts at comedy largely fall flat, but the film thunders along at a suitably idiotic pace and manages to tick all the boxes required for a six-pack and pizza rental along the way. Those computer generated snakes are woefully unimpressive though.

THE FOREST (2005)

Director: Heng Tolar

Stars: Tan Nosar, Koa Mony Neath

A group of archaeology students venture into a Cambodian forest in search of a lost temple, but find it is guarded by snakes controlled by an ancient curse.

Cambodia's first monster movie is as wobbly as you might expect, making a valiant effort to copy the style of western horror movies while threading its back story with Asian snake myth. It's easy to laugh at the result, especially the spectacularly bad CGI special effects which sometimes look like they've literally been hand drawn on the screen, but the film still manages to come close enough in quality to enough modern American B-movies to be considered a success of sorts, even if that says more about the poor state of US animal horror flicks than The Forest's quality. The film adds a little variety by adding some brief moments of spider and scorpion peril to the mix, and every now and then there's a bit of old-fashioned practical gore that really works. The Forest's biggest flaw is that at two hours long it stretches its thin story and inexperienced cast way beyond reasonable limits. Compacting it down to under 90 minutes wouldn't make it a good film, but it would make its foibles a lot easier to swallow.

BOA...NGUU YAK! (2006)

Director: Chaninton Muangsuwan

Stars: Pimpan Chalaikupp, Sittha Lertsrimonkol, Kiratikorn Ratkulthorn

A group of college friends take a hot air balloon into the jungle to find their missing friend, and come face to face with giant snakes.

Thai movie Boa...Nguu Yak! (literally: Boa...Giant Snake!) is the sort of film where people searching an entire jungle for one person by hot air balloon can crash land in a tree, right next to the backpack of the person they're looking for. That sort of outrageous coincidence soon pales as our intrepid band turns out to be made up entirely of obnoxious jerks and mewling idiots, and as the next hour consists of them running around, squabbling and screeching, it makes for a less than enjoyable movie. One guy in particular, with dreadlocks, a throat tattoo and a Thai-Jamaican accent, is almost unbearable, while the female characters just merge into one screaming background noise. This irritating and repetitive tale is padded out as a team of soldiers enters the jungle in search of the first search party, along with the businessman who rented the balloon, for some reason, but even this group ends up squabbling and screeching. The snake is a surprisingly well modeled bit of CGI work, with lots of detail, but the animation is crude and it sits distractingly on top of scenes rather than integrating with them. It's a shame, as the final twenty minutes or so contain some genuinely fun moments – not least the brilliantly gory demise of one of the snakes – but such small nuggets aren't nearly enough to balance out the endless scenes of directionless jungle panic that precede them.

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

Director: David R. Ellis

Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Margulies, Nathan Phillips

An extravagant gangster, hoping to eliminate a key witness against him, unleashes venomous snakes on board an airplane in flight. He didn't bank on the presence of federal agent Samuel L. Jackson, and his lack of patience with airborne serpents.

An internet sensation before a frame of footage had even been shot, Snakes on a Plane's blunt descriptive title made it a natural contender for meme infamy. Sadly, that spirit of fun didn't translate into the movie itself, or into box office success. Director David R. Ellis, fresh from the gleefully gory Final Destination 2, serves up a couple of memorably lowbrow snake encounters – a woman is bitten on the breasts, a man is bitten on the penis – but the padding around the twenty minutes of anarchic snake carnage is desperately dull and filled with ideas that never pay off. Why, for example, go to the trouble of revealing one of the passengers is a kick boxer if you're not going to have him kick box a snake? The whole film is full of such half-developed ideas, but never achieves the gonzo momentum it desperately needs and is instead content to cruise along on the back of its ironic appeal and Samuel L. Jackson's annoyingly self-aware performance. A B-movie made by and for people who don't really understand B-movies, the fact that Snakes on a Plane ended up as little more than a pop culture footnote is most appropriate.

Snakes on a Train (2006)

Director: Peter Mervis

Stars: A.J. Castro, Julia Ruiz, Giovanni Bejarano

A woman is placed under a voodoo curse which makes her give birth to thousands of killer snakes. While on a train.

A knowingly bad cheap B-movie riding on the back of the publicity for a knowingly bad studio B-movie, Snakes on a Train very nearly creates a black hole of irony so deep that no entertainment can escape its pull. Needless to say, it's as stupid, dull and hopeless as you'd expect, with bad acting and sloppy direction, and the outrageous “voodoo snake babies” premise is not nearly as crazy in execution as it is in concept. Still, it's a more honest B-movie than the fake corporate cult-by-committee of Snakes on a Plane, and deserves faint praise for that at least.

MEGA SNAKE (2007)

Director: Tibor Takács

Stars: Michael Shanks, Siri Baruc, Michal Yannai

A mystical snake is stolen from a Native American shaman. When it escapes and begins to feed, it grows to enormous size.

A typically inept offering from low budget movie factory Nu Image and Syfy, this Bulgarian-shot cheapie has all the unconvincing CGI and clumsy amateur performances you expect. The plot is so wisp thin as to be virtually invisible, and the actors can barely seem to muster the energy to remember their lines. Passable for those who seek out low quality trash for drunken fun, but director Tibor Takács can do much better, as his energetic 1987 kid horror The Gate proved.

Trivia: Mega Snake features a small role for Matthew Atherton, winner of Stan Lee's reality TV show, Who Wants To Be A Superhero? Although Mega Snake was promoted on Syfy as “starring” Atherton's hero alter-ego Feedback, he only appears briefly at the end of the movie. He hasn't appeared in anything since.

COPPERHEAD (2008)

Director: Todor Chapkanov

Stars: Brad Johnson, Keith Stone, Brad Greenquist

A roaming gunslinger arrives in a small town in the Old West looking for a notorious bandit, but the traditional western shoot-out is interrupted by the arrival of an army of snakes.

Not to be confused with the 1983 movie of the same name , Copperhead is yet another cheap animal horror churned out by the  Channel, though the wild west setting gives this one a unique flavour that makes it far more enjoyable than most of its listless peers. Every western cliché is lovingly indulged, right down to the Morricone pastiche soundtrack, and it's actually a passable cowboy yarn until the snakes show up in force. Sadly, the snakes are predictably rendered using zero budget CGI effects, and their laughable appearance can't help but undermine the lively tone the movie has established. There are very few scenes of people actually being injured or killed by the snakes – presumably that would require more complicated and expensive animation than simple slithering – so the goodwill dries up pretty fast. Things finally fly off the rails completely when a cheesy looking giant snake turns up for the final act, because all  TV movies must apparently feature at least one over-sized creature by law. Also disappointing is the unceremonious way that the fantastic character actor Billy Drago, playing the villainous bandit with lip-smacking relish, vanishes from the action before anything exciting can happen. He's a rare bright spot in an otherwise dull cast, and the film never really recovers from his abrupt and underwhelming departure.

VIPERS (2008)

Director: Bill Corcoran

Stars: Tara Reid, Jonathan Scarfe, Corbin Bernsen

A scientist uses the venom of the horned pit viper as a treatment for cancer, but is unaware that the bio-tech firm she works for has been illegally manipulating their genes. When the snakes are accidentally released on a small island, the inhabitants must fight back.

Another stock snake movie, enlivened by some fun gore but undercut by cheap CG that leaves the snakes looking like weightless squiggly lines superimposed on the actors. The idea of snakes that not only have venomous bites but eat people piece by piece is a good one, but the story can only ever trundle downhill towards its rote conclusion, hitting as many obvious plot points as it can on the way down. There are some decent performances, not least from Corbin Bernsen, who can do slimy corporate villainy in his sleep. Stargate veteran Don S. Davis and Mercedes McNab from TV's Buffy and Angel also know the sort of tone required to bring the leaden script to life, but the leads are spectacularly dire. Jonathan Scarfe's military medic turned small town doctor is defined by his distractingly smug smirk, while tarnished American Pie star Tara Reid inexplicably takes top billing, based solely on her mainstream profile than any relevance to the plot. She's truly awful as well, stumbling and slurring her way through the most basic action movie lines, exhorting her allies to run away from the snakes with all the enthusiasm of someone wearily asking who has her car keys after a long night out. When it comes to scenes that require actual emoting, she inadvertently tips the whole movie into camp comedy. Goofy and gory, but populated by too many bad actors and lousy characters, there's a faint glimmer of an enjoyable B-movie here, but it's simply too much effort to dig it out.

SILENT VENOM (2009)

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Stars: Luke Perry, Krista Allen, Tom Berenger

A decommissioned US submarine is diverted to evacuate research scientists based on an Asian island before Chinese military exercises discover them. Unlucky for them, the research involves snakes and they get loose on the sub.

We've had snakes on a plane, so why not snakes on a submarine? A more sober and coherent effort than Fred Olen Ray's many other animal attack movies, Silent Venom still can't quite stretch its promising high concept into an entertaining 90 minutes. It earns praise for mostly using real snakes, but squanders them in tired scenarios and inevitably ends up falling back on the terrible cartoon-like CGI giants you expect from a modern TV movie. Luke Perry's sour expression, coupled with a monotone performance, mean that he looks absolutely mortified to be reduced to this sort of thing, while Tom Berenger stays on dry land and glowers beneath a shocking blond dye job. It may not be as obnoxiously camp as its peers in the giant digital snake field, but Silent Venom commits the worst sin of all: it's deathly dull.

MEGA PYTHON VS GATOROID (2011)

Director: Mary Lambert

Stars: Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, A Martinez

When man-eating pythons upset the balance of nature in the Everglades, an enterprising park ranger feeds the local alligators with steroid-infused chicken. Soon, gigantic snakes and alligators are battling in the streets.

The selling point for this rancid reptilian disaster has less to do with the creatures in the title and everything to do with the 1980s pop starlets facing them. Both Debbie Gibson and Tiffany had appeared in cheap monster flicks before – Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus for Gibson, Mega Piranha for Tiffany – so it obviously made promotional sense to put them in a movie together, and play off their former musical rivalry. Gibson plays a sociopathic eco-terrorist (she's a professor of something, but that's never explained) who releases test pythons into the wild. Tiffany plays the arrogant park ranger who fights back by feeding the local 'gators with steroid-spiked chicken. Most of the film seems more concerned with pandering to the tabloid-friendly sight of the two women calling each other bitches, and inevitably builds to a climactic catfight between the two, where they smear each other with cream and then fall in a lake, all while clad in tiny dresses. Never let it be said that budget studio The Asylum doesn't know how to appease its audience. The monsters only really put in an appearance right near the end, and there's actually a reasonable attempt to deliver on their Godzilla-esque promise.  The digital effects are terrible, as always, but there are a handful of effective images in amongst the slop. It's the film's tongue-in-cheek tone that ultimately drags it down. This is a movie that can barely stop sneering at itself, and by extension anyone watching. Yes, somebody says “I think we're alone now” to Tiffany, and she dutifully responds: “There doesn't seem to be anyone around”. Former Monkee Mickey Dolenz turns up, playing himself for no apparent reason. A giant python bites a blimp (with the Asylum logo on the side) and gets dragged through the sky as it deflates like a party balloon. It all sounds like dumb fun, but it really, really isn't.

Trivia: Mega Python vs Gatoroid marks a career low for director Mary Lambert, who started out directing seminal music videos such as Madonna's Like A Virgin, and graduated to the effective Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary. That she's been reduced to helming half-hearted schlock like this is very depressing.

SLITHER AND SLIME

“Look ooze talking...”

Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

Director:  Bernard L. Kowalski

Stars: Ken Clark, Yvette Vickers, Jan Shepard

The inhabitants of a small bayou town are menaced by giant blood-sucking creatures that emerge from the swamp.

Yet another from Roger Corman's micro-budget monster movie factory, this grungy effort is slim even by the seat-of-the-pants standards set by Attack of the Crab Monsters  Running barely an hour in length, and with the titular creatures on-screen for maybe three minutes in total, it's a ponderous affair made bearable only by the deliciously slutty over-acting of B-movie scream queen Yvette Vickers. After a fun opening, during which she berates her podgy cuckold of a husband in venomous style, she falls prey to the leeches and spends the rest of the movie unconscious in a cave, being pawed and sucked by actors dressed in black plastic trash bags while Ken Clark's drab hero blunders around trying to find the monsters. There's some ironic camp value in how shamelessly the film teases its intended audience of horny drive-in teens while never actually giving them anything truly titillating, but for the most part this is a movie that deserves its relative obscurity.

Trivia: Attack of the Giant Leeches was remade in 2008, and somehow managed to be worse second time around.

Frogs (1972)

Director: George McCowan

Stars: Sam Elliot, Ray Milland, Joan Van Ark

An idealistic environmentalist photographer is enlisted by a wealthy family to find out why people have been going missing around their swampy plantation, and why the local frogs are being so darned noisy. Simple answer: they're pissed off with all the pollution, and want to get even.

Despite the ludicrous premise, and a poster that suggested the amphibians in question would be devouring humans whole, Frogs plays it completely straight. Tediously so, for the most part, as the running time is padded out by lots of failed attempts to make croaking noises sound ominous. The docile creatures roped in to portray the fearsome menace clearly aren't up to the task, which leaves the cast shrieking and fainting as perfectly ordinary frogs sit placidly outside the window, looking for all the world like they'd rather be back in their nice dank pond. As a result, the movie is sorely lacking in scares, suspense or shocks, and is only really watchable as a kitschy reminder that somebody once thought “killer frog movie” was a good idea. The fact that the deadly amphibian sub-genre only contains this movie proves them wrong quite conclusively.

Trivia: Frogs marked Sam Elliot's first starring role in a movie, after several years of TV work. He acquits himself well enough, though few would recognize this clean-shaven young hunk as the grizzled mustache-touting character actor we know today.

Squirm (1976)

Director: Jeff Liebermann

Stars: Don Scardino, Patricia Pearcy, R.A. Dow

A downed power line pours millions of volts into the wet Georgia soil, sending the local worm population into a carnivorous feeding frenzy. The inhabitants of the nearby small town suffer the consequences, though luckily there's a bespectacled city dweller on hand to save the day with his book smarts and fancy learnin'.

A cheap and often amateurish movie, Squirm's rough edges and hayseed acting actually give it a creepy lo-tech believability, which may explain its enduring cult appeal. Gorehounds will be let down by the slow build-up, which offers several skeletons but little in the way of actual horror, but things pick up considerably towards the end with one memorable sequence showing the worms hungrily burrowing into the face of one of the characters. The climax, set in a house overrun with the worms, is genuinely creepy and unpleasant with tens of thousands of the slimy predators oozing through holes in the ceiling and people being pulled to their doom beneath a wormy flood.

Trivia: The special make-up effects in Squirm provided an early showing for Rick Baker, who would go on to win seven Academy Awards for his work on such hits as American Werewolf in London, Men In Black and The Grinch.

Slugs (1988)

Director: Juan Piquer Simón

Stars: Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale

Carnivorous slugs make a meal of the inhabitants of a small town, and it's up to a local health inspector to stop the horror.

A Spanish/American movie based on a novel by British horror author Shaun Hutson, Slugs both succeeds and fails thanks to its slimy stars. It succeeds because slugs are inherently unpleasant things, and the film goes out of its way to play on our disgust. Slugs crawl into eyes and out of mouths, while the gloopy gore takes care of whatever composure you have left. In one particularly memorable scene, a man vomits up a slug and then pulls his own face off - in a restaurant, no less. Another man hacks his own hand off rather than suffer a single slug nibbling his fingers. If you've come for the gross-out, Slugs definitely delivers.

But then it's also hard to get past the trite plot, which once again has a keen-eyed public servant ignored and mocked for guessing the cause of a spate of mysterious deaths, before everyone finally rallies around to defeat the slithering beasts but, as yucky as they are, slugs just don't make for terribly threatening foes. Even in mutant flesh-eating form, they're slow and far from agile, meaning victims must be clumsily placed in their path and meet their end screaming and writhing, instead of simply walking away, squishing the monsters underfoot as they go.

Slugs is also hamstrung by its international origins, with the cast divided between ambivalent US actors and poorly dubbed Spaniards. While the film is set in America, it's also clear that the shooting was split across two continents, with exterior scenes filmed in the US and interiors crudely matched up in Europe, and the cheap nature of the enterprise means its not hard to see the join.

Leeches (2003)

Director:  David DeCoteau

Stars: Matthew Twining, Josh Henderson, Stacey Nelson

River leeches gorge on the blood of a steroid-enhanced college swim team and grow into oversized killers.

David DeCoteau's much derided slime horror tips you off pretty early as to what kind of movie it will be. The opening credits could have come from any 1950s drive-in creature feature, while lengthy slow motion scenes of an all-male swim team stretching, swimming and showering may give you a hint that this one isn't for horror's traditional horny heterosexual teen audience. That the monsters are phallic things that suck the human body, while leaving behind a sticky white secretion should erase any lingering doubts as to DeCoteau's intent. These overt gay overtones tend to dominate most reviews of this movie, and are no doubt largely responsible for its toxic reputation.

Yet for all its faults, Leeches barrels along at a brisk pace, avoiding the second act inertia that kills so many cheap horror flicks. Barely five minutes passes without one of the cast getting slurped to death in grisly style, while the special effects rely on the fine old standbys of rubbery critters and fake blood. The leeches themselves wouldn't look out of place in the 1959 Vincent Price movie, The Tingler, but the pace and look of the film makes it feel more like a 1980s slasher. It certainly doesn't feel like it was made in 2003, and in this case that's a good thing.

Kudos, too, for never making it entirely clear who the main characters are. The guy you assume is the hero gets killed off without fanfare, while some audaciously stupid last act twists supply the requisite WTF factor.

Leeches is a dumb movie, but it's well paced, delivers plenty of icky gore and is really no worse than dozens of similarly cheesy schlock horror offerings. The only difference is this one has muscular young men preening for the camera rather than buxom girls, and that seems to lead certain horror fans to suddenly become strangely fussy about the quality of their film diet. If you're writing a paper on the male gaze and the role of sexuality in horror, this is your thesis right here.

Trivia: David DeCoteau also directed the tiresomely uneventful killer bear movie, Grizzly Rage , a movie which would have benefited enormously from just an ounce of Leeches' sleazy B-movie gusto.

FEAR OF FLYING

“Keep watching the skies...”

The Devil Bat (1940)

Director: Jean Yarbrough

Stars: Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O'Brien

A mad scientist gets revenge on the company that profited from his research by making his victims wear a special perfume that attracts specially trained giant bats.

Audiences in 1940 were well used to seeing Bela Lugosi hanging out with bats, but this odd and silly little poverty row thriller was a far cry from the gothic menace of Dracula. Lugosi hams it up, as only he could, cooing about “glandular stimulation” while electrocuting bats in his lab to make them grow larger. This is because he's working on the formula for a new shaving lotion with a “strange oriental fragrance”. The film, running at a brisk 65 minutes, doesn't even waste time explaining how that works – within ten minutes his first victim is lined up for a monster bat snack, and by the end credits he's added another three necks to his tally. For the most part, however, this is a potboiler detective yarn in the traditional style. Lugosi hisses and preens while the heroic cop slowly tightens the net around him.

The Devil Bat is every bit as stiff and formal as its vintage would suggest, while the soundtrack is all shrill strings and blaring horns, but there's a huge amount of charm wrapped in the sight of a clearly stuffed bat being yanked around on a string. If nothing else, it has an enjoyable lip-smacking Lugosi performance, and those are always fun to watch.

Trivia: The producers abandoned plans for a direct sequel, which would have found the Devil Bats battling Nazis, and instead waited until 1946 to churn out a completely unrelated sequel, Devil Bat's Daughter, as well as a virtual remake in the shape of The Flying Serpent, which swapped shaving lotion for magic feathers and giant bats for the Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl.

The GIANT CLAW (1957)

Director: Fred F. Sears

Stars: Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum

The Earth is attacked by a giant bird from outer space, protected by a mysterious anti-matter field.

Dozens of cheap monster movies from the 1950s have been consigned to the dusty corners of history, but The Giant Claw endures for one simple reason: its monster. With its long scrawny neck, hooked beak, flaring nostrils, goggle eyes and inexplicable tuft of hair on top of its hideous bald head, it is without a doubt one of the most ridiculous – and therefore unforgettable – creations ever to stalk the screen. As silly as it is, however, the film doesn't really deserve its reputation as an atomic age stinker. It's certainly no worse than many of the more anonymous efforts that have since been forgotten, and the bird itself is actually a rather wonderful piece of low budget puppetry, an iconic and characterful beast that looks like it would be more at home in the pop art craziness of a 1960s Japanese monster flick than a staid American program filler from the 1950s. The cast are inevitably overshadowed, both figuratively and literally, by the squawking turkey buzzard soaring above, but they fill their stock roles well and there are some genuinely ambitious scenes, such as when the bird attacks the United Nations. The film certainly suffers from many of the flaws common to its era – using heavy-handed narration to move things along, and using risible movie science to explain away its illogical nature – but it certainly doesn't deserve the caustic reputation that it has attracted. Much like the work of Ed Wood, The Giant Claw has become an easy target precisely because it has personality and is memorable, not because it's actually any worse than its peers.

Trivia: The bird was originally to have been animated by Ray Harryhausen, but the production couldn't afford the time or money needed for him to work his magic. The film does, however, use some of his work towards the end, when clips from Earth vs The Flying Saucers are used to beef up the climactic rampage by the space bird.

The origin of the bird is never explained, beyond the fact that it comes from outer space and projects a loosely explained anti-matter field that prevents Earth weapons from harming it, yet can be shut off so the bird can munch on cars, planes, parachutists and hot-rodding teens. Curiously, the method chosen to defeat the bird – by using meson particles to eliminate its protective field – has a kernel of scientific truth behind it. The meson is a genuine quantum particle that would have been fairly cutting edge knowledge at the time so, despite the film's many nonsensical ideas, somebody involved clearly knew a little more about real world physics than they were letting on.

Trivia: Legend has it that when star Jeff Morrow saw the finished film for the first time at the premiere, having had no idea what the bird would look like while filming, he was so dismayed that he quietly left the theater and went to drown his sorrows at home.

The Birds (1963)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Stars: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy

A free spirited young woman follows a potential suitor to the Californian coast, but their romance is interrupted when birds launch a sudden and inexplicable attack on the town of Bodega Bay.

As prolific as it is, the “animal attack” movie genre has very few genuine classics among its numbers. One that can certainly lay claim to that title is Hitchcock's masterful chiller, very loosely based on Daphne Du Maurier's story.

Ever the playful sadist, Hitchcock takes his time to tighten the screws, and uses the first hour of the film to introduce a rich cast of interesting characters, each with hopes and fears that pay off during the carnage to come. By the time the birds unleash their onslaught, the brakes are off as scene after scene ups the ante, spreading the chaos organically while keeping the action varied. It's gruesome, too, particularly for 1963, with eye sockets pecked clean and bloody wounds inflicted on plenty of cast members. The attack scenes, created using what were then state-of-the-art matte effects, still have the power to horrify, not least because they remind us that even the most humble wild bird has a beak and claws that can do serious harm in great enough numbers. And numbers is what, ultimately, gives The Birds its power. We're not scared of a bird, but the prospect of all of them, turning on us at once? It's hard not to wonder what would happen in that scenario.

Perhaps what is most ingenious about The Birds is that it never once shows any interest in explaining why the birds are attacking. Where lesser movies would contrive some third act revelation that leads to humanity prevailing, Hitchcock offers no such reassurance. There's no reason, and no closure – the film ends on a bold and abrupt note of ambiguity, leaving the audience unsure as to whether they've seen our heroes drive off for a fresh start, or simply into a larger apocalypse.

Hitchcock's brilliance also shines through in the sly symbolism laced through the film. Never one to spell things out, he toys with ideas of gender relations, class resentment and generation gaps but never hammers any single theme into a recognizable shape. The result, of course, is that the film is still being discussed today, as film scholars continue to argue about what the birds really represent. For most audiences, the answer is simple: a terrifying good time at the movies.

Trivia: A truly wretched sequel, The Birds II: Land's End, slunk onto video shelves in 1994. Little more than a halfhearted remake, the only tangible connection to the original is an appearance by Tippi Hedren, who really should have known better. Hedren also starred in, and produced, the disastrous lion movie, Roar

CHOSEN SURVIVORS (1974)

Director: Sutton Roley

Stars: Jackie Cooper, Richard Jaeckel, Bradford Dillman

Eleven people are sealed inside an underground bunker to wait out a nuclear war, but find their high tech refuge is invaded by vampire bats.

Combining the animal attack genre with elements of dystopian sci-fi and conspiracy thriller, Chosen Survivors is unmistakably a product of the 1970s. There's a Watergate-era cynicism to the way the plot unfolds, and a lack of faith in human nature that speaks to the weariness of a nation still mired in Vietnam. It's also very effective, even if it struggles to define or make use of the full cast of unlikely bedfellows locked in the bunker. Smart, restrained and with a nice line in trippy special effects, it's only the bats themselves that let the side down. The real bats are clearly too sweet and lethargic to cause the bloody mayhem attributed to them, while some poorly handled matte effects at the end reduce them to flickering black shadows superimposed over the action. Make allowances for those shortcomings, however, and Chosen Survivors is an original and memorable addition to the genre.

Trivia: Chosen Survivors features two familiar faces from the animal attack genre. Richard Jaeckal would go on to star in Grizzly , Mako: Jaws of Death and Day of the Animals , while Bradford Dillman followed his bat attack with turns in Bug , The Swarm and Piranha

Nightwing (1979)

Director: Arthur Hiller

Stars: Nick Mancuso, David Warner, Kathryn Harrold

A colony of vampire bats sets up home on a Native American reservation and begins to feed on the population.

Not content with trying to pass off tanned Italian actor Nick Mancuso as a Native American – they're both brown, right? - Nightwing's biggest flaw is how it squanders the intriguing idea of an animal attack movie set in the unique cultural environment of a reservation. Sadly, despite a rousingly aggressive campfire attack halfway through, it never finds a convincing pulse and instead spends more time on a bland subplot about oil under sacred ground than on the more pressing problem of carnivorous bats. Out of the cast, only the wonderful David Warner, an experienced veteran of this sort of movie, hits the heightened camp tone the concept requires. Blame must surely fall to director Arthur Hiller, best known for screwball comedies such as Jack Lemmon's The Out-of-Towners and the Gene Wilder hit Silver Streak, as well as the classic weepie, Love Story. There's no doubting Hiller's Hollywood credentials, but he's a poor match for this shameless creature feature, downplaying the horror aspects and fumbling scenes that should build tension. By the time the plot veers into the supernatural towards the end, after which point it simply ends, it's clear that Hiller just wanted to get it over with and move on.

Trivia: Hiller went on to serve as the president of both the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, so it's clear his brush with killer bats did his career no harm.

Beaks: The Movie (1987)

Director: Rene Cardona Jr.

Stars: Christopher Atkins, Michelle Johnson, Sonia Infante

Around the world, birds are attacking people. A plucky reporter and her hunky cameraman are determined to find out why.

Yet another offering from Mexploitation legend Rene Cardona Jr, Beaks doesn't hang around. There's virtually no plot and little time spent establishing characters. It's just straight into the gory eye-pecking bird attacks, with occasional nudity to keep things varied.

However, just like Cardona's other films, the acting is uniformly terrible and made worse by cheap dubbing. What it lacks in polish it gains back in gonzo B-movie appeal, even if Cardona uses common pigeons for almost all the attack scenes, using stock footage of flamingos and ostriches, as well as radio reports about killer ducks and chickens, to make his yarn seem larger in scale than it really is. Credit where it's due, there is one memorable set piece, in which an eagle attacks a hang glider, but for the most part you're getting mildly annoyed pigeons flapping close to people pretending to be scared and doing a pretty bad job of it.

Where Cardona does share ground with Hitchcock is in his lack of interest in explaining the bird attacks or offering narrative closure. However, while Hitchcock's ambiguity stimulates debate, Cardona's only causes confusion. His film simply stops, leaving the viewer with the suggestion that while the birds may have inexplicably forgiven us for our polluting ways, it's the insects who are only just getting started.

Trivia: Beaks has gone by many titles depending on the country. It's variously known as El ataque de los pájaros, Evil Birds, Birds of Prey and – rather cheekily – The Birds 2.

Bats (1999)

Director: Louis Morneau

Stars: Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina Meyer, Bob Gunton

A pair of genetically modified bats are released into the wild near a small Texas town. They breed with local bats and create a giant flesh-eating super-colony.

Despite its painfully generic premise, Bats deserves credit for getting straight down to business. After a kitschy opening sequence in which a pair of dating teens gets attacked at the obligatory lover's lane parking spot, the film pretty much skips the usual opening act sluggishness and gets right into the action. Barely five minutes in and everyone is in agreement that there are killer bats on the loose, the Center for Disease Control is on the case, the bodies are piling up and the movie's not even halfway through when the bats unleash an enjoyably aggressive attack on the entire town. Sadly, this means the second half doesn't really have anywhere to go, so there's a cheesy A-Team style montage of our heroes blockading themselves into the local school, set to opera music for no reason other than it classes the joint up a little, and the finale is nothing more than Lou Diamond Phillips' drawling sheriff and Dina Meyer's perky “batologist” wading through waist-high rivers of bat poop in an abandoned mine to trigger the handy freezing device that will save the day. As predictable as it all is, the cast are game for anything and the bats themselves are brought to life with some wonderfully hokey rubber puppets that are a joy to see.

Trivia: Bats marks a very early outing for screenwriter (and, on this occasion, producer) John Logan. The very next year, his career took a far classier turn when he wrote Oliver Stone's gridiron drama Any Given Sunday and was Oscar nominated for the screenplay for Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Since then, he's written The Last Samurai for Tom Cruise, The Aviator for Martin Scorsese and Sweeney Todd for Tim Burton. He also wrote the Academy Award winning animated movie Rango, which features a stunning 3D action sequence in which Johnny Depp's lizard hero is attacked by...killer bats. Coincidence?

Fangs (2002)

Director:  Kelly Sandefur

Stars: Corbin Bernsen, Tracy Nelson, Whip Hubley

Hundreds of genetically altered flesh-eating bats are unleashed on a small town just as potential homeowners arrive for the annual Apple Blossom dance.

Do lazy old cliches still count if they're delivered with tongue firmly planted in cheek? That's the question posed by this surprisingly enjoyable effort, which sails right down the line dividing goofy B-movie from knowing parody. The script skews more towards sitcom banter than actual horror, and the cast of reliable character actors is game enough to go along with the joke. In case the gently mocking tone wasn't evidence enough, a second act twist reveals that the bats are actually part of an orchestrated revenge plot and the finale couldn't be more cartoon-like if Scooby and Shaggy turned up to help solve the case. Despite not being remotely scary, the CGI bats are above average for the genre, a few clunky close-ups aside, and the whole enterprise rattles along with a freewheeling fun loving energy that's easy enough to enjoy. Since the movie doesn't seem to aspire to anything more, that's a victory of sorts.

Vampire Bats (2005)

Director: Eric Bross

Stars: Lucy Lawless, Dylan Neal, Liam Waite

Polluted water transforms a bat colony into an aggressive, murderous brood hellbent on attacking attractive young students.

This direct-to-DVD effort is nothing if not faithful to the expected plot twists of the killer animal template. A shady chemical company provides the catalyst for the bat rampage, as well as the usual cover up conspiracy, while the local police blunder around arresting innocent students for the bite-related deaths of their peers. Thankfully, the cast is above average and almost manages to make the result watchable. Lucy Lawless, slimmed down from her muscular TV turn as Xena: Warrior Princess, is a naturally charming lead, and while her posse of eager young student helpers makes proceedings feel a bit like Buffy the Vampire (Bat) Slayer, they at least bring some energy to an otherwise plodding story. Shame the same can't be said for the special effects, which fall back on bargain basement CGI and rarely make it look like the characters are in any real danger.

Trivia: Vampire Bats boasts a couple of surprising cameos. Watch out for sitcom star Brett Butler, and Scottish comedian turned talk show host Craig Ferguson as a boozy fisherman.

DIE Krähen (2006)

Director: Edzard Onneken

Stars: Susanna Simon, Stefan Jürgens, Doris Kunstmann

A flock of specially reared aggressive crows with a taste for live flesh is accidentally released in the German countryside and only a pregnant veterinarian, recently relocated to the area, can see the full extent of the problem.

Slow and largely uneventful, it'd be easy to write off this German TV movie (literal title: The Crows) as a boring waste of time, but there's something about its low key approach that makes it oddly effective. Susanna Simon certainly helps, playing lead character Alexandra with a welcome absence of movie star contrivance. She's natural and believable, and with her husband as her sidekick the movie has the weird air of a domestic drama that just happens to have killer crows in it. You don't get to see those crows do much killing but director Onneken keeps them a credible threat all the same, shooting with a style and restraint unusual in the modern animal attack genre. When we do get to see the flock, swirling around our heroes against an ominous cloudy sunset, the image is suitably apocalyptic. That's appropriate since with its claustrophobic focus and downbeat conspiracy undertones the film feels very much of a piece with the stark and foreboding eco-thrillers of the 1970s, such as the UK's Doomwatch.

Bats: HUMAN HARVEST (2007)

Director: Jamie Dixon

Stars: David Chokachi, Michael Jace, Pollyanna McIntosh

An elite Delta Force squad is sent into a remote Russian forest to extract a rogue US scientist, unaware that he is protected by a colony of large flesh-eating bats with chameleon-like camouflage.

If you ever wanted the 1987 Schwarzenegger hit Predator to be remade with more boring characters, less filmmaking skill and CGI bats instead of an iconic alien monster, then Human Harvest is the film for you. Utterly shameless in the way it riffs on Arnie's blockbuster hit, even down to lifting lines of dialog, there's some credit to be had here simply for producing something that steers clear of the expected animal horror plot cliches – there's no small town festival under threat, thankfully. But that doesn't compensate for the brazenly cheap production values and the embarrassing attempt at making its cast look like military badasses. Most struggle not to get tangled in the straps of their rifle, and the overall effect is less “battle-hardened combat team” and more “the folks from accounting on a paintball team-building exercise”. The bats themselves are OK, as cheap CGI goes, and there are some goofy moments of gore courtesy of some grisly skeletons and mangled corpses. The special effects highlight comes when a swarm of bats seems to literally knock a man's arm clean off simply by flying past him, but even with that level of over the top nonsense, there's nothing here that demands your attention or sticks in the memory once the end credits have rolled.

Kaw (2007)

Director: Sheldon Wilson

Stars: Sean Patrick Flanery, Stephen McHattie, Kristin Booth

A small town is attacked by bloodthirsty ravens, driven insane and granted eerie intelligence by Mad Cow Disease.

A standard riff on Hitchcock's formula, this DTV effort at least offers a fun excuse for the avian carnage in the shape of disease-riddled ravens that become smart enough to throw rocks at windows. All the necessary genre ingredients are in place, but they're served up with little enthusiasm. The bird attacks are tame, with actors waving their arms then falling down with a bit of blood on their face, and none of the characters are interesting enough to lift the movie above mediocre. Efficient but very dull.

Trivia: In a truly sad turn, the town's doctor is played by Rod Taylor, star of Hitchcock's The Birds.

FLU BIRDS (2008)

Director: Leigh Scott

Stars: Clare Carey, Jonathon Trent, Sarah Butler

A group of juvenile delinquents fight to survive when mutant birds attack, carrying a lethal strain of the H5N1 avian flu virus.

The knowledge that director Leigh Scott was previously responsible for such outrageous direct-to-DVD blockbuster rip-offs as Transmorphers and Pirates of Treasure Island should give you an idea of where to set your expectations for this opportunistic headline-inspired B-movie. It's cheap, clearly shot in a matter of weeks with a cast of wide-eyed newcomers, and laughably illogical. More to the point, it's not particularly interesting, as it continually contrives ways to keep the screen filled without having to spend money on its low rent special effects. While the teen anti-heroes squabble in the woods, sporadic scenes of doctors fighting to contain the infection stir some Outbreak-style medical horror into the mix. Anything other than show the flu birds themselves, basically, which is perhaps just as well. Looking more like bats crossed with pterodactyls, these crudely animated digital critters  are more likely to inspire laughter than fear.

Trivia: One of the birds first victims is Lance Guest, probably best known for his starring role in the classic 1984 sci-fi movie The Last Starfighter. He also starred as Michael Brody in Jaws: The Revenge

LES CORBEAUX (2009)

Director: Régis Musset

Stars: Astrid Veillon, Jean-Pierre Michael, Anne Charrier

Thousands of crows descend on a small French island when their migration pattern disrupted by climate change.

This French TV miniseries – literal title: The Crows – owes an obvious debt to Hitchcock but while it inevitably fails to live up to his high standard, it's not a bad effort. The biggest problem is the three hour running time, mandated by the decision to make it a miniseries rather than a TV movie. There's a tight movie in here somewhere, but it's bloated by the need to keep filling up time with subplots about robbers hiding out on the island, and the local doctor's autistic daughter. There's a down-to-earth Gallic appeal to the way the story unfolds, sluggish and generic though it may be, and the use of real birds for some shots works wonders. Sadly, there's a weakness for CGI, even where it doesn't seem to be needed, and while the digital birds are well animated, they're poorly composited into the scenery making them look more fake than they need to be. In both tone and pace, not to mention title, it's very similar to German TV movie Die Krähen but it's not quite as well put together – the sprawl of the miniseries format takes an uneventful story and simply stretches it too far. Even so, killer bird movies are relatively rare, and decent ones rarer still, so Les Corbeaux is hard to criticize too harshly.

BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR (2010)

Director: James Nguyen

Stars: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore, Adam Sessa

A salesman and a fashion model begin a relationship, just as hundreds of eagles decide to attack humanity because of global warming and stuff.

Birdemic is...well, it's something. This $10,000 opus plumbs such depths of terrible moviemaking that it becomes transcendent, its ineptitude so all-encompassing and bizarre that you spend the whole thing waiting for the punchline to reveal it's all a carefully constructed spoof. The punchline never comes. If writer-director-producer James Nguyen is doing this as an elaborate joke, he never shows his cards. Put it this way: Birdemic is by far the worst movie in this book. Given the competition, that's one hell of an achievement.

Birdemic's awfulness must be seen to be believed. This is a movie where shots are out of focus, and where characters are cut off mid-sentence or are drowned out by traffic. The acting is simply amazing. Lead actor Alan Bagh is incapable of even walking down the street convincingly, and delivers every line of dialog with the thudding monotone rhythm of a robot. Not that the script was ever likely to help him out. It spends the first forty-five minutes establishing the relationship between his cocky salesman, Rod (he has one phone conversation in a bare office that consists of “yes, yes, I can offer a fifty per cent discount” and this apparently closes a million dollar deal) and Whitney Moore's glamorous model Nathalie (her shoots are held at the local one-hour-photo store, and this lands her the cover of the Victoria's Secret catalog). Every scene strongly suggests that Nguyen has no idea how human beings move, talk or think. When they first meet, Rod tells Nathalie they used go to school together. Then he asks her where she's from. That, amazingly, is one of the less idiotic moments.

And, oh, the special effects. Words really can't do justice to the crudely animated bird-shapes that float across the screen with all the grace of a Sega Genesis game. It's the same eagle – looking for all the world like an animated gif image downloaded from the internet – copied and pasted across the screen, flapping in slow motion or simply “hovering” in front of actors who then fall over with stage blood rubbed on their face and neck.

But Nguyen wants these eagles to pass on a message, and so the film stops periodically so some passing character can launch into a garbled and scientifically suspect explanation of how global warming has killed all the krill in the sea which has caused bird flu and SARS and also bark beetles to kill redwood trees and all of this means eagles want to kill people. Nguyen even stages a stiff and awkward love scene in front of a bare wall with a piece of paper taped to it. On the paper is the address of an anti-war website he'd clearly like you to visit.

As with literally every other aspect of Birdemic, it's not merely bad, it's bad on such an astonishing scale that it immediately escalates from irritating to fascinating. Whether deliberate or not, Birdemic is a surrealist masterpiece, a Dadaist deconstruction of everything that is terrible in American cinema, in the guise of terrible American cinema. And yet it's this very terribleness that makes it so compulsively watchable. Most bad movies are simply lazy, unwilling to put in the extra effort needed to polish a script or connect the narrative dots, and ending up excruciatingly dull in the process. For all it's many, many faults, Birdemic is never dull. It's the work of people trying their absolute hardest to make an entertaining movie and failing so spectacularly that they accidentally end up succeeding.

Trivia: After Birdemic became a cult sensation, Nguyen started work on Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, with the ominous tagline “You asked for it”. Nguyen also helmed the 2003 “romantic sci-fi” movie Julie and Jack which starred Tippi Hedren. By reusing footage from that film in Birdemic, he was able to include the star of Hitchcock's The Birds in the credits of his own inept tribute.

ANIMAL APOCALYPSE

“Ever feel like the whole
world is out to get us?”

The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)

Director: David Kramarsky

Stars: Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Dona Cole

A small rural community is menaced by the local wildlife and farm animals, which have been possessed by an alien probe.

This ultra-low budget sci-fi potboiler is a fun reminder of a time when we were innocent enough to be entertained, and even scared, by movies in which very little happens. Yet The Beast With a Million Eyes was also strangely prescient with regards to the future of animal horror movies, with a bird attack scene some eight years before Hitchcock delivered his classic and a pet dog turning savage long before Cujo came on the scene.  Strangely, the film's cheap nature – several action scenes are completely silent apart from stock music - actually works in its favor giving otherwise ordinary scenes a weird off-kilter nightmare feel that is almost surreal. That, of course, must be weighed up against less effective scenes, such as the one where chickens are clearly thrown at a woman to make it look like she's being attacked. The science fiction elements are really just there to kick the soporific story into action, and to provide a convenient way to explain why everything would come to an abrupt end just over an hour later. The Beast With A Million Eyes is a wonderful title, but not a lot more.

Trivia: Rather famously, producer James H. Nicholson came up with the title and poster for this B-movie first, and sold it to distributors on the strength of the name. Roger Corman then had to come up with a movie that lived up to the rather outlandish promise of a creature with a million eyes, and decided that the eyes in question would belong to all the creatures used by an alien invader in his quest for world domination. Misleading, certainly, but also rather ingenious.

Food of the Gods (1976)

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Stars: Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker

A farmer feeds mysterious white ooze to his livestock, creating giant chickens, rats, maggots and wasps.

Borrowing the title, some character names and the broad plot outline of a 1904 HG Wells story, this endearingly silly effort at least deserves credit for trying to offer something more interesting than the usual Jaws copycats of the mid-1970s. For that we can probably thank 1950s B-movie mogul Bert I. Gordon, whose atomic era fondness for giant creatures survived into the disco age.

Sadly, having established its large array of giant creatures, the movie quickly settles on rats as its primary antagonists of choice and soon falls into a predictable rhythm. The contrivances required to trap its human cast on an island with the beasts fail to convince, as pro footballers, a young man with a pregnant girlfriend and a cartoonishly devious businessman  all wind up backed into a corner by the outsized rodents. The film does boast some enjoyable special effects, however, thanks to clever use of real animals, puppets, miniature sets and split-screen . It's thanks to these techniques that the siege-style finale in a flooding house has a pulse that could almost be described as “exciting”, as real rats clamber over a model house like tiny furry Godzillas.

Trivia: The film adapts only the first part of Wells' original story, and even then only in the loosest possible way. Wells used his giant critters to kickstart a satirical look at society, as viewed through the adventures of gigantic children. The movie flirts with this idea at the every end, as the contaminating ooze finds its way into cow's milk at a school, but it wouldn't be until 1989 and the film's vague sequel, Gnaw , that we'd get to see any oversized kids.

Day of the Animals (1977)

Director: William Girdler

Stars: Christopher George, Leslie Nielsen, Richard Jaeckal

The erosion of the ozone layer causes all animals above 5000 feet to go crazy and attack humans. This is bad news for a mismatched group of victims on a hiking vacation in the mountains, as eagles, cougars, bears and wolves begin stalking them.

Day of the Animals is, rather appropriately, a peculiar beast. Directed by William Girdler, fresh from the success of the killer bear shocker Grizzly , it owes more to disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure than the typical eco-horror yarns covered elsewhere. The hikers are drawn from a broad range of cliches – young lovers, a bickering couple, a prissy middle class mom and her son, a football hero dying of cancer, a professor and a female news reporter – and the animals are considerate enough to put aside their usual predatory instincts to concentrate on human prey, instead of each other, and pick their victims off one at a time, rather than simply ripping them all to shreds at once.

Like a lot of 1970s genre movies, there's a nihilistic tone to the thing and a cruelty to some of the deaths that is still shocking, despite the weak special effects, numerous cutaways to wildlife footage and the blatantly silly notion of birds and beasts conspiring together in order to kill – yet strangely never eat – the cast. The rather pat ending, therefore, feels like something of a cop out, as the script contrives an unconvincingly hasty reason for the carnage to be halted before the credits.

The highlight of the film is Leslie Nielsen's unhinged performance as an advertising executive who goes from irritating jerk to bare-chested rapist in the space of a few hours. The scene in which he wrestles with a live bear has to be seen to be believed.

Trivia: Day of the Animals reunited William Girdler with his Grizzly stars Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel. Girdler went on to make the risible supernatural horror The Manitou, but was killed in a helicopter accident before it opened.

LoNG Weekend (1978)

Director: Colin Eggleston

Stars: John Hargreaves, Briony Behets, Michael Aitkens

A husband and wife on the brink of divorce head off to the Australian coast for a camping vacation, but find that their disregard for nature is going to have tragic consequences.

A strange and sombre Ozploitation curiosity, Long Weekend is both smarter and creepier than its genre peers. Confidently paced, it's full of subtle moments that showcase just how out of tune with nature Peter and Marcia, the couple in question, really are. A casually discarded cigarette smoulders in the brush. A kangaroo is the victim of a hit and run accident. Litter is strewn with cavalier disregard. And, at the heart of it all, the cause of their marital strife: a recent abortion that Marcia regrets. In case you don't get the message, Marcia underlines it by smashing a rare eagle's egg. Life, for these city dwellers, is not sacred.

Nature bites back, as it so often has, but with only two characters (not counting a handful of locals on-screen for only a few minutes at the start and end) there's no room for the story to chalk up cheap kills. Instead, we get an eerie slow build and a series of mishaps that could be the result of the interloper's inexperience with outdoors life, or could be mounting evidence that the countryside itself is conspiring against them with murderous intent. Director Colin Eggleston taps into that feeling of dislocation and fear that only comes with alien animal noises in the night, and come the final thirty minutes, which unfold in a delirious swirl of almost entirely dialogue-free panic and terror, he's crafted a notably superior entry in the eco-horror canon.

Trivia: Long Weekend was remade in 2008 as Nature's Grave, with Jim Caviezel in the lead role. The same script was used for both films.

The Beasts Are On The Streets (1978)

Director: Peter R. Hunt

Stars: Carol Lynley, Dale Robinette, Billy Green Bush

A tanker crashes into the fence surrounding a safari park, releasing scores of beasts which then proceed to make their way on to the streets.

This TV movie deserves credit for at least delivering on the “beasts” part of its title. With no cheap puppet fakery, the movie uses real fully grown animals for all its scenes and doesn't skimp on the variety. Elephants headbutt cars, rhinos and ostriches go toe to toe with a couple of joyriding jerks in a hot rod, a tiger fights a bear in a public park and a pride of lions roams free in a hospital. What the movie doesn't deliver is any real suspense or horror, restricted as it is by its made-for-TV origins. A trio of redneck hunters with sloppy aim supplies some human peril, but for the most part the story limps along based solely on the the safari park staff (including a pre-Miami Vice role for Philip Michael Thomas) as they attempt recapture their escaped creatures with very little fuss. It's not even particularly scary or exciting, and despite the variety of outlandish scenarios conjured up, and the size of the menagerie running wild there's only one human fatality. By the end credits the early tension has given way to light comedy and hollow melodrama, and you're left wondering what the point of the whole thing was.

Trivia: Star Carol Lynley came closest to stardom when she joined the ensemble cast of The Poseidon Adventure. Movie success eluded her, however, and TV shows and TV movies were her bread and butter. Director Peter R. Hunt cut his teeth as the editor on the Sean Connery Bond movies, and first stepped up to the director's chair for George Lazenby's sole 007 outing, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Wild Beasts (1984)

Director: Franco Prosperi

Stars: Lorraine De Selle, John Aldrich, Ugo Bologna

Animals in a European zoo are driven crazy when PCP leaks into their water supply. They break out and go on a violent rampage through the city.

Although never as nasty as some Italian horror movies, Wild Beasts is still one of the more brutal and cruel titles in this book, not least because many of its scenes of animal violence appear to be real, or at the very least involve genuine distress on the part of the animals being filmed. Most notoriously, rats are burned alive in a scene which really doesn't look faked, despite a disclaimer to the contrary, but there are other scenes that will still cause viewers of a moral disposition considerable discomfort. A cat is attacked by rats, a hyena fights a pig, a lion wrestles with a cow and a tiger suffers convulsions that seem to be the result of electrocution. Fatalities may not have occurred, but those animals are in visible pain. That the film then tries to push the message that mankind will pay the price for exploiting animals is so blatantly hypocritical that you almost have to admire the audacity of it.

Away from ethical matters, Wild Beasts is terrible – but also ruthlessly effective. The plotting is bizarre, the English dubbing worse, and it all builds to a conclusion that is both ridiculous and abrupt. Along the way, however, it excels at coming up with scenario after scenario for its drug-crazed critters. A cheetah chases a Volkswagen down the city streets. Elephants crush a young couple to death, then crash an airliner by wandering across a runway. A tiger tears through a subway car. A polar bear attacks a school. Unlike so many other horror movies, this is one where you can honestly say you've got no idea what's coming next. It's a parade of grisly death and outrageous chutzpah, and one that makes Wild Beasts a seminal entry in the animal attack genre, for those who can stomach its sleazy qualities at least.

Trivia: PCP was developed as an animal tranquilizer, so in reality this movie should be about a zoo full of animals having a lovely nap.

THE TREK (2002)

Director: Chanchai Pantasi

Stars: Tawatchai Austinont, Paul Visut Carey, Supakson Chaimongkol

A team of Thai and European conservationists head deep into the jungle to find a rare breed of elephant, but fall foul of drug smugglers. Making matters worse, the drugs have contaminated the river, driving the local wildlife into a frenzy.

Naïve people blundering into the jungle only to meet a gruesome death is a staple of the Italian exploitation cinema of the 1970s, so it's more than a little strange to find the template revived for this relatively recent Thai movie. The comparisons go deeper than plot details as well. This is a bracingly ruthless and nasty horror, with lots of deaths, lots of gore and precious little sentimentality. The film avoids using the jungle's larger inhabitants for its horror, and instead turns to the beasts most likely to make our skin crawl. Spiders, snakes even mud crabs turn on the soft fleshy humans and while the inevitable use of CGI for some sequences is weak, there's a propulsive energy to the thing that makes the 100-plus minute running time fly by. You won't care a fig for the characters, but it's always fun to see them meet their sticky ends.

RISE OF THE ANIMALS (2011)

Director: Chris Wojcik

Stars: Greg Hoople, Stephanie Motta, Adam Schonberg

A young man travels across the country to find his girlfriend, as the animal kingdom turns on mankind.

More of an enthusiastic home movie than a professional film, Rise of the Animals doesn't try to hide its debt – both narrative and stylistic – to the British horror comedy, Shaun of the Dead. It's an affectionate tribute though, and one that overcomes clunky dialogue and stiff performances with surprisingly effective direction and editing. It's the special effects that make it work, though. Not even bothering to strive for realism, the animals that hurl themselves at the cast in ravenous attacks are nothing more than stuffed toys, their fluffy ridiculousness heightened by the buckets of fake blood thrown around in their wake. To their credit, the cast never plays up to the joke, cowering in terror from rabbit plushies and obvious puppets alike. This honesty of intent means that while Rise of the Animals obviously had a fraction of the budget of some of the other movies in this book, it's no more silly for its tongue-in-cheek approach.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

WHAT'S A NICE ACTOR LIKE YOU DOING IN A MOVIE LIKE THIS?

Brad Pitt menaced with power tools! Hugh Grant battling an ancient worm god! Humphrey Bogart as an effeminate mad scientist! All this plus moon-faced robot spies, disembodied hands, several Anti-Christs, dancing zombies, nude space vampires, barbarians iants, lusty ghosts, psychotic clowns, randy computers, evil test-tube babies, crap Russian superheroes…and a confused Jack Nicholson trying to punch a falcon.

SPECCY NATION: A TRIBUTE TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH GAMING

Join veteran games journalist and author Dan Whitehead on a journey through fifty classic home computer games that helped define the golden age of British gaming, from timeless classics to unlikely cult favourites, and even the games so bizarre and eccentric they could only have flourished on the ZX Spectrum in the bedroom games industry of the 1980s.

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Cover and interior design: Dan Whitehead

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Illustrations by  Doug Slack (http://hardboiledhorror.tumblr.com/)

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© 2012 Dan Whitehead