The highly anticipated film, Jurassic World, opens in NZ cinemas today. Dominic Corry takes a look at other great movies where characters get devoured by deadly creatures.
I think everybody would agree that the most memorable part of the original Jurassic Park is when the lawyer on the toilet gets gobbled up by the T-Rex. It's the film's most indelible moment.
When a character we've gotten to know gets eaten on screen, it can induce something of a primal shock in the viewer. Inversing the food chain in this manner speaks to the cowering caveman in all of us. I like it.
The new sequel Jurassic World opens in theatres this week, and I'm happy to report it features plenty of good people-eatin'.
To mark the release of the film, I am gonna cite what I consider to be the most memorable examples in contemporary cinema of characters being eaten. Not bitten, mauled or squashed. Eaten. Swallowed. Digested. By some sort of beastie.
The modern cinematic era is widely considered to have unofficially begun with Jurassic Park director (and Jurassic World producer) Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic Jaws, which features one of the most dramatically resonant acts of human-consumption ever committed to screen.
It's a memorably grisly and horrific moment when (four decade-old spoiler alert!) Robert Shaw's Quint goes in to the ... jaws of the great white shark, but it's also an appropriate climax to his character arc.
We learn earlier in the film how Quint is haunted by having survived a (real-life) WWII-era shark feast, so when he gets eaten, it's just as impactful as when Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer at the end of Star Wars.
It's probably the only time a character got to fulfil their destiny by being eaten (Legends of the Fall would count if the bear bothered to eat Brad Pitt), if we exclude zombies and cannibals. The theatrical appeal of someone being eaten is undermined if the character isn't able to be wholly consumed in a couple of decent bites. And cannibals don't even eat the bones.
Scene from the 1993 film Jurassic Park.
Spielberg didn't bother directing any of the Jaws sequels himself, but he did stick around to helm 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which I still think is a hugely underrated film. There's nothing in there quite as awesome as the lawyer/toilet gag, but it nevertheless contains some very respectable body-chomping, especially during the nuts climax on the mainland.
Despite the surfeit of giant monsters stomping around, there's a disappointing (though perhaps understandable) dearth of characters being consumed in Peter Jackson's Tolkien films. The Fell Beasts get their laughing gear around a few heads, but nobody is really consumed. Does Smaug actually eat anyone? I think he mostly stomps and chars. There's lots of talk about various characters being eaten, but very little follow through.
Smaug in the final Hobbit film Battle of the Five Armies.
Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong features some nice follow-through however. Kong himself doesn't eat anybody (although he bites someone's head off at one point), but this scene where Andy Serkis is slowly consumed by what can only be described as a penis monster is one of the most amusingly disturbing things I've ever seen a monster movie. There also are a couple of impressive 'swallowed-whole' moments in this awesome deleted scene from the film.
As much as I like to see Jackson as the modern filmmaker who most evokes of the spirit of creature effects legend Ray Harryhausen, George Lucas has also shown a lot of reverence for Harryhausen's work, especially the parts where people get eaten.
There are several instances of this throughout both the original Star Wars trilogy and the prequels, but the best is definitely the Sarlacc Pit from Return of the Jedi, without the Special Edition CGI additions of course. It may be just a hole in the ground, but it's very convincingly a mouth, and it totally eats a bunch of dudes.
Speaking of the ground, cult favourite Tremors (1988) features giant worms which swim through the dirt and swallow people whole. It is a fantastic movie. Skyline (2010) is not a fantastic movie, but it does feature a couple of effective eats, as does Anaconda (1997) and Lake Placid (1999).
The 2006 Korean film The Host put an innovative spin on lots of old monster movie tropes, and still found room for a couple of nice people-eating moments.
A scene from the 1999 movie Deep Blue Sea. Photo / Warner Brothers
When the genetically-engineered super shark jumps out of the water to grab Samuel L. Jackson just as he finishes giving an inspirational speech in 1999's Deep Blue Sea, it set a cheeky new bar.
Ever since Psycho, innumerable films have succeeded in pulling the rug out from under the viewer by unexpectedly killing off the "main" character, but it takes a special kind of movie to achieve that via said character being suddenly eaten. Bravo, Deep Blue Sea!
Lots of modern monster movies feature scenes of characters being yanked away to suffer some hideous off-screen fate which probably involves being eaten (The Mist, Pitch Black) but unless I see a body go directly into a monster's maw, I don't get the visceral reaction I crave. I appreciated that the finale of Cloverfield (2008) recognised this need, and served it.
The disembodied head of the Statue of Liberty has been tossed into the streets of New York by a terrible monster in Cloverfield.
It's always bothered me that Godzilla doesn't eat humans (even when he was evil), and I was genuinely disappointed that none of monsters in Pacific Rim ate anybody. Granted, the monsters in that film were so huge that humans would've seemed like a grain of rice to them, but they could've at least scoffed a handful of us or something.
• Do you get a weird sensation from watching characters get eaten in movies? What are your favourite examples? Nobody say Basic Instinct. Comment below!
