18 Movies to Snort Before ‘Cocaine Bear’
Reading Time: 7 minutesThese critters just wanna have fun…by eating your face.
Friends, this is the story of Cocaine Bear; a coke-lovin’ carnivore who ran wild circa 1985.
The upcoming Elizabeth Banks-directed movie tells the story of the woodland creature sometimes known Pablo Escobear, who back in 1985 ate a whole fuckton of coke after a smuggler dumped something like 35 kilos of the stuff from a private plane that couldn’t handle the load…which also turned out to be sadly the case for Cocaine Bear, who wanted to party Jordan Balfour-style and instead wound up a taxidermied curiosity in a Kentucky souvenir shop for all eternity.
Banks’ film slanders Cocaine Bear by sending him on a murderous rampage, when clearly my guy was just trying to manage the pressure of his high-powered stock-trader day job (something something bear market). And sadly, our ursine friend is not alone in being misjudged and misunderstood. Here are 18 other movies starring animals that just trying to cut loose and, I don’t know, eat a few people. No big deal.
The creature: A massive saltwater crocodile.
Coked out on: Betty White’s home cookin’.
A sorely under appreciated classic in the Betty White oeuvre, Lake Placid finds the animal lover doing what she does best: caring for a loyal pet. In this case, it’s a 30-foot-long saltwater crocodile with a burgeoning taste for human flesh. Crocodiles are terrifying even at standard sizes, which is but one of the reasons that the entire state of Florida puts me on edge—though this cult classic (written by David E. Kelley, better known for prestige-adjacent TV like Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies) is set in Maine. Which I will also now avoid. Luckily, Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda are on hand to investigate the rash of deaths.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The creature: A big ol’ Saint Bernard.
Coked out on: Rabies.
Though the short synopsis sounds a little silly (family terrorized by their dog), and the movie gets mixed marks in stretching out the premise of family trapped in its car, Stephen King tapped into something fundamentally terrifying with his 1981 novel, upon which this mid-’80s adaptation is based. Particularly for an animal lover, what could be more terrifying than finding that a loving, loyal family pet has been transformed into a slavering beast that wants nothing more than to rip out your throat? Vaccinate those pets, folx.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Paramount+, Epix
The creatures: A blended pack of feral dogs.
Coked out on: An entirely reasonable dislike for humans.
What’s scarier than one bad dog? How about an entire pack? At least, that’s meant to be the premise of the Joe Don Baker-starring dogs-gone-wild film, though it honestly works much better if you go in cheering for the dogs to handle the problem of the mostly annoying humans.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The creature: An American alligator.
Coked out on: Chicago toilet water.
Alligator/crocodile movies are nearly always set in backwoods and bayous, but this Robert Forster-starring animal attack movie is boldly set in Chicago (though it was clearly filmed in LA). It’s having fun with the popular myth (or is it?!) of hungry beasts flushed down the toilet that go on living in urban sewer systems (when they say not to put anything but TP in there, they mean it). The surprisingly effective movie works, in part, by satirizing the animal-attack genre while also managing to stage its own moments of impressive tension. Also, multiple Academy Award-nominee (but, you know, not for this movie) John Sayles wrote the screenplay.
Where to stream: Shudder, The Roku Channel, Shout Factory TV, Freevee
The creatures: Piranhas, natch.
Coked out on: Skinny dippers.
Though contemporary reviews generally took it too seriously, this goofy B-horror classic is clearly all in good fun—a style of comedy-horror that debut director Joe Dante would go on to master. Here, genetically modified piranhas escape from a military facility with the help of some skinny dippers, and proceed to eat their way through a summer camp full of unwary swimmers. John Sayles wrote the screenplay for this one too, and James Cameron made his directing debut helming the 1982 sequel. A surprising amount of talent is on display in the Piranha-verse, no?
Where to stream: Peacock, Shudder, The Roku Channel, Hoopla, Tubi, Kanopy, Crackle, Pluto, Plex, Freevee
The creature: A wild boar.
Coked out on: Outback tourists.
A (mostly) impressive blend of practical effects and just a bit of CGI, Australian horror film Boar offers pretty much what it says on the label: a series of outback attacks by the titular boar on a family who chose the wrong weekend to visit their uncle. Ignore the human drama and enjoy it for the boar-attack action.
Where to stream: Shudder
The creature: A tiger.
Coked out on: Small business debt.
Let’s say that you kinda want to murder your stepdaughter because she won’t stop bringing up the fact that you spent her inheritance and college money on a tiger for your stupid safari park. In this very specific scenario, it might seem reasonable to trap her inside her house with said tiger during a hurricane, elegantly putting the animal to use in a way you’d never anticipated. I suppose it could be argued that as murder schemes go, this one’s pretty dumb. But there’s still plenty of fun to be had watching it play out, and the tiger-loose-in-a-house premise is at least unique.
Where to stream: Tubi, Freevee
The creatures: Lions.
Coked out on: Defecating humans.
Not to be confused with any of the other hundred movies with the same name, this 2007 South African film sees a family stalked by a pack of lions following an ill-timed bathroom stop along a game trail. It’s a lesson to us all: If you find yourself suddenly having to poop in lion country, hold it in. That’s not the only unintentional bit of comedy in the film, which succeeds as something akin to campy fun in its failed attempts at seriousness.
Where to stream: Sling, Plex
The creature: A hamadryas baboon.
Coked out on: Experimental hormones.
The Blue Lagoon‘s Christopher Atkins finds himself on the bad side of some shady scientists when his beloved baboon pal is injected with experimental drugs in order to see if they’ll make it docile and curb his aggressive impulses. You might not be surprised to learn that things don’t go as they’d hoped. There’s some incidental LARPing here, which feels ahead of its time circa 1990.
Where to stream: Tubi, Shudder
The creature: A green anaconda of unusual size.
Coked out on: Ham (courtesy of Jon Voight’s performance).
A rather eclectic cast (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, and Owen Wilson) sets off down the Amazon to shoot a documentary about an unconnected tribe, only to discover that they’ve been duped: Evil snake hunter (sure) Jon Voight is using the expedition as a cover to find and capture a record-breaking green anaconda, and he doesn’t care how many supporting characters have to die in the quest. As B-movie creature features go, this one’s particularly entertaining, and the bizarre ‘90s-era CGI only adds to the fun.
Where to stream: Hulu
The creatures: All the birds
Coked out on: Interpersonal conflict.
In execution, this isn’t exactly the wackiest of animal attack movies—not by a long shot—but, on paper, it’s essentially ‘all birds attack everyone all the time,‘ which is amusing (or could be). On a metatextual level, the bird attacks are timed to moments of heightened conflict between the main characters, when people prove unwilling or unable to connect. So, on that level, it’s all a bit of a metaphor. On another level? It’s birds gone wild.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The creatures: Mako sharks.
Coked out on: Genetic engineering.
Deep beneath the ocean, scientists are conducting experiments on mako sharks in the hope of finding a cure for Alzheimers. Which: sure. The illicit work involves genetically engineering the sharks to make them smarter, which, again—sure. Don’t spend too much time thinking about the set-up and enjoy the action-filled sharks v. scientists bloodletting in a movie that became a minor cult classic in the better-than-it-should be subgenre. LL Cool J, Michael Rappaport, Stellan Skarsgård, and Samuel L. Jackson provide some of the chum.
Where to stream: Pluto TV
The creatures: Sharks and jellyfish.
Coked out on: Dumb tourists.
In the by now venerable shark-attack genre, there’s a sub-genre involving vacationers who find themselves trapped in shark infested waters (The Reef, The Shallows, etc.). Deep Water was just about the first, and is still probably the best if only for its simple setup: a couple of numbskulls out scuba diving over the Great Barrier Reef are accidentally left behind by their dive group, and find themselves struggling to stay afloat and also not get eaten by the sharks that begin to take an interest is their supple, seal-like bodies. In one sense, it’s a masterclass in sustained tension. In another, it’s watching two slightly annoying people have a wet argument for an hour and change.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel, Tubi, Redbox, Plex, Freevee
The creatures: Motherfuckin’ snakes. On a motherfuckin’ plane.
Coked out on: Snake pheromones.
Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson, Snakes on a Plane was a better meme than it is a movie, but earns points for fully committing to the wacky title. Jackson plays a federal agent escorting a witness across the country who is forced to defend hundreds of tasty passengers from the snakes that have been smuggled aboard in order to bring down the plane and ensure the witness can never talk (good plan, can’t fail). What’s more, the snakes have been exposed to some kind of snake-anger pheromone to make them completely unreasonable (again, cannot stress enough what a levelheaded assassination plan this is).
Where to stream: HBO Max, Hulu
The creatures: An unreasonable number of spiders.
Coked out on: Invasive species enthusiasm.
Though mostly played for laughs, director Frank Marshall’s spider-attack movie, about the mayhem that unfolds after a hapless nature photographer brings an arachnid hitchhiker back from a trip to the jungle, includes more than one genuinely squirm-inducing moment for anyone who shares the title fear, even a little bit (it involves a slipper). It’s mostly all in fun, but there’s some real terror in any attacker with so many gosh darn legs.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The creatures: Several species of spider.
Coked out on: Toxic waste.
More spiders, more comedy, this time with the even wackier tone that you can only get by casting David Arquette as your lead. Here, spiders exposed to toxic waste grow to extraordinary size which is, honestly, a bit less scary than lots of normal-sized spiders. But definitely freaky nonetheless.
Where to stream: HBO Max
The creatures: Tigers, stags, bears, and snakes.
Coked out on: Imperialist flesh.
Unlike every other movie on this list, RRR isn’t exclusively or even primarily and animal attack movie, but at its center is the single greatest animal attack sequence in the history of global cinema. Early in the film, we establish that Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) is capturing wild animals, though it’s unclear why. Unclear until a massive truck rams through the gate of the palatial home of a British administrator for the Raj and, well, you kind of have to see it. The movie has been building animal metaphors to this point, making clear that, to the British, Indians are little more than animals—and the ironic payoff is glorious.
Where to stream: Netflix
The creature: A great white shark.
Coked out on: Amity Island-area skinny dippers and too-small boats.
Still the reigning champion of the animals-gone-wild genre, Steven Spielberg took what ought to have been a B-movie and turned it into a prestige picture that, for better and worse, kicked off our modern blockbuster era.
Where to stream: Digital rental