I am a great movie buff. My tastes include action, comedy, thrillers and science-fiction. Terminator 3, Phone Booth, Daredevil, you name it, I’ve seen them all.
For a time when I was younger though, I used to be crazy about movies on animals, snakes especially. As I grew older however, I lost all interest in such films. The reason being they are all badly made and misleading too. Most animals I have found, in my reading and experience, are peaceful creatures, attacking only in self-defence. This fact however, doesn’t sell well in the movie industry. Animals have to be shown to be ferocious and blood thirsty, only then will people want to watch them. Consequently for a movie to be a hit, film directors end up blowing the natural behavior of animals always way out of proportions.
Take Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws for instance. This old movie is about a Great White shark, which ruthlessly chases and hunts people swimming in the sea. Watching this movie made me so scared of sharks, that till today I have a phobia of swimming alone in the sea.
Most sharks, you should know, are harmless. Even the Great White sharks and the Tiger sharks, rarely attack humans, the reason because humans are not their natural food. Stomach contents of dead or killed Great Whites, have shown along with food, bicycle tires, cans and metal objects, implying that they are scavengers. In fact most experts agree that sharks have attacked humans only on occasions when they have confused humans for some animal dead, or in distress.
I distinctly remember reading an article some time ago which stated that the probability of being attacked by a shark is even less than that of being hit by lightning! Viruses, bacteria and other diseases kill millions of people every year. One estimate states that mosquitoes have wiped out half the world’s population since the Stone Age. Yet thanks to movies like Jaws and Deep Blue Sea innocent sharks get the bad name.
Coming back to the sea, The Beast is another movie that I would have banned had I been on the Censor Board. The film is about a giant squid which attacks boats and kills people. This movie gave me the jitters. After that even rubbing of seaweed against my foot while I was swimming in the sea used to make me imagine I was being stalked by a sea monster.
Giant squids live deep in the ocean. Their bodies are so long, that along with their tendrils they could measure 50-60 meters in length. Again, I should state that they are never known to attack humans. As a matter of fact hardly anyone has even seen one. The only ones probably ever encountered were dead ones washed up on the shore.
The most famous movie on snakes was probably Anaconda. Though this film had very good computer graphics, everything portrayed about the snake was very wrong and untrue. Anacondas don’t look like that, they don’t grow that big, they don’t chase their prey or hunt for fun, and most important of all, they don’t eat humans. Though I have seen pictures of this snake getting the better of a small crocodile, I can’t think of a single incident recorded where an anaconda has attacked man or child.
My father recently was watching a movie called Out of Towners, about a township coming up on a nest of rattle-snakes. He found it creating so many negative feelings in him about snakes that he soon turned it off.
Bollywood is also to blame. Though Bollywood usually turns snakes into heroes, it encourages people to believe that snakes can perform outrageous feats such as opening door handles by coiling around them, drinking milk when offered to them, protecting vulnerable heroines and chasing villains, and most famous of all – approaching beens when they are played by the actors. The myth about beens is so firmly entrenched in people that I remember my neighbors actually turning down their T.V volumes during these been playing scenes, fearful that the sound would bring snakes into the house!
The sucker that I am for animal films I couldn’t resist watching a film on Komodo dragons and another called Ghost in the Darkness, a story about two lions who terrorized an entire village.
Thankfully, though, I have finally put a full stop to watching such films, and so I have decided not to watch two movies - Bats and Piranha - my cousins have told me that each one is worse than the other.
After watching so many animal movies, I some times wonder if movies about living animals today are so erroneous, how misleading movies made about extinct animals like Jurassic Park must be. Both Jurassic Park and The Lost World present dinosaurs as some of the most feared animals to have ever walked on this earth, yet for all you know dinosaurs might have been as friendly as your neighbour’s cute little puppies.

Rahul