APEX PREDATORS

Every beast must have its movie.

Every apex predator has its movie. Jaws is king. There were apex predator movies before Jaws, like Night of the Grizzly and Alligator, but Jaws was the first to make you believe it was real. It scared the crap out of people. We still talk about it today, recycyle our Jaws memes, and watch it over and over. It spawned a passel of shark movies of varying quality. Deep Blue Sea is memorable because of Samuel L. Jackson’s abrupt departure. The Shallows is pretty good, but no shark movie can match the impact of Jaws. There are two Meg movies. For such a terrifying creature, they are surprisingly tame, but amusing in a pass-the-time sort of way.

That is until you switch predators. Anaconda is the king of the giant snake movies. It gets a bad rap. It’s wildly entertaining. Ice Cube, Jo-Lo, but it’s Jon Voight who steals the show as a German big game hunter. When that giant anaconda sticks its head in the cabin window you’ll believe a snake can fly.

There have been a couple forgettable sequels, but Anaconda has the field pretty much to itself.

Bears have not been well served. Back Country is a great drama but it never features the bear front and center ripping limb from limb. Cocaine Bear should have been the one. If only they’d played it straight. An opportunity to show a coke-crazed bear (based on a true story) attacking people in the woods. But nooo…instead its a “horror/comedy,” which is neither terrifying or funny. The Edge is the closest we have to a truly scary bear movie, but the bear takes a back seat to the drama, written by David Mamet, starring Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins as two romantic rivals whose plane hits a bird and crash-lands in the middle of Alaska. Who among us would not want to see Alec Baldwin ripped limb from limb? It’s a great movie, I recommend it.

Wolves have been shortchanged in the apex predator sweepstakes. Not terrifying enough. They can be. In the right hands. There’s only one truly great wolf movie, The Gray, starring Liam Neeson, a hunter who works for a petroleum company in the northern Alaska wilderness. When the plane he and a bunch of roughnecks are riding crash-lands in the wilderness, a pack of wolves starts picking them off one by one. A gripping movie and one of the great existential thrillers. The leader of the pack only emerges at the very end. It is a monster.

I have saved the best for last. Alligators and crocodiles are not the same. One will see you later, the other will see you after awhile. Rogue, an Australian movie about a monster crocodile in the Northwest Territories, rivals Jaws for top apex predator movie. You will believe this croc is real. The cinematography is breathtaking. Like Jaws, director Greg McLean is careful not to show you too much of the monster until the climax. It also stars the radiant Radha Mitchell.