The Sunday “Bad” Movies is a collection of many different
type of posts that I’ve written all relating to a movie I watched for that
week. The topics of interest vary from
week to week. It all depends on what I
feel like. I’ve done reviews or recaps
of movies and the crazy or not so crazy things that happen in them. I have written about general topics like
superhero movies and fighting movies.
And there are times like this week where I will delve into a little bit
of my own personal history with the movie.
Though, this week, I spin that topic in a slightly different way.
My reasoning for the twist on my personal history is that
this is the first time that I have ever seen the movie Zombeavers. This is a movie
that came out in 2014 and dealt with a group of twenty-somethings being
attacked by, you guessed it, beavers that have been zombified. It plays as a horror movie with comedy
sprinkled throughout, and for the most part it works. It also has three main female characters that
sort of fit within the mold set by Halloween. They are modern representations of those
character archetypes, though the outcome is different. But the movie got me thinking about something
else. It got me to look back at my
history with movies in which animals attack people. Real or fake animals, it doesn’t matter. I just want to take a look down memory lane
and see what comes up. (Also, this is
some decent writing for 4am, isn’t it?)
I would say that it all began for me with Jurassic Park. I remember being five years old and watching
it at a babysitter’s house because they had it on VHS. Remember VHS?
It was before discs became popular enough to win out in a format war for
movies. The opening scene of the movie
with the unseen dinosaur in the box was horrifying to me. I can still remember being frightened by that
scene and not wanting to continue the movie.
Yet I did. And I fell in love
with the movie. The wonder and
excitement about seeing the dinosaurs filled me. I was a kid who enjoyed dinosaurs for a long
time; a little Ross Gellar.
My next few years were a blur of different animal attack
films going in and out of my brain.
Between the time when I was five and the time when I was twelve, there
was a barrage of late 1990s animal attack films that were released. I know I saw some of them during that time in
my life. I saw Anaconda and Lake Placid
for sure, though I remember very little of seeing them at that age. (I’ve seen all four Anacondas recently. I even
covered them in the Sunday “Bad” Movies just over a year ago.) The one standout during this period of my
life was Arachnophobia, which didn’t
even come out during that period. It
instead came out in 1990. My family
ended up with a copy of the movie during the rise of DVD and I watched it again
and again. It either played upon my fear
of spiders or caused it. I’m not sure
which.
The next big memory in my personal history of watching
animal attack movies came in 2002 when I watched a movie called Sabretooth. I came across it on TV and watched it and for
some reason I took a liking to it. It’s
a movie that I don’t think a lot of people know about. It is about a bunch of hikers being killed by
a genetically engineered mountain cat.
The film sparked something in me and made me go back and watch movies
like Deep Blue Sea (from 1999), Eight Legged Freaks (from 2002), and The Birds (from 1963). My fascination with these types of movies has
not stopped since.
Moving one year forward, into 2003, I would watch TBS after
school all the time. I was hooked on all
of the sitcoms that they would play in the evening. Sometime during the year, commercials started
to air for a new TBS movie about a shark attack featuring Lou Diamond Phillips. It was called Red Water. I never watched
it, but I remember seeing commercials for it all the time. I still remember the movie because of those
commercials.
If I had to pinpoint the next big animal attack moment in my
life, it would be Snakes on a Plane.
This Samuel L. Jackson led action movie set on a plane had snakes
killing many of the passengers. I was
fond of the movie right from the get-go.
The name was magnificent, the movie was cheesy, and the music fit me at
exactly the right time. The movie would
also influence many things I watched later on in my life, from the movies of
The Asylum (Snakes on a Train,
anybody?) to movies with plain old goofy names.
I mean, if Snakes on a Plane
could be as entertaining as it was, why couldn’t other movies that have names
as crazy as that?
Now for a little story I’ve told before but I’ll tell again
because it is relevant. Not long after
watching Snakes on a Plane, a high
school friend and I were perusing the local video store. (I miss video
stores. It was so nice to see all of the
cases on shelves.) While looking for new
movies that we wanted, we spotted Snakes
on a Train sitting on a shelf. I
laughed that such a ridiculous movie would be out there. A rip-off of a movie in theaters, with a
story that was more insane than the theatrical release. Little did I know that I would later be
watching lots of movies like it.
There are three more big moments that I want to
highlight. The first is the theatrical
releases since that point which hinged on animal attacks. I won’t try to say that I’ve seen any of them
in the theater (Jurassic World
aside). But there were a few notable
releases that came out and fed into my desire to watch heightened animal attack
movies. One such movie was another David
R. Ellis movie (he did Snakes on a Plane). It was called Shark Night 3D and was about a group of 20 somethings who went to a
beach house only to get attacked by sharks.
It was very forward about what kind of movie it was and had an overall
attitude that very few movies seem to have.
The other movie was Piranha 3D,
a remake of sorts of the 1978 Piranha. This updated version managed to bring
sexuality and cool to the movie while also taking the perverts involved in that
kind of stuff to task. Plus, Elisabeth
Shue was kicking fish ass. You can’t
beat that.
But the real place where animals seem to be attacking people
is television. This brings me to the
second last highlight, which is the television movies. These movies seem to be getting even more
insane than their theatrical equivalents.
I mean, sure, Birdemic is
stinking up the theatrical side of the animal movies. That’s true.
Yet, television seems to be all about these kinds of movies now. I took notice of this trend in 2010 when The
Soup started featuring clips of Mega
Shark vs. Giant Octopus. (Note that
this is another movie from The Asylum, and they’re still going to come up
again.) The movie aired on SyFy, which
may have been SciFi at the time. And
they wouldn’t be stopping there. They
aired more movies like it. Sharktopus, Big Ass Spider! (technically on video before ever being on SyFy), 2-Headed Shark Attack, Anaconda 3 and Anaconda 4, Avalanche Sharks,
(all of which I’ve seen) and many others were shown on SyFy. Though, one movie… No. One franchise outdid all of these, for
whatever reason.
The pinnacle of modern animal attack movies and my history with
them comes with the Sharknado
movies. I’m not entirely sure what it
was about the first movie that got people wanting to watch it. People tuned in the night it aired and
watched the hell out of it. It was one
of the most live-Tweeted events on Twitter.
I was annoyed that one of the more incompetent movies by The Asylum was
the one getting all the attention. The success of the first would be surpassed
one year later by the sequel, and the ratings for Sharknado 2 were crazy high.
It was also a better made movie, knowing what to take from the first
movie and improving upon it. Sharknado 3 came out about a month ago
and was also popular for SyFy.
I can’t say I watched all modern animal attack movies. What I can tell you is that the Sunday “Bad”
Movies have allowed me to watch more animal attack movies than I probably would
have otherwise. It only took seven weeks
for me to include one. 2-Headed Shark Attack began the animal
attack concept that has shown up time and time again with movies like Big Ass Spider!, Shakma, Anaconda, Snakes on a Train, Frogs, and this week’s Zombeavers. There are surely many more to come, as there
are many more movies out there that I have yet to cover.
For now, I’m just going to cover some notes:
- Zombeavers was suggested by @erincandy.
- Movies I mention in this post that have been covered are 2-Headed Shark Attack, Snakes on a Train, Shakma, Big Ass Spider!, Anaconda, and Frogs.
- I also mentioned Halloween. I haven’t covered that, but I’ve covered a movie in the franchise, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
- One of the actors in Zombeavers was Peter Gilroy, who had previously been featured in 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
- Rex Linn was also featured in Zombeavers. He was in Drop Zone as well.
- Have you seen Zombeavers? Have you seen any of the movies I mentioned? What is your history with animal attack movies? There’s a comments section below for anything you want to say.
- If you have a movie that you think would be perfect for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can suggest that to me through either the comments or my Twitter.
- Next week’s movie will be Foodfight! This movie is some animated thing that was delayed for nine years and finally saw the light of day in 2012. It is apparently filled with product placement and crude humor and situations. I’m not sure what I’m getting myself into. I’ll let you know next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment