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The Setup

Horror movies derive a great deal of their tension from our darkest fears of everyday places and things. In this case, those very things are the fauna of Mother Nature herself. That’s right. Our pets, our animal bretheren, and those cute fuzzy creatures that always populate the background of the latest Disney animated “classic.” These films seek to prove to you just how…terrifying a fluffball of fuzzy furry fury can truly be.

Squirrels are adorably harmless creatures that populate our back yards and woodlands. But what about rabid squirrels? Dear god! That’s scary!!! But wait, what if they were wait-for-it. . . Radioactive Rabid Vampire Squirrels? That’s our movie! R.R.V.S: Curse of the Blood Acorn

Every era has a flagship “Killer Animals” movie, in which animals are corrupted by whatever the culture was afraid of at the time. Radiation, disease, communism, technology, fast food, etc. turn animals into some sort of rabid killer…or otherwise piss them off so much that they decided-collectively or on their own-that they’ve had enough.

The Formula

Take the cutest animal you can think of. Now expose it to a nuclear, biological or chemical agent that makes it more blood thirsty than a drunk hockey fan snorting a fistful of speedballs and ground up PCP. Stand back and watch the fun. Additionally, every Killer Animal movie will have one of the following scenes:

• “Awww. .  . how cute. .” Some idiot will attempt to pet, snuggle or capture the now amazingly dangerous animal and loose a limb, possibly their life.
• “Dear God, They’re everywhere!!” It will turn out that either one animal is so fast it’s everywhere at once, or it spreads it’s ichor through the local animal population turning them all against the humans.
• There will be an “Expert” Someone who has dealt with this of thing before, back in the 50’s, but it was covered up by the government.
• KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!: At some point one of the formerly domesticated monsters will be set ablaze.

The Menu

In addition to our typical selection of chips, beer, liquor, and snacks-there will be:

The Booze: Wild Turkey, Warm Woolly Sheep

Because in the face of such terrifying and horrible movies, we need a warm glass of milk to calm down our nerves (mixed with booze, of course).

The Food: The Flesh of Deadly Animals! Or, you know, Peeps

That’s right: BEEF JERKEY to prove who’s at the top of the food chain, and marshmallow animal effigies for ritual burnings.

The Movies

Night of the Lepus (1972): A regular feature of Sunday afternoons in the 80’s, this movie proves that with good sound production, you can almost make rabbits scary. Almost. The beasties terrorize a barely populated western town for an entire evening.

Black Sheep (2006): Chris Farley is back from the grave and looking to eat EVERYONE! No. Wait. Even scarier! This movie is about killer sheep rampaging through the gorgeous landscape of New Zealand. It has everything: flesh-eating zombie sheep, flying Terry Tate sheep and…wait for it: WERESHEEP. Already a cult classic everywhere else in the world, we’re going to give this movie its due.

Suggested Alternatives

Orca (1977) : A strange fever dream of a movie, whose lesson is this: DO NOT KILL BABY WHALES, or their parents will hunt you to ends of the earth.

Tentacles (1977): Wow, ’77 was a year for movies about dangerous marine life, eh? An “all-star cast” (read: Henry Fonda) are terrorized by a giant octopus. The IMDB error page says it all: “Factual errors: Octopuses don’t roar.”

Slugs (1988): Cavalcade Staff Writer John Higgins was seven when he first saw this movie. It was funny even then.

This article was co-authored with John Higgins.

Wow. 2009’s events are done, and now we move into year 3. Have to admit, this isn’t something we were expecting or even prepared for, but you know what? We perform well under pressure and thinking on our feet. So that said, what themes do we have for you? We’ve been heavy on action themes these last few months, with the exception of our Special Events, so we’re leaning towards a couple of the other choices, but hey-not our decision, is it?

Action: Jean-Claude Van Damme

Yes, we are in face dedicating a whole genre to films made by a single actor. Why? Because he has a body of work that includes: Sudden Death (Die Hard at a hockey game), Double Team (Rouge cop movie…with Dennis freakin’ Rodman!), and Double Impact (Rogue cop movie…where he plays twins). Seriously, this guy was this close to being a gen-u-ine top tier action hero… but he just kept making movies like these (oh, you can BET the Street Fighter movie is part of that link cluster in there)

Sci-Fi: Dragons

2 things about dragons:

1) They are awesome.

2) They’ve never made a good dragon movie (but they’ve made a FUN one…)

Q: The Winged Serpent-Reviewed by our own Tom O’Reily, this film has David Carradine and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree fighting an Aztec god…in New York! We’d of course have to follow it up with Reign of Fire. Christian Bale, Matthew “I’m too sexy for my shirt” McConaughey , fire breathing dragons in a post-apocalyptic wasteland….mmmm TASTY. Of course, there’s also the Dungeons & Dragons movie too… (that sound you hear is millions of minds crying out all at once).

Horror: Killer Animals

Because DAMMIT, we have some fantastic movies to show you if this gets voted! This genre has so much to offer, yet it gets voted down every time (sniff). Black Sheep, Lake Placid, Piranha, Jaws IV, Night of the Lepus, Grizzly, Orca-C’mon people! Respect Nature! We barely even scratched the surface of what this genre has to offer!

Note About the date of the Event:

Please note that the event will be on January 16th, which is not the second Saturday of the month. While we did book the full year for 2010, some of our dates were already claimed, and we had no choice but to take another. We will be doing everything we can to give everyone as advanced a notice as possible by posting a full calendar for the year very soon.

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