Power Play: Five killer creature movies to stream this week

THE cinema release of Jason Statham’s narky-sharky thriller The Meg is sure to maul the box-office to the max. Here are five more streaming options to stoke your fears of fanged creatures in the water.

THE cinema release of Jason Statham’s narky-sharky thriller The Meg is sure to maul the box-office to the max. Here are five more streaming options to stoke your fears of fanged creatures in the water.

THE SHALLOWS (2016) ***1/2

Google, iTunes

The villain is a finned food-processor always ready to make himself another surfie smoothie. The heroine (an excellent Blake Lively) is a human half-scared out of her wits, and half-clever enough to never to run out of survival strategies. So what’s not to like here? Not much. You’ll be afraid, amused, alarmed and rather exhausted, all inside 85 short, sharp-toothed minutes.

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BEST ACTION MOVIE SINCE MAD MAX FURY ROAD

Actor Ice Cube in scene from film Anaconda.

ANACONDA (1997) ***

Netflix

The script is non-existent. The acting is pedestrian. The title monster looks like a computer-generated garden hose with teeth. Yet somehow, Anaconda racks up a winning score (and body count) with a mix of imagination and humour. The choice scene? When a 15m writhin’ python performs an amazing slips catch as it plucks a screaming victim from a waterfall.

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999) ***1/2

Foxtel Now, Stan

A very pulpy, very enjoyable affair. As three rogue super-sharks chase their former captors (meddling scientists who enlarged the fish’s brains to come up with a cure for Alzheimer’s!) through a flooding underwater research facility, the bites, fights and frights just keep coming. The angry man-munchers are the true stars of the show, outperforming leads Saffron Burrows and Samuel L. Jackson.

A scene from 'Piranha.

PIRANHA (2010) ***

Stan

A series of seismic shifts deep underground releases a swarm of killer fish thought to be long-extinct. The nearest beach happens to be hosting a Spring Break Festival, which means the marine mean machines will be mostly chompin’ on chicks in bikinis. A deliberately trashy, but undeniably fun guilty-pleasure horror outing. Stars Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Jerry O’Connell.

Bridget Fonda in a scene from Lake Placid.

LAKE PLACID (1999) ***

Foxtel Now

A gloriously goofy movie about a 20-metre crocodile in a feeding frenzy on a once-docile inlet. Major plot details are not a concern here (how did a croc the size of a train carriage move undetected a few hundred kilometres inland?), and neither are minor ones for that matter (since when did dangling a cow from a helicopter constitute croc bait?). Stars Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda.

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