Animal Crackers: When Beasts Bite Back

It's a no-brainer for us here at ITV Towers to compile a thrilling selection of crazy animal flicks where the beasts bite back at humans in honour of this low-budget thriller that cleaned up at the box office.

Busty Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis play scuba divers who get left behind by their tour boat in shark infested waters. Needless to say, the fin wagglers can eye a big meal from a long way off.

With a 2009 3-D remake on the cards, it only seems fair to kick off our appreciation of aquatic mayhem merchants with 1978’s Piranha, in which a group of Amazonian flesh-strippers are accidentally released into a river.

But as we all know, there’s only one true daddy when it comes to sub-aqua terror – Jaws, the Great White scourge of Amity Island . Honourable mention: Deep Blue Sea (super-intelligent, ultra-aggressive sharks)

You never see little girls cuddle up to “Snuggles” the snake in the movies, do you? And yet no one bats an eyelid when a boy embraces a wrinkly extra terrestrial in ET. Yes, snakes are bad news in Hollywood – and here’s why.

Getting your snake out at 30,000ft is normally a precursor to mile high fun – but not when you fall foul of Snakes on a Plane. And if you go fumbling in the jungle, watch out: you might just grab on to something big, like J.Lo discovered in Anaconda.

Having let the snakes loose, we move onto the Big Kahuna of inland waterways with the crocs. Obviously Pauly Hogan got in on the act back in the day with the misty-eyed Croc Dundee, while the late, great Steve Irwin also hunted them.

However, the best croc pics have been churned out in recent years with lovely Brooke Langton wrestling the scaly dudes in Primeval, together with honourable mentions for ferocious flicks Lake Placid and Black Water.

Ralph Fiennes had nothing to do with the creepy crawlies in his 2002 movie honouring their name, while Tobey Maguire came off pretty damn well from his encounter in Spider-Man thanks to his awesome array of super powers.

So we turn to the classic one-two punch of Arachnophobia and Eight Legged Freaks for the gore and tongue-in-cheek laughs, with Jeff Daniels fending them off in the former and Scarlett Johansson taking them to town in the latter.

We all know how The Lion King turned out with Jeremy Irons' evil Scar turning on one his own, in poor defenceless Simba. However, let's be honest it's animated and the syrupy Elton John soundtrack cancelled out the fur revenge.

In terms of proper mane-flying action, we have to turn to The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe and The Ghost and the Darkness, where Mickey Douglas and Val Kilmer needed all their wits and a shedload of ammo to keep the lions at bay.