Movies with bite!

It's nature gone wild as Anton van Beek and Mark Craven dig into Hollywood's love affair with killer crocs, fiendish fish, bloodthirsty boars and much, much more

- nton van Beek and Mark Craven

RAMPAGING REPTILES

Following decades of bit parts in jungle adventure movies, alligators and crocodiles started to take center-stage in the bloodied wake of Steven Spielberg's 1975 smash Jaws. The first notable post-Jaws killer croc turned up in Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive (1976), where the redneck owner of a sleazy Louisiana hotel feeds guests to a crocodile living in the neighbouring swamp. Hooper, once his directing career had fallen from grace, gave the genre another go in 2000, helming the lacklustre DTV creature-feature Crocodile (but not the even worse 2002 sequel Crocodile 2: Death Swamp).

Aided immeasurably by a knowing script from John Sayles and a game cast, future Cujo helmer Lewis Teague delivered one of the all-time great creature features in 1980's Alligator (see p95). Sadly, Alligator II: The Mutation (1991) was a pale imitation completely lacking any bite.

By this point Thai cinema had got in on the act with Crocodile Fangs (1978) and Chorake (1979), as had Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino with The Great Alligator (1979). Yet he was outdone by fellow countryman Fabrizio De Angelis, who directed 1989's brilliantly outlandish Killer Crocodile and penned its sequel a year later.

The rest of the 1990s were a dry patch for crocodile lovers, until 20th Century Fox's likeable Lake Placid arrived in 1999 with its tale of a 30-foot saltwater croc terrorising locals around a lake in Maine. The film didn't exactly set the box office alight, but did well enough to generate four cheap DTV sequels: Lake Placid II (2007), Lake Placid 3 (2010), Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (2012), and another we'll get to shortly.