Tuesday, July 01, 2014

At Anorak: The Day of the Animals - The Five Strangest Revenge of Nature Movies of the 1970s


My latest article is posted at Anorak, and it remembers the revenge of nature horror cycle of the 1970s.


IT’S not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

In the seventies, science fiction and horror filmmakers were certain that mankind was going to soon face his comeuppance for polluting and over-populating Mother Earth. And more so, that this comeuppance was going to be delivered at the paws, claws, talons, webbed fingers, and teeth of our former friends: the animals.

Call it the Circle of Death.

Between 1970 and 1979, more than a dozen genre films involved Mother Nature striking back against man for his mis-use of pesticides, his damage of the ozone layer, and for polluting previously unspoiled terrain.

Among these movies were titles such as The Bug (1975), Food of the Gods (1976), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), and Empire of the Ants (1977).

From a certain perspective, even blockbuster films such as Jaws (1975) — which saw a great white shark attack a beach town’s economy virtually forty years to the day that atom bombs were dropped on Japan — and Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong (1976) — in which the noble ape was exploited by an Exxon-like oil company — tread into this then-popular “revenge-of-nature” territory.

So with that prologue in mind, here is a look back at five of the most bizarre Revenge of Nature films of the 1970s.

2 comments:

  1. Took me 30 years to get over my fear of Prophecy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. John I remember all of these films from my boyhood in the '70s. As a kid they made an impression on me, albeit, they did not make me afraid to be a Boy Scout.

    SGB

    ReplyDelete

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