Thursday Movie Picks #300: Movies About Animals

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This time, the theme is "Movies about animals". Now, I figure you could go one of two ways with this. One obvious way is movies along the lines of the Lassie movies, with a heroic main character animal. But I decided I'd go in a different direction, and actually picked four movies instead of just three:

Them! (1954). Nuclear testing in the US southwest has created a breed of giant ants, which being that big have enough venom to bite people to death. (In reality, insects have a size limit preventing them from getting this big as the exoskeleton would crush them to death.) Scientist Edmund Gwenn is brough in to investigate at the urging of James Whitmore and James Arness, and when he waves a glass of formic acid under a little girl survivor's nose, he knows what he's up against. Can he stop the ants before a new colony hatches in Los Angeles?

Tarantula (1955). Leo G. Carroll plays a scientist working on nutrients to feed the world's growing population. One experiment creates a giant tarantula, and in an accident at the laboratory, the tarantula escapes to wreak havoc on an isolated region of the US southwest.



Night of the Lepus (1972). Feral rabbits are a pest wherever they've been introduced and bred like, well, rabbits, and the US southwest is no exception. Scientists Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh are brought in to come up with something that will make future generations sterile, but the experiment goes awry and their idiot daughter releases a rabbit that causes the bunnies to grow large and deadly. Hilariously bad special effects make this one a classic.

Tentacles (1977). Henry Fonda's company is constructing an undersea tunnel, and journalist John Huston thinks that's responsible for causing some sort of freak of nature that's killing people in the ocean off of southern California. It turns out that that something is a giant octopus, so everybody get out of the water. Shelley Winters plays Huston's wife, and gets one of the classic scenes in the movie. Her kid and the kid's friend are about to take part in a junior regatta (nobody realizing the octopus is going to attack the boats), and Winters, who was quite ample by this point in her career, says she wishes she could be on the sailboat with the kids taking part in the regatta. To this, the friend of her son replies, "Then we'd need a tornado to move the boat!" LOL!