Tag: creature feature

Movie Monday: Remembering Sam Neill (1947-2026)

Two weeks ago I sat in the front row of the BFI IMAX and watched a palaeontologist go weak at the knees over a brachiosaur. The film was Jurassic Park, screened for London Climate Week by The Wildlife Trusts, and before the lights dropped, Craig Bennett – Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts – made the point that we perhaps could never have imagined at its inception: the film is thirty-three years old, and its science fiction has quietly become science. De-extinction is no longer a plot device. It is a funding round.

I did not expect, a fortnight later, to be writing about the man who played that palaeontologist because he had gone.

Sam Neill died on Monday in Sydney, aged 78. His family called it sudden and unexpected, and were careful to say he remained cancer free — he had beaten the rare blood cancer he was diagnosed with in 2022, and announced as much only that spring. That is the cruelty of it. Many of us had let ourselves believe we would be seeing a great deal more of him.

I’d like to pay my respects the way this blog knows how: by noting that Sam Neill spent an extraordinary amount of his career standing next to monsters, and that almost nobody did it better.

Dr Alan Grant, and the wonder that curdles

Let’s start where most of us did. Every kid who grew up in the eighties had a dinosaur phase; Alan Grant showed up and quietly extended ours by another thirty-odd years. He was Indiana Jones with a rock hammer — a palaeontologist who would rather be knee-deep in a Montana dig than anywhere near people, least of all children. One can sympathise. What Neill understood about the part was that the wonder and the wariness are the same muscle. Watch the sauropod scene: the open-mouthed awe of a man who has spent his life with the dead and is suddenly handed the living. He recaptures this beautifully, despite all the danger via dinosaurs his character has been exposed to by then, when he spots the dreadnoughtus in Jurassic World: Dominion. But also watch how quickly that awe learns to be afraid. By the end he will not endorse the park, and he has become, almost against his will, the fierce protector of two frightened children.

The film’s explicit sermon on hubris belongs to Ian Malcolm — the line about scientists being so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to ask whether they should, which I have leaned on myself when writing about resurrected wolves. But Grant is its conscience in a quieter register: the scientist who looks at the miracle and says, gently, that some things are not ours to command. Neill played that not as a lecture but as a kind of grief.

It’s been a while since I drew anything, but this image has been in my head all morning. Farewell Dr. Alan Grant.

When the fiction walked out of the cinema

Which brings us back to that IMAX introduction. In 2025 a Texas company, Colossal Biosciences, announced it had “brought back” the dire wolf — a claim I picked apart at length elsewhere, because what they had actually made was a gene-edited grey wolf in a very good marketing coat. The dodo, the thylacine and the mammoth are all on their stated to-do list. Grant’s fictional dilemma has become a real one, and we are all extras in it now.

The Hunter, and a guide you cannot trust

Here is where I had meant to cast Neill as the wise voice steering a hunter towards mercy — and where the film politely refuses to let me.

In The Hunter (2011), Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary sent to Tasmania by a biotech firm to find the last thylacine and take its DNA, killing any others so that no rival can have them. Neill plays Jack Mindy, the local who meets him off the plane and shows him the country — and who turns out to be a man with rather too many secrets and divided loyalties, closer to the fire that guts the film’s grieving family than to its conscience. It is Dafoe’s hunter, not Neill’s guide, who finds the moral centre, and he finds it the hard way.

I think that is the better note anyway. Mindy is a wonderfully compromised piece of work — friendly, helpful, and quietly on the wrong side — and the film’s real argument is that when the last of a kind is at stake, nobody’s hands stay clean. The thylacine Dafoe hunts was formally declared extinct in 1986; it is now, uncannily, a resurrection candidate. The monster and the man have swapped places, and Neill is right there in the middle of it.

The wider bestiary

Grant may be the headline, but Neill kept unlikely company for decades. He was the grown Antichrist in Omen III: The Final Conflict. He lost his mind aboard a very haunted spaceship in Event Horizon and inside a Lovecraftian small town in In the Mouth of Madness. He shared the sea with a killer in Dead Calm and something far worse in Possession. Time and again he was cast as the sane, civilised man at the threshold of the unspeakable — and he lent those films a gravity they had no right to expect, never once looking down his nose at the genre paying his wages.

The man himself

Neill was born in Northern Ireland in 1947 and raised in New Zealand from the age of seven, and for all the Hollywood years he never really left the land. He kept a Central Otago vineyard and a farm full of ducks, pigs and cattle that he introduced to the internet, by name, during lockdown, to the delight of several million strangers. Offered a knighthood, he waved the title away as far too grand, though he quietly accepted the honour in 2022.

And he was, by every account, a deeply kind man. In 2024 he appeared on the ABC series The Assembly, interviewed by a room of autistic journalism students, and a young woman named Abby asked him the best lesson his parents had taught him. He stopped. He teared up, admitting he could not quite say why the question had floored him, before landing on his mother’s very undramatic wisdom: that sometimes you simply have to pull yourself together. It went round the world because it was so plainly unperformed.

He spoke about his illness the same way — without self-pity, and with a line I keep coming back to. He was not frightened of dying, he said; he would just find it “very irritating”, because there were things he still wanted to do.

There were. There would have been more. Thirty-three years on from that first sauropod, the beautiful, terrible animals he stood beside are climbing out of the past and into our laboratories — and it feels right that the man who taught a generation to look at them with equal parts hunger and caution should get the last, quiet word.

Rest well, Sam. Try not to be too irritated.

Movie Monday: When Nature Sent the Bill: The Drive-In Decade of Animal Revenge

There is a tidy version of this story that gets told every summer, usually around the time someone re-airs Jaws on a bank holiday. It goes: Spielberg made a film about a shark, the film made an obscene amount of money, and every producer with a chequebook and a rubber animal spent the next decade trying to do it again. Tidy, and not exactly wrong. But it skips the most interesting part, which is that Jaws lit the fuse on a genre it didn’t actually belong to.

Look closely at the 1975 original and you’ll notice something the imitators all felt obliged to fix: the shark has no reason. It isn’t avenging anything (we’re ignoring the fourth instalment at this moment in time). It hasn’t been mutated, provoked, or wronged. It is simply a large apex predator doing what large apex predators occasionally do, and the film is far more interested in the three men in the boat than in any quarrel between humanity and the sea. There’s a lovely irony buried in this. Even the picture’s own origins are slippery — the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks are widely cited as the seed of Peter Benchley’s novel, and Benchley went to the trouble of issuing a correction to The New York Times in 2001 to deny it. The film references 1916 in its own dialogue. Make of that what you will. The point is that Jaws arrived without a thesis about nature, and the films that chased it spent a decade supplying one.

The bloodline before the shark

The idea of nature turning on us was hardly new. Hitchcock had done it in 1963 with The Birds, in which gulls and crows lay siege to a California town for no stated reason at all — arguably the purest expression of the whole notion. The early 1970s kept the thread going: Willard (1971) and its army of rats, Night of the Lepus (1972) and its giant rabbits filmed in slow motion across miniature sets (a sentence that explains the film’s reputation rather efficiently), and Frogs (1972), in which an assortment of swamp life conspires to remove a polluting Florida patriarch from the gene pool. The amphibians mostly sit and watch, which is somehow more unnerving than if they did the work themselves.

So the appetite was there. What Jaws added wasn’t the concept but the commercial proof — that an animal-attack picture could be the biggest thing in the country. The rest was arithmetic.

Silent Spring with teeth

Here’s the engine that the tidy version leaves out. The decade that produced these films was also the decade that produced modern environmentalism. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had landed in 1962, the first Earth Day was held in April 1970, and the air was thick with genuine anxiety about pesticides, pollution, the ozone layer and what exactly we were doing to the world. The drive-in took that anxiety and gave it fangs. Where Jaws offered a predator without motive, its descendants offered defendants. The animals weren’t just hungry — they were owed.

You can read the era’s whole guilty conscience in the premises. Day of the Animals (1977) blames a damaged ozone layer for sending wildlife collectively berserk. Prophecy (1979) hands us a bear mutated by mercury from a paper mill, lurching through the Maine woods as a sort of furry environmental impact statement. Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) sics pesticide-starved tarantulas on William Shatner. The monster, increasingly, was us — and the films knew it.

The American core

The film that turned the key was Grizzly (1976), directed by the prolific William Girdler and marketed, with admirable honesty, as the most dangerous jaws on land and at least one tagline cited “Jaws with claws“. And it is Jaws transposed to a national park almost beat for beat: the denied threat, the obstructive official, the climactic showdown (here the bear is dispatched with a bazooka, because of course it is). Critics were unkind. Audiences were not — it became the highest-grossing independent film of 1976, earning somewhere near $38 million against a budget under a million, a record it held until Halloween two years later. There is a grim coda to that success: distributor Edward L. Montoro allegedly kept the profits, leaving Girdler and his writers to sue, was later pursued by Universal over a different rip-off entirely, and in 1984 simply vanished with the company’s money, never to be seen again. A man-eating producer to bracket the man-eating bear.

The cycle that followed had range. Piranha (1978), directed by Joe Dante from a John Sayles script, was the clever one — a film that grasped the joke and told it on purpose, which is precisely why it endures. Alligator (1980), Sayles again, took the old urban legend of the flushed pet reptile and fed it discarded growth hormone until it burst out of the sewers; it remains, for my money, one of the era’s genuine guilty pleasures, smarter and funnier than it needed to be. And then Prophecy, which is a real curio — a John Frankenheimer film, properly mounted and beautifully shot, that lapses into pure camp the moment the mutant bear appears. The gap between its ambitions and its monster is where a lot of its charm lives.

The prestige peak: Orca

If Grizzly was the cycle’s reliable workhorse, Orca (1977) was its swing for the fences. Dino De Laurentiis commissioned it to outdo Spielberg outright. The legend has him phoning his writer in the night demanding a “fish” tougher and more terrible than the great white, and threw real money at it: Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and a Morricone score. What makes Orca fascinating isn’t its budget but its morality. It flips the polarity completely. The whale isn’t a monster; it’s bereaved, hunting the captain who killed its mate and calf. It’s less Jaws than Moby-Dick reversed, or Death Wish with a dorsal fin — the animal as wronged party, the human as the one with the reckoning coming. That inversion, the audience quietly rooting for the creature, became the cycle’s true signature.

The cash-ins and the artful outliers

Inevitably, the imitation curdled into outright theft. The Italian industry, never shy, produced Cruel Jaws and Enzo Castellari’s The Last Shark (released abroad as Great White) — films so close to the source that Universal had their American releases halted in court. The genre had begun eating itself.

Australia, meanwhile, did something more interesting with the same materials. Long Weekend (1978) is the era’s most artful entry, a slow, dread-soaked story of a bickering couple whose casual cruelties to the bush — litter, a rifle, a smashed egg — are answered by a landscape that turns sentient and patient. And then there’s Razorback (1984), Russell Mulcahy’s giant-feral-boar picture, which has no business looking as good as it does. Mulcahy came from music videos, and it shows in the best way: the outback set-pieces, especially the desert sequences, are extraordinary — bleached, surreal, lit like a nightmare. It’s a B-movie with the visual imagination of something far grander. I also especially liked the tagline: it has two states of being – dangerous or dead. The film also featured a young Arkie Whiteley, the London-born, Sydney-raised daughter of the painter Brett Whiteley, in one of her early roles. She died in 2001 at just 37, of adrenal cancer — a genuine loss, and worth a moment’s pause amid the killer pigs.

The bill comes due again

By the early 1980s the cycle had run its course. Cultural dread migrated to the nuclear and the dystopian — the wasteland replaced the wilderness — and the notion of a vengeful animal started to feel quaint. But it never quite died, and lately it’s been stirring, fed by the same anxieties that powered the original wave, now updated. Shark cinema, frankly, never stopped at all (that will get its own blog). The bear got its absurdist revival in Cocaine Bear (2023). And the moral inversion Orca pioneered has come fully back into fashion: Killer Whale (2026) builds its whole story on an orca driven to kill by twenty years of captivity, with the humans cast firmly as the villains — an animal-welfare parable in a creature-feature costume.

What’s telling is that even a film made to condemn captivity caught flak for doing the one thing the genre always does: turning the species into a monster to sell tickets. Which brings us neatly back to the patriarch. Both Benchley and Spielberg lived to regret what Jaws did to the great white’s reputation — Spielberg has said as much, plainly. Half a century on, the nature-strikes-back film has become self-conscious about the very fear it trades in. The animals are still sending us the bill. We’ve just started to suspect we had it coming.