6 Best Sea Monster DVDs Ever

By RICHARD CORLISS

Just when you thought it was safe to rent a DVD, what pops its snout up? Jaws, back again, in a spiffed-up digital package. But before and after the toothy one terrorized beach swimmers, sea monsters cued the aquaphobia of many a movie fan. Here's a scary half-dozen.

JAWS 1975; STEVEN SPIELBERG

Seeing this blockbuster again, on the 30th anniversary of its release, is to be reminded how important character and dialogue used to be, even in monster movies. For all the fabulous shark battles, Jaws is essentially three guys on a boat, talking out their fears. The extras here include a new-to-DVD documentary on the film's troubled production--its own kind of behind-the-scenes disaster movie. As for the film itself, it's still chatty and teeth-chatteringly suspenseful.

CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON 1954; JACK ARNOLD

This well-directed B movie (and its two sequels) told of a primordial 7-ft. amphibi-man. A half-century later, one image sticks to the moviegoer's retina: Julie Adams in a bathing suit of iconic white, swimming gracefully in an Amazon lagoon and, unseen by her, the Gill Man miming her strokes a few feet below, like the hidden id ready to surface. In this eerie pas de deux, the creature's attentions are both predatory and appreciative. He could be her destroyer or her lover: Swamp Thing or Wild Thing.

MOBY DICK 1956; JOHN HUSTON

"From hell's heart I stab at thee!" spumes Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) as he harpoons the great white beast. "For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee, thou damned whale!" Yes, this version of the Melville novel has its starchy parts, and Peck takes a while to shake off his trademark decency and slip into Ahab's rasping obsession. Plus, the film's mechanical whale, which looks like a great slab of lard with a cold blue eye, kept sinking when it was meant to swim. But what matters is the saline tang of the location shooting and the acrid foretaste of doom as Ahab sails to his awful destiny, taking his crew and the audience with him on that terrifying ride.

GOJIRA/GODZILLA 1954; ISHIRO HONDA

Monster-movie parables were the Pop Art of the early nuclear age. Japan got its cinematic revenge for the A-bomb with the story of a prehistoric monster (called Gojira at home, Godzilla abroad), its eon-long sleep disturbed by an A-blast, that rises from the depths to stomp on Tokyo. In dozens of sequels, the beast devolved into a toy or a clown. But here, just nine years after Hiroshima, Gojira is a political metaphor that roars majestically to life.

TABU 1931; F.W. MURNAU

Murnau, one of the greatest silent-film directors, went to Tahiti (with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty) to make this ethnographic idyll spiked with Hollywood-style melodrama. A boy who has fallen in love with a local princess dives for pearls in a deep-sea grotto that is guarded by a possessive shark. The simple story is told with rapturous visual poetry that captures both nature's beauty and its threat. Murnau, 42, had his own rendezvous with tragedy: he died in a car crash shortly before Tabu's release.

THE ABYSS 1989; JAMES CAMERON

Cameron is a director who virtually lives underwater, from his debut feature Piranha Part Two to his recent marine documentaries. Oh, and Titanic. Cameron's ultimate sea adventure, surely his wettest, is this aquanautic journey leading to the discovery of a new species. There's a whirling wonder in this confrontation. And a sobering message: sometimes the monster on the ocean floor is man. --By Richard Corliss