11 Best Creature Features of the 1990s

The 1990s were a great decade for cinema, and this includes B-movie creature features.

The 1990s was a pretty terrific decade for movies, and this is especially true for the subgenre of horror known as the "creature feature." These movies involve a beast, usually some mutant (or just extra large) animal, that terrorizes a group of people.

Typically, the group of people lives in some small, isolated town. Or, in the case of Jaws, a small, isolated island. Then, usually quite slowly, they're either ignorant of the problem or outright ignore it until it swims or crawls up and bites them in the butt. These are the best creature features the 1990s had to offer, listed in chronological order.

Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia was one of the more high-profile creature features to come out of the '90s. With Jeff Daniels and John Goodman in the cast, it had marquee names, as it did in producer Kathleen Kennedy and executive producer Steven Spielberg.

And the film carries the Spielberg tone that elevated so many movies throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Like fellow Spielberg-produced horror film Gremlins, Arachnophobia takes place in a small town filled with (mostly) likable folks. Then, something sinister (a particularly deadly overseas spider) enters the equation and wreaks havoc.

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One of several creature features to spawn unnecessary sequels (Save for one), Tremors is one of the decade's most inventive films regardless of genre. The film takes place in the fictional town of Perfection, Nevada, with a population of 14, not including the gargantuan carnivorous worms rapidly crawling through the dirt, waiting to sense an impact tremor, so they can have some dinner.

It's a film with a sense of humor, incredible pacing (the reveal of the Graboid is perfectly modulated), and wonderful performances all around that make the town of Perfection feel truly lived in. This is especially true of the lead performances by Kevin Bacon and the late Fred Ward, whose chemistry elevates an already solid script.

Based on a Stephen King story primarily known for its inclusion in his 1978 collection Night Shift, Graveyard Shift is widely deemed one of the worst adaptations of the author's work. And, to be fair, outside The Mangler and, especially, The Lawnmower Man, it's debatable whether any King adaptation has strayed from the source material more.

But, there are aspects of the movie that work for it. Stephen Macht's antagonistic performance is solid, the same which could be said for Brad Dourif's supporting role as creepy rat exterminator Tucker Cleveland. As for the monster itself, it's cheap and ugly-looking, but that just goes toward Graveyard Shift's midnight movie vibe.

One of the best direct-to-video horror films there is, Tremors II: Aftershocks is a more than suitable follow-up to the original even if the presence of Kevin Bacon's Val is dearly missed. But at least there's still Fred Ward's Earl Bassett and Michael Gross' gun-toting Burt Gummer.

As two survivors of the Graboids' attack on Perfection, Earl and Burt are arguably the only two experts on the mysterious beasts on the face of the planet. But they're not (just) fighting Graboids this time, as the subterranean beasts' life cycle has brought them up from the ground. But at least they're smaller, if not also more plentiful.

An absolute blast from start to finish, Anaconda is precisely how a creature feature should function. Start with a relatively slow build, so the audience can get a taste of the cookie-cutter characters, punctuated by hints of the title creature. Then go for the reveal (in the case of Anaconda, when they hook the snake from the stern and it rises, screaming, from the water, hook in mouth). After the reveal, all bets are off, and this is the case for Anaconda. There's something brilliant about having a small, mostly-unprotected boat moving slowly down a river while a massive snake (or monster of any kind) either swims below it or crawls alongside it from the shoreline.

The viewer doesn't know where the snake is any more than the audience does...it's the Amazon. And the beast has no issue with climbing on board, especially if it's to eat Owen Wilson. Toss in a truly outlandish performance from Jon Voight (who either perfectly understood the assignment or didn't take it seriously enough to care), some memorable character death scenes (The anaconda leaping from the log and wrapping around Mateo, the entire waterfall sequence), and a terrific animatronic antagonist, and Anaconda's probably the best creature feature the 1990s had to offer.

There are many reasons to recommend The Relic, from the fact it shares two cast members with 1990's Kindergarten Cop (Penelope Ann Miller and Linda Hunt) to its containing one of the late Tom Sizemore's best performances. But the museum-set monster movie also has what really counts in a project of its type: A memorable antagonist.

The Kothoga is a legendary, tusked South American lizard beast that's actually far more than it seems. In fact, the Kothoga is less of an ancient feared legend so much as a mutated museum employee who's been sent home. It's an inventive story for a villain, and pretty surprising in play.

After tackling some small budget movies, director Stephen Sommers was given the reigns of The Jungle Book, which proved to be a box-office success. But it's his follow-up, Deep Rising, that feels like the blockbuster director's true debut.

A fast-paced, cruise ship-set monster movie with a phenomenal cast and a memorable, toothed squid for a villain, Deep Rising is a movie that values exactly two things: Memorable kill sequences and quickened audience heart rates. And in that lies the appeal of the film, as it works both as a horror film and as a genre action movie not unlike Sommers' The Mummy, released just one year after Deep Rising. It's not hard to figure out that the earlier film (while not a box office success) was the one to get him the blockbuster later gig.

One of the most purely fun, big-budget aquatic creature features there is, Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea is a perfect Sunday afternoon movie for the adrenaline enthused. It's also stocked with a perfect cast, including Thomas Jane and Saffron Burrows in the lead roles as, respectively, a shark wrangler and a scientist using the toothed swimmers to try and cure Alzheimer's disease.

It's all pretty ridiculous stuff, but there was no way to make a movie about extra-intelligent (And fast as can be) sharks without things getting a little absurd. And, bar none, Deep Blue Sea has the most surprising character death of the 1990s. So much for everyone sticking together.

1999's Bats, starring Young Guns' Lou Diamond Phillips, Starship Troopers' Dina Meyer, and The Shawshank Redemption's Bob Gunton, isn't high art, but it is underrated. The plot follows a group of scientist-mutated bats as they swarm down on a small Texas town.

Philips plays the town sheriff while Meyer portrays (of course) a zoologist hoping to bring the bats down. It's basically Arachnophobia with winged rats, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Steve Miner, director of Friday the 13th Part 2 and Friday the 13th Part III, was probably the best director to come from that particular franchise. He was even handed the reigns of some studio projects, e.g. Lake Placid, a solid if ultimately unspectacular aquatic creature feature with a curiously low kill count.

But, Lake Placid has a wonderful sense of humor. In fact, it's arguably the reason Betty White was brought back into the public consciousness as a comedic icon. Her Delores Bickerman is a woman with a lake house, and in that lake is the crocodile that ate her husband. But this doesn't really phase Mrs. Bickerman, who continues to feed the thing live cows until it grows to become a monster. But at least it's her monster.

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While Virus isn't exactly one of Jamie Lee Curtis' quintessential movies, it's fun in an odd-haunted-house kind of way. It also has a solid cast, with Curtis supported ably by the underrated William Baldwin, Marshall Bell, Avatar: The Way of Water's Cliff Curtis, and The Hunger Games' Donald Sutherland (who hams it up, blatantly recognizing the quality of the movie he's in).

The plot centers around Curtis' tugboat navigator and her limited crew as they stumble upon a Russian research vessel. But it appears abandoned, and after scouring the ship they find just one crew member and ultimately come to realize there's an alien that has harnessed the ship's computers in the hope of slaughter on a massive scale. Virus is technically an alien movie rather than a creature feature, but the fact that the alien essentially possesses organic matter and warps it to include machinery (in grotesque configurations) makes the antagonist of the film hard to define. One thing is for sure, what it does to some of the crew makes them far more creature than human.