STACK's Ultimate Monster Guide

Real Monsters

Oversized creatures on the rampage – nature can be a real mother sometimes...

JAWS The film’s trailer says it all: “There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution without change, without passion, and without logic. It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine, it will attack and devour anything. It is as though God created the devil and gave him Jaws.”

GRIZZLY 18-feet of gut-crunching, man-eating terror! If you went down in the woods in 1976, you were sure of a big surprise. However, William Girdler’s naff but entertaining Jaws rip-off was definitely no picnic. Campers, a horse, and even a helicopter were torn apart in this ursine rampage.

ANACONDA The monster snake of the Amazon can grow to more than six metres in length and tip the scales at 150kg.This mega-serpent proved a formidable foe for J.Lo, Jon Voight and a documentary crew in the 1997 film of the same name, and had the ghastly habit of vomiting up its half-digested prey – as a hapless Voight discovered.

ALLIGATOR These primeval reptiles are certainly big, but nothing compares to the gigantic gator on the rampage in LewisTeague’s tongue-in- cheek, 1980 monster movie.The film’s message is simple – don’t flush pet baby alligators down the toilet, especially when the sewers contain the carcasses of lab animals injected with a growth hormone.

TARANTULA Spiders are scary at the best of times, but imagine being confronted by “Crawling terror 100 feet high!” An experimental growth serum results in the eponymous arachnid reaching gigantic proportions, which spells bad news for a small desert town in Arizona. Why the hell would you inject a spider with this stuff, anyway?

RAZORBACK “It only has two states of being – dangerous or dead.” Well, according to Bill Kerr, who’s referring to the monster swine that terrorises the Australian outback in Russell Mulcahy’s 1984 creature feature. It’s man versus boar, as Gregory Harrison faces off against the hungry hog who has eaten his wife.