By Sean Axmaker
Special to MSN Movies

Leapin' lizards!

They slither. They creep. They crawl.

They are reptiles, hear them roar, hiss, screech, snap and howl. They once ruled the Earth and now they want it back!

Samuel L. Jackson knows the truth. In "Snakes on a Plane" he takes on hundreds of the scaly, snapping, springing killers. Ostensibly they've been planted to take out a federal witness in mid-air, and Jackson is the badass who refuses to be tinned snake food, but is there more to the story?

Just connect the dots to another surprise summer disaster movie hit: "An Inconvenient Truth." Al Gore paints a portrait of global warming. Temperatures escalating. Icebergs melting. Sea level rising. What Gore doesn't warn you about is the effect on the kingdom of cold-blooded creatures. As their bodily fluids warm up, they get faster, smarter, more aggressive. In short, everything the movies have been warning us about.

Consider the ick factor, the knee-jerk recoil from the slimy and the scaly. Is it some kind of prehistoric survival instinct or just a matter of species hierarchy? After all, we fought hard to take the Earth from the dinosaur and its spawn, and we're not about to give it back to those creepy crawly creatures without a fight.

Overstating the case? I don't think so. Just look at the cinematic evidence. It's a battle of the bloods, warm versus cold -- a war for planetary domination begun all over again. For a preview of the coming campaign of skins against scales, just cast an eye to these great cold-blooded creatures of the big screen: Lizards and gators and snakes -- oh my!

10. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) and sequels
Genus: Cinematicus snake-piticus
Identifying characteristics: Found in large, heterogeneous groups.
Care and feeding: Leave in damp, dark places where it can lie in wait for rumpled adventure-movie heroes.
Field notes: "I hate snakes!" True, neither the hissing and rattling denizens of the snake pit in the original "Raiders of the Lost Ark" nor the slithering snakes on a train in the prologue to "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" break out of the nest to proclaim any personality (or even individual menace). But their effect on intrepid adventurer Indiana Jones is so essential and defining to the films that they earn an honorable mention just for showing up and creeping the audience out without lifting a finger ... which, of course, snakes do not have.

9. "Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe" (1995)
Genus: Japanese flying sea turtle
Identifying characteristics: Larger than average (about the size of a school bus); retracts legs for jet propulsion; flies at supersonic speeds; shoots jets of fire from mouth.
Care and feeding: Good with children and protective of the human race; refrain from lobbing missiles in his direction, which can anger the otherwise good-natured creature.
Field notes: The giant airborne sea turtle with turbo jets evolved from a campy, kid-friendly matinee hero into a giant movie monster of a different species altogether when it came out of hibernation in its rousing 1995 revival. A knowing tribute to the city-smashing entertainments of the past with a modern sensibility and a loving sense of spectacle, it's more fun than most of the recent "Godzilla" sequels. And it spawned the ultimate monster movie come-on line: "Someday I will show you around a monster-free Tokyo."

8. "Lake Placid" (1999)
Genus: Asian crocodile -- inexplicably living in a Maine lake
Identifying characteristics: 30-feet long; waits near the shore to gobble meals that wander too close; an uncharacteristic affection for dotty, potty-mouthed old ladies.
Care and feeding: Prefers its beef fresh, on the hoof and still mooing as it drags it under water.
Field notes: Written by TV wunderkind David E. Kelly with tongue-in-cheek dialogue dotted with sarcastic quips, it's a big, dumb monster movie with a man-eating croc, a whiny city-bred paleontologist (Bridget Fonda), a straight-talking fish-and-wildlife warden (Bill Pullman) and a bunch of gawkers just dying to be turned into pet food. But (dare I say it?) what a croc! It scares fish right out of the water and pulls a helicopter out of the sky and into the lake. Still, Betty White all but steals the film as the eccentric who feeds the monstrosity and considers it a pet.

7. "Alligator" (1980)
Genus: American alligator, mutated by experimental growth hormones
Identifying characteristics: 36-feet long; can traverse the city in subterranean tunnels faster than most people can navigate the subway; will eat almost anything that moves but has a taste for corrupt politicians.
Care and feeding: Keep in cool, dark, fetid sewer with easy access to street and it will feed itself just fine.
Field notes: The urban legend of baby alligators flushed down toilets and growing in city sewers gets its obligatory creature feature treatment in the silly but wily drive-in movie scripted by John Sayles. Sure, it looks as phony as a bathtub toy, but it eats every unpleasant character in the movie and slithers through dark alleys to take back the neighborhood with such aplomb that these shortcomings are easily forgiven. Robert Forster lends a little dignity to film as the jaded but honest cop out for payback after his partner is eaten by the toothy omnivore.

6. "Anaconda" (1997)
Genus: Anaconda, South American relation to the boa constrictor
Identifying characteristics: 40-feet long; likes to play in the water; obsessively hunts humans who stray into its territory.
Care and feeding: Its enormous appetite and rapid metabolism enable it to devour supporting casts like popcorn, so send plenty of B-movie actors down the river.
Field notes: Before Jennifer Lopez was J.Lo, she played a documentary filmmaker looking for a lost Amazon tribe sidetracked by a devious Captain Ahab of a jungle poacher (Jon Voight, borrowing Al Pacino's "Scarface" accent) and his great white whale of a snake. Not only the largest species of snake in the world, the anaconda, as the film's prologue explains, "will regurgitate its prey in order to kill and eat again." More than a wildlife biology lesson, that's a promise, and the film delivers victims bitten in the throat, snatched out of the air, squeezed into a state of paralysis, dragged under water and swallowed whole and alive.

5. "Tremors" (1990)
Genus: Prehistoric graboid
Identifying characteristics: Resembles a giant snake, only much uglier -- seriously, these things are repulsive; reportedly it smells pretty bad, too; swims through earth like a fish through water; preternaturally attuned to the vibrations of humans on the run.
Care and feeding: Keep your pet graboid penned in by rocky deposit and volcanic sheets, lest it stray into more densely populated feeding grounds.
Field notes: Director Ron Underwood casts a playful tone on a B-movie situation and comes up with a lively monster movie filled with offbeat humor, eccentric characters (notably odd-job buddies Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, but a gun-toting survivalist couple Michael Gross and Reba McEntire also rise to the occasion) and a clever twist on an old genre. Think of them as carnivorous earthworms on speed, with big honkin' teeth and terrible B.O.

4. "The Lost World" (1925)
Genus: Brontosaurus, extinct but for a few living on a small plateau in the South American jungle
Identifying characteristics: Hundreds of feet long; slow and lumbering but deliberate; jerky movements give clues to the primitive stop-motion animation that kept it alive for eons.
Care and feeding: Vegetarian -- do not feed it humans. Also, do not separate from its young, as it will swim an ocean to retrieve a kidnapped cub.
Field notes: The original Jurassic adventure wowed audiences with the first big-screen dinosaur since "Gertie," and this one was no cartoon. The mama brontosaur that tramples downtown London into rubble is the mother of all giant monsters (consider Gorgo one of her many illegitimate offspring) and the star attraction of the first great creature-feature spectacle. Pioneering special effects artist Willis O'Brien went on to create "King Kong" and mentor Ray Harryhausen, his imaginative protégé, kept the art of stop-motion artistry alive in a series of wondrous tales of myth and fantasy and giant-monster rampages.

3. "King Kong" (1933/2005)
Genus: Tyrannosaurus rex, extinct but for the herd living on the tropical zoological time capsule of Skull Island
Identifying characteristics: Big and ferocious -- real big. Where it once moved slowly and hunted alone, it evolved over the 70 years between movies into a quick, limber leaping thunder lizard that hunts in a pack.
Care and feeding: Carnivore -- finds humans a delicacy tasty enough to fight over. Otherwise, it eats anything smaller than itself.
Field notes: Kong is the indisputable king of Skull Island, but the T. rex is a mighty prehistoric predator and a magnificent thing to behold in both the original "King Kong" and Peter Jackson's 2005 remake. The stop-motion death match of the 1933 film is a primal battle of the jungle beasts. Whether Jackson's overkill remake, which pits three of the thunder lizards against the fiercely protective Kong as he juggles Naomi Watts like a rag doll, tops it is a matter of taste, but it's an astounding spectacle nonetheless. Before you adopt, however, check out the cool Tyrannosaurs in the "Jurassic Park" films.

2. "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" (1954)
Genus: Gill-man, possibly an aquatic relation to Piltdown Man
Identifying characteristics: Humanoid with scaly hide and webbed hands and feet; swims with the wild agility of a trained scuba diver; obsessed with bathing beauties.
Care and feeding: Prefers equatorial jungle rivers with convenient cave systems; apparently vegetarian; do not remove from habitat for danger of inferior sequels such as "The Creature Walks Among Us."
Field notes: Jack Arnold's B-movie "beauty and the beast" spawned two iconic images -- the leggy, luscious Julie Adams in a luminous white bathing suit and the amphibious missing link between man and lizard who falls head over flippers for the white goddess who dives into his self-protected wetlands home. The best of the '50s monster films, it turns the creature into a misunderstood underdog hero of sorts; just another outsider (albeit with gills and an unfortunate skin condition) who only wants to carry the girl off to his cave and live happily ever.

1. "Godzilla" (1954)
Genus: Godzillasuarus, an entirely fictitious prehistoric dinosaur, revived and mutated by the fallout of the hydrogen bomb
Identifying characteristics: 160-feet tall (give or take a few feet), charcoal gray, spiny dorsal plates down the backbone, radioactive breath. Some say he resembles a man in an elaborate dinosaur bodysuit, though everyone knows that it's only coincidence. Note: Godzilla grew taller and turned various shades of green and blue as he evolved through sequels.
Care and feeding: Enjoys stomping through major cities and hibernating underwater between features; territorial, keep separated from King Ghidorah, Gigan, Hedorah and other supersized pretenders to the throne.
Field notes: The big daddy of all Japanese monster movies spawned more than 20 sequels and opened the door for a whole host of oversized brethren: Mothra, Rodan, Gamera and more. But none match the righteous anger or terrifying ferocity of the big G in his first film. Godzilla's devastating rampage and radioactive breath leave behind thousands of casualties and a city aflame, recalling nothing less than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The version American audiences saw was significantly cut down and all of the political commentary was removed, but the spectacle of a painstakingly constructed city smashed to pieces by a rampaging lizard screaming a horrific cry of anger and anguish is intact. But fear not -- the complete, original Japanese version (the one without Raymond Burr's grave narration) will debut on DVD in September.

What cinematic lizards do you love? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for the Internet Movie Database. His writing has appeared on MSN Entertainment and Greencine.com and in Amazing Stories, Asian Cult Cinema and "The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide."