111: “Put ‘Em On The Endangered Species List” – Tremors, Arachnophobia & Congo

When We Were Young - an 80s and 90s pop culture podcast

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the ’90s, an elite team of podcasters has been selected to journey deep into the jungle, dive deep into the ocean, and dig deep underground to locate some of the deadliest predators ever known to moviedom.

Two of cinema’s greatest auteurs made creature features that have gone down as classics – Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS in the ’60s and Spielberg’s Jaws in the ’70s. In their wake, however, the genre known as “nature horror” took a steep downhill turn into low-budget schlock, and sadly creature features became an endangered species.

But for a brief, beautiful window during the 1990s, movies about hungry, hungry critters great and small came roaring back! The genre flirted with becoming mainstream again, nabbing bigger budgets, bigger stars, and monster-sized box office receipts (in some cases).

So welcome to Part One of our ’90s Creature Sexa-Feature! (“Sex” as in “six.” Get your mind out of the gutter – there might be alligators down there!) In this episode, we unearth 1990’s TREMORS, which features Kevin Bacon and Reba McEntire pole-vaulting away from giant worms, then direct all eight of our eyes toward the shrieking spiders of ARACHNOPHOBIA (from that same year), which still has the power to scare at least one of our hosts off his tuffet. Finally, we go bananas for the killer gorillas of CONGO (1995), which features Tim Curry, Laura Linney, and a host of others giving performances that are almost as big as the lost diamonds of Zinj.

Pour yourself a green drop drink and pack up that sesame cake, because we’re hunting down and rounding up the very finest big screen animal attacks of the 90s! (Survival not guaranteed.)

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