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.

Here's a snippet (and the url: http://www.anorak.co.uk/402579/news/flashback/the-day-of-the-animals-the-5-strangest-revenge-of-nature-movies-of-the-1970s.html/  ):

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.