To this day, Jaws remains the best example of Steven Spielberg‘s genius as a filmmaker. He somehow took a middling pulp novel about a killer shark and turned it into a thrilling adventure about masculinity and economic desperation. And to the surprise of no one, the massive success of Jaws spawned a lot of knockoffs, a glut of movies about animals terrorizing communities. None of these reach the majesty of Jaws, of course. But here’s the thing—none of them had to be Jaws. Sure, it’s nice that Spielberg’s film has impeccably designed set pieces and compelling characters, but that’s not the main reason people go to animal attack movies. We really just want to watch people get attacked. And eaten. With such standards duly lowered, let’s take a look at the best animal attack movies that came out in the past half-century since Jaws first scared us out of the water. Of course this list doesn’t cover every movie inspired by Jaws ( for example Godzilla Minus One, which devotes its middle act to a wonderful Jaws riff), and some can argue that these movies were less inspired by Jaws than other nature revolts features, such as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds. But every one of these flicks owes a debt to Jaws, either in inspiration or simply getting people interested in movies about animals eating people. Those warning aside, lets make like drunken revelers on Amity Island and dive right in! 20. Sharknado (2013) Sharknado almost doesn’t belong on this list because it’s less a movie and more of a meme, a precursor to Vines and TikTok trends. Yes, many fantastic movies have been made off of an incredibly high concept and a painfully low budget. Heck, that approach made Roger Corman’s career. But Sharknado‘s high concept—a tornado sweeps over the ocean and launches ravenous sharks into the mainland—comes with a self-satisfied smirk. Somehow, Sharknado managed to capture the imagination of the public, making it popular enough to launch five sequels. At the time, viewers defended it as a so bad it’s good-style movie like The Room. But today Sharknado‘s obvious attempts to be wacky are just bad, making the franchise one more embarrassing trend, ready to be forgotten. 19. Orca (1977) For a long time, Orca had a reputation for being the most obvious Jaws ripoff, and with good reason—Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who would go on to support Flash Gordon, Manhunter, and truly launch David Lynch‘s career with Blue Velvet, wanted his own version of the Spielberg hit. On paper he had all the right ingredients, including a great cast with Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, and another oceanic threat, this time a killer whale. Orca boasts some impressive underwater cinematography, something that even Jaws largely lacks. But that’s the one thing Orca does better than Jaws. Everything else—character-building, suspense and scare scenes, basic plotting and storytelling—is done in such a haphazard manner that Orca plays more like an early mockbuster from the Asylum production company (makers of Sharknado) than it does a product from a future Hollywood player. 18. Tentacles (1977) Another Italian cheapie riding off the success of Jaws, Tentacles at least manages to be fun in its ineptitude. A giant octopus feature, Tentacles is directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, a man whose greatest claim to fame is that he annoyed first-time director James Cameron so much on Piranha II: The Spawning that he activated the future legend’s infamous refusal to compromise with studios and producers. Tentacles somehow has a pretty impressive cast, including John Huston, Shelly Winters, and Henry Fonda all picking up paychecks. None of them really do any hard work in Tentacles, but there’s something fun about watching these greats shake the the octopus limbs that are supposed to be attacking them, as if they’re in an Ed Wood picture. 17. Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) Spielberg famously couldn’t get his mechanical shark to work, a happy accident that he overcame with incredibly tense scenes that merely suggested the monster’s presence. For his arachnids on the forgotten movie Kingdom of the Spiders, director John “Bud” Cardos has an even more formative tool to make up for the lack of effects magic: William Shatner. Shatner plays Rack Hansen, a veterinarian who discovers that the overuse of pesticides has killed off smaller insects and forced the tarantula population to seek larger prey, including humans. These types of ecological messages are common among creature features of the late ’70s, and they usually clang with hollow self-righteousness. But in Kingdom of the Spiders, Shatner delivers his lines with such blown out conviction that we enjoy his bluster, even if we don’t quite buy it. 16. The Meg (2018) The idea of Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark is an idea so awesome, it’s shocking that his character from Spy didn’t already pitch it. And The Meg certainly does deliver when Statham’s character does commit to battle with the creature in the movie’s climax. The problem is that moment of absurd heroism comes only after a lot of long sappy nonsense. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! It’s hard to figure out who is to blame for The Meg‘s failure. Director Jon Turteltaub hails from well-remembered Disney classics Cool Runnings and National Treasure. But too often he forgets how to pace an adventure film and gives into his most saccharine instincts here. One of the many Chinese/Hollywood co-produced blockbusters of the 2010s, The Meg also suffers from trying to innocuously please too wide an audience. Whatever the source, The Meg only fleetingly delivers on the promise of big time peril, wasting too much time on thin character beats. 15. Lake Placid (1999) I know already some people reading this are taking exception to Lake Placid‘s low ranking, complaining that this list isn’t showing enough respect to what they consider a zippy, irreverent take on a creature feature, one written by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley and co-starring Betty White. To those people, I can only say, “Please rewatch Lake Placid and then consider its ranking.” Lake Placid certainly has its fun moments, helped along by White as a kindly grandmother who keeps feeding a giant croc, Bill Pullman as a dumbfounded simple sheriff, and Oliver Platt as a rich adventurer. Their various one-liners are a pleasure to remember. But within the context of a movie stuffed with late ’90s irony, the constant snark gets tiresome, sapping out all the fun of a killer crocodile film. 14. Open Water (2003) Like Sharknado, Open Water had its fans for a few years but has fallen in most moviegoers’ esteem. Unlike Sharknado, Open Water is a real movie, just one that can’t sustain its premise for its entire runtime. Writer and director Chris Kentis draws inspiration from a real-life story about a husband and wife who were accidentally abandoned in the middle of the ocean by their scuba excursion group. The same thing happens to the movie’s Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel Travis (Daniel Kintner), who respond to their predicament by airing out their relationship grievances, even as sharks start to surround them. Kentis commits to the reality of the couple’s bleak situation, which sets Open Water apart from the thrill-a-minute movies that mostly make up this list. But even with some shocking set pieces, Open Water feels too much like being stuck in car with a couple who hates each other and not enough like a shark attack thriller. 13. Eaten Alive (1976) Spielberg’s artful execution of Jaws led many of the filmmakers who followed to attempt some semblance of character development and prestige, even if done without enthusiasm (see: Orca). Not so with Tobe Hooper, who followed up the genre-defining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Eaten Alive. Then again, Hooper draws just as much from Psycho as he does Jaws. Neville Brand plays Judd, the proprietor of a sleazy hotel on the bayou where slimy yokels do horrible things to one another. Amity Island, this is not. But when one of the visitors annoy Judd, he feeds them to the pet croc kept in the back. Eaten Alive is a nasty bit of work, but like most of Hooper’s oeuvre, it’s a lot of fun. 12. Prophecy (1979) Directed by John Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix fame, Prophecy is easily the best of the more high-minded animal attack movies that followed Jaws. This landlocked film, written by David Seltzer, stars Robert Foxworth as Dr. Robert Verne, a veterinarian hired by the EPA to investigate bear attacks against loggers on a mountain in Maine. Along with his wife Maggie (Talia Shire), Verne finds himself thrown into a conflict between the mining company and the local Indigenous population who resist them. Prophecy drips with an American hippy mentality that reads as pretty conservative today (“your body, your choice” one of Maggie’s friends tells her… to urge her against getting an abortion), making its depictions of Native people, including the leader played by Italian American actor Armand Assante, pretty embarrassing. But there is a mutant bear on the loose and Frankenheimer knows how to stage an exciting sequence, which makes Prophecy a worthwhile watch. 11. Piranha 3D (2010) Piranha 3D begins with a denim-wearing fisherman named Matt, played by Richard Dreyfuss no less, falling into the water and immediately getting devoured by the titular flesh-eaters. This weird nod to Matt Hooper and Jaws instead of Joe Dante’s Piranha, the movie Piranha 3D is supposed to be remaking, is just one of the many oddities at play yhere. Screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg have some of the wacky energy and social satire of the original film, but director Alexandre Aja, a veteran of the French Extreme movement, includes so much nastiness in Piranha 3D that we’re not sure if we want to laugh or throw up. Still, there’s no denying the power of Piranha 3D‘s set pieces, including a shocking sequence in which the titular beasties attack an MTV/Girls Gone Wild Spring Break party and chaos ensues. Furthermore, Piranha 3D benefits from a strong cast, which includes Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, and Ving Rhames. 10. Anaconda (1997) With its many scenes involving an animal attacking a ragtag group on a boat, Anaconda clearly owes a debt to Jaws. However, with its corny characters and shoddy late ’90s CGI, Anaconda feels today less like a Jaws knockoff and more like a forerunner to Sharknado and the boom of lazy Syfy and Redbox horror movies that followed. Whatever its influences and legacy, there’s no denying that Anaconda is, itself, a pretty fun movie. Giant snakes make for good movie monsters, and the special effects have become dated in a way that feels charming. Moreover, Anaconda boasts a enjoyably unlikely cast, including Eric Stoltz as a scientist, Owen Wilson and Ice Cube as members of a documentary crew, and Jon Voight as what might be the most unhinged character of his career, second only to his crossbow enthusiast from Megalopolis. 9. The Shallows (2016) The Shallows isn’t the highest-ranking shark attack movie on this list but it’s definitely the most frightening shark attack thriller since Jaws. That’s high praise, indeed, but The Shallows benefits from a lean and mean premise and clear direction by Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made some solid modern thrillers. The Shallows focuses almost entirely on med student Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), who gets caught far from shore after the tide comes in and is hunted by a shark. A lot of the pleasure of The Shallows comes from seeing how Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski avoid the problems that plague many of the movies on this list. Adams is an incredibly competent character, and we pull for her even after the mistake that leaves her stranded. Moreover, The Shallows perfectly balances thrill sequences with character moments, making for one of the more well-rounded creature features of the past decade. 8. Razorback (1984) Jaws, of course, has a fantastic opening scene, a thrilling sequence in which the shark kills a drunken skinny dipper. Of the movies on this list, only Razorback comes close to matching the original’s power, and it does so because director Russell Mulcahy, who would make Highlander next, goes for glossy absurdity. In the Razorback‘s first three minutes, a hulking wild boar smashes through the rural home of an elderly man in the Australian outback, carrying away his young grandson. Over the sounds of a synth score, the old man stumbles away from his now-burning house, screaming up into the sky. Sadly, the rest of Razorback cannot top that moment. Mulcahy directs the picture with lots of glossy style, while retaining the grit of the Australian New Wave movement. But budget restrictions keep the titular beast from really looking as cool as one would hope, and the movie’s loud, crazy tone can’t rely on Jaws-like power of suggestion. 7. Crawl (2019) Alexandre Aja’s second movie on this list earns its high rank precisely because it does away with the tonal inconsistencies that plagued Piranha 3D and leans into what the French filmmaker does so well: slicked down and mean horror. Set in the middle of a Florida hurricane, Crawl stars Kaya Scodelario as competitive swimmer Haley and always-welcome character actor Barry Pepper as her father Dave, who get trapped in a flooding basement that’s menaced by alligators. Yet as grimy as Crawl can get, Aja also executes the strong character work in the script by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen. Dave and Haley are real people, not just gator-bait, making their peril feel all the more real, and their triumphs all the sweeter. 6. Piranha (1978) Piranha is the only entry on this list to get a seal of approval from Stephen Spielberg himself, who not only praised the movie, even as Universal Pictures planned to sue the production, but also got director Joe Dante to later helm Gremlins. It’s not hard to see why Piranha charmed Spielberg, a man who loves wacky comedy. Dante’s Looney Tunes approach is on full display in some of the movie’s best set pieces. But Piranha is special because it also comes from legendary screenwriter John Sayles, who infuses the story with social satire and cynicism that somehow blends with Dante’s approach. The result is a film about piranha developed by the U.S. military to kill the Vietnamese getting unleashed into an American river and making their way to a children’s summer camp, a horrifying idea that Dante turns into good clean fun. 5. Slugs (1988) If we’re talking about well-made movies, then Slugs belongs way below any of the movies on this list, somewhere around the killer earthworm picture Squirm. But if we’re thinking about pure enjoyable spectacle, it’s hard to top Slugs, a movie about, yes, flesh-eating slugs. Yes, it’s very funny to think about people getting terrorized by creatures that are famous for moving very, very slowly. But Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón, perhaps best known for his equally bugnuts giallo Pieces (1982), pays as little attention to realism as he does to good taste. Slugs is filled with insane and ghastly sequences of killer slugs ending up in unlikely places, swarming the floor of someone’s bedroom or inside a fancy restaurant, and then devouring people, one methodical bite at a time. 4. Deep Blue Sea (1999) When it comes to goofy ’90s CGI action, it’s hard to top Deep Blue Sea, directed by Renny Harlin and featuring sharks with genetically enhanced brains. Deep Blue Sea doesn’t have a strong sense of pacing, it lacks any sort of believable character development, and the effects looked terrible even in 1999. But it’s also the only movie on this list that features LL Cool J as a cool chef who recites a violent version of the 23rd Psalm and almost gets cooked alive in an oven by a genius-level shark. It’s scenes like the oven sequence that makes Deep Blue Sea such a delight, despite its many, many flaws. The movie tries to do the most at every turn, whether that’s clearly reediting the movie in postproduction so that LL Cool J’s chef becomes a central character, stealing the spotlight form intended star Saffron Burrows, or a ridiculous Samuel L. Jackson monologue with a delightfully unexpected climax. 3. Alligator (1980) In many ways, Alligator feels like screenwriter John Sayles’ rejoinder to Piranha. If Joe Dante sanded down Piranha‘s sharp edges with his goofy humor, then Alligator is so filled with mean-spiritedness that no director could dilute it. Not that Lewis Teague, a solid action helmer who we’ll talk about again shortly, would do that. Alligator transports the old adage about gators in the sewers from New York to Chicago where the titular beast, the subject of experiments to increase its size, begins preying on the innocent. And on the not so innocent. Alligator shows no respect for the good or the bad, and the film is filled with scenes of people getting devoured, whether it’s a young boy who becomes a snack during a birthday party prank or an elderly mafioso who tries to abandon his family during the gator’s rampage. 2. Grizzly (1976) Grizzly stands as the greatest of the movies obviously ripping off Jaws precisely because it understands its limitations. It takes what it can from Spielberg’s masterpiece, including the general premise of an animal hunting in a tourist location, and ignores what it can’t pull off, namely three-dimensional characters. This clear-eyed understanding of everyone’s abilities makes Grizzly a lean, mean, and satisfying thriller. Directed by blaxploitation vet William Girdler and written by Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon, Grizzly stars ’70s low-budget king Christopher George as a park ranger investigating unusually vicious bear attacks on campers. That’s not the richest concept in the world, but Girdler and co. execute their ideas with such precision, and George plays his character with just the right amount of machismo, that Grizzly manages to deliver on everything you want from an animal attack. 1. Cujo (1983) To some modern readers, it might seem absurd to put Cujo on a list of Jaws knockoffs. After all, Stephen King is a franchise unto himself and he certainly doesn’t need another movie’s success to get a greenlight for any of his projects. But you have to remember that Cujo came out in 1983 and was just the third of his works to get adapted theatrically, which makes its Jaws connection more valid. After all, the main section of the film—in which mom (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) are trapped in their car and menaced by the titular St. Bernard—replicates the isolation on Quint’s fishing vessel, the Orca, better than any other film on this list. However, it’s not just director Lewis Teague’s ability to create tension that puts Cujo at the top. Writers Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier key into the complicated familial dynamics of King’s story, giving the characters surprising depth. It’s no wonder that Spielberg would cast Wallace as another overwhelmed mom for E.T. The Extraterrestrial the very next year, proving that he still has a soft spot for animal attack movies—even if none of them came close to matching the power of Jaws.

Last Surviving Grandson of President John Tyler, Who Took Office in 1841, Dies at 96 When Harrison Ruffin Tyler’s grandfather was born 235 years ago in 1790, George Washington had just become the nation’s first president John Tyler was 63 when his 13th child was born in 1853. That child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr., was 75 when Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928. Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of the tenth American president John Tyler, died on May 25 at age 96. Though the cause of death has not been revealed, his health had deteriorated in recent years. He had been diagnosed with dementia and suffered several small strokes starting in 2012, reports the New York Times’ Robert D. McFadden. He died at his home in a retirement community in Richmond, Virginia, according to the Washington Post’s Andrew Jeong and Brian Murphy. After the death of his brother, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., in September 2020, Harrison Ruffin Tyler was the last surviving grandson of John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and led the nation between 1841 and 1845. But how could someone born in 1790 still have—until very recently—living grandchildren? Even the president’s grandson acknowledged that the time frame was difficult to comprehend. “When you talk about my grandfather born in the 1700s, there is a disconnect there,” he told WTVR’s Scott Wise and Greg McQuade in 2012. The unusual timeline was the result of second marriages and late-in-life fatherhood for the former president and, later, one of his sons. John Tyler was 63 when his 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr., was born in 1853. Then, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. was 75 when Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928. “Both my grandfather—the president—and my father were married twice,” he told New York magazine’s Dan Amira in 2012. “And they had children by their first wives. And their first wives died, and they married again and had more children.” With so many relatives to keep track of, he added, “it does get very confusing.” “When I was a child, I did know most of the descendants, but as you get more generations down the line, it’s hard to keep track of everybody,” he said.John Tyler was born just after George Washington became the fledgling nation’s first president. He pursued a career in politics, serving as Virginia’s governor, as well as a United States representative and senator. He became America’s vice president when William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840. When Harrison died of pneumonia a month into his term, John Tyler became the first vice president to succeed a president who died in office. His ascension was controversial, with some federal lawmakers questioning the legitimacy of his claims to the presidency. Some detractors even took to calling him “His Accidency.” The issue was not officially settled until 1967, with the ratification of the 25th Amendment. As president, one of John Tyler’s biggest accomplishments was pursuing the annexation of Texas, which officially joined the Union in 1845 under President James K. Polk. After his stint in the White House, he retired to his plantation on Virginia’s James River. During the Civil War, he was elected to the Confederate legislature, but he died in 1862 before he could take office. During his lifetime, he had a record-setting 15 children—the most of any U.S. president. He was married twice: first to Letitia Christian, who became the first president’s wife to die in the White House in 1842, followed by Julia Gardiner, who also served as First Lady. Their fifth child was Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr., who later fathered Harrison Ruffin Tyler. Born in 1928, Harrison Ruffin Tyler studied chemistry at the College of William & Mary and chemical engineering at Virginia Tech before founding a water treatment company called ChemTreat. He and his wife, Frances Payne Bouknight, who died in 2019, also spent many years restoring the family’s ancestral home, Sherwood Forest Plantation. The 1,600-acre property, built around 1730 and purchased by his grandfather during his presidency, is a National Historic Landmark. The couple also worked to preserve a nearby Union supply depot called Fort Pocahontas that had been constructed by a regiment of Black soldiers during the Civil War. They had three children together: Harrison Ruffin Tyler Jr., William Bouknight Tyler and Julia Gardiner Tyler Samaniego. Harrison Ruffin Tyler “will be missed immeasurably by those who survive him,” Annique Dunning, the executive director of Sherwood Forest, said in a statement, as reported by the Associated Press. “He will be remembered for his considerable charm, generosity and unfailing good humor by all who knew him.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

To hear him tell it, veteran character actor Neal McDonough shocked his writing partners when he showed them the initial draft for his latest movie, The Last Rodeo. Where did this come from? his friends would ask. You write about Lee Marvin and tough guys. Those are your heroes! As much as it surprised the folks he knew, The Last Rodeo will feel quite familiar to anyone who knows McDonough from his many supporting roles. With his striking blue eyes and wide smile, McDonough’s become one of the most recognizable “that guys” in Hollywood, especially when he’s playing a tough one, whether that be Dum Dum Dugan in Captain America: The First Avenger or the terrifying criminal Quarles in Justified. On the surface, The Last Rodeo protagonist Joe Wainright falls in line with those guys. Written by McDonough, Derek Presley, and director Jon Avnet, The Last Rodeo follows McDonaugh’s former championship bull rider as he returns to the sport to earn money for his grandson’s surgery. In addition to the rust he’s gathered in his years away from the sport, Joe must also overcome the physical injury that drove him out of bull riding and the mental and emotional scars left by the sudden death of his beloved wife (McDonough’s real-life wife and co-producer, Ruvé McDonough), who succumbed to the same disease that now threatens his grandson. For McDonough this story of a man who will do anything for his family makes Joe stand out from his other more famous characters. And the idea came to him during a lonely moment after a shoot when a horrible but provocative thought popped into his head. “One day, I was driving home from work and I got gut-punched with the thought of what would become of me if something ever happened to Ruvé,” McDonough recalls to us. “I’m on the side of the highway in Arizona and the idea just came into my head, Rocky or Bull Durham for a grandpa who has to go back and save his grandson’s life because he’s dying of the same tumor that killed his wife. I just sat on the side of the road voice-dictating what I thought the script would be and I had the whole film, it just flew out of me.” Always open about his Catholic faith, McDonough’s quick to attribute the idea to divine inspiration (“I’m pretty smart, but I don’t think I’m that clever,” he quips). But he also admits that he made Joe a bull rider because he saw the sport as underrepresented in cinema. “I was looking for ideas because I love athletics. But when you get to a certain age, you can’t be the athlete anymore. You have to be the coach, and I was getting tired of being the coach. So I started asking, ‘Who’s the oldest rookie of the year?’ and ‘what’s an old story?'” McDonough remembers. He found his answer in bull riding, but the 59-year-old actor didn’t get to completely meld fiction and reality, at least when it came to Joe’s feats in the arena. “I wanted to be the guy on the bull all the time,” laughs McDonough. “I think everyone knows what a knucklehead I am when it comes to stunts and the physicality of acting in films. I love it. Being an athlete for so long, it’s just something that I always kind of told myself that I can still do, even at my age. But they would never let me get on an actual bull unless it was for a [single] shot. But let me tell you this, they beat the living tar out of me on those mechanical bulls for months and months, and they’re not easy. The amount of times I got smoked off of that thing and got bashed… riding a bull ain’t easy.” McDonough’s commitment to embodying characters isn’t a surprise to anyone familiar with his work. He puts Joe Wainright alongside Buck Compton from Band of Brothers and Wyatt Kane from Tin Man as his favorites to play precisely because of the depth he brings to them, even when they’re silent. While Joe retains a warmth in his taciturn nature, some of McDonough’s other characters felt menacing in their stillness, such as Dave Williams in Desperate Housewives or Damien Darhk in the CW Arrowverse. But that was a skill McDonough had to learn early on. “You almost need a Dramamine just to watch my early stuff,” he admits. “But then I started to pare it down and be as simple as possible in everything. I was watching what John Wayne would do. People don’t think of John Wayne as one of the greatest actors of all time, but he understood stoicism better than anyone. He’d take that breath before he’d say a line and really think about what he was about to say before saying the line, and then really hammering it out there. Kevin Costner’s great at that, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, all those guys were great at listening to what’s going on. They’d take a second and say a line, not twenty lines.” As much as he admires those pillars of cinematic masculinity, McDonough also confesses that he initially saw himself as more of a comedian when he first came to Hollywood. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! “When I did Walking Tall, I thought they were bringing me in for the Johnny Knoxville character. I had read the script and was all prepared, and went in thinking I was going to crush this. But they said ‘No, no, no—we want you to play the villain.” Given his love for Wayne and McQueen, it seems odd that McDonough would go out for a part that eventually went to Johnny Knoxville. But McDonough cites another legend as a major influence, one not known for his silence. “William Shatner as Captain Kirk, my favorite captain!” he declares. Shatner’s a fitting model, given that McDonough made his Hollywood feature debut on a Star Trek movie, albeit in Star Trek: First Contact, the first film without Shatner on set. But McDonough doesn’t look back on the experience with sadness, in part because of the way the Next Generation cast supported him as a young actor. “Patrick Stewart became such a paternal figure to me because he knew it was my first big movie,” McDonough recalls. “Jonathan Frakes, who also directed, took it upon himself to bust my nuggets every single day on set. They said, ‘Look, we only have you for a short amount of time. You’re about to die, you’re the red shirt guy. So we’re going to make fun of you all day long.” He adds with a chuckle, “I was sort of like the toy they got to play around with. And you know, I saw Frakes about a year ago and he was like, ‘Gosh, to see what you’ve become ever since then and what you’ve gone through in your personal life to get here is inspirational for all of us.’ Coming from Jonathan Frakes, who’s an incredible talent, that was a great compliment.” McDonough’s work on First Contact also meant that he got to participate in franchise events, some of which involved his hero, William Shatner. The first time he and Shatner were at an event, McDonough admitted that he turned down the chance to meet the legendary actor, worried that the reality wouldn’t live up to the hero in his mind. “Then Shatner came up right behind me and they rolled him up on a wheelchair because he was 90 years old at the time. And he stands up from the wheelchair and gives me a big hug. He tells me, ‘I know exactly who you are and I’ve been following your career and I think you’re terrific.’ And that was just amazing.” Of course since then McDonough’s got the chance to play some heroes himself, including one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. McDonough has appeared several times as Dum Dum Dugan, a member of the Howling Commandos and an agent of SHIELD. Despite how well-received McDonough’s performances have been, and despite Dugan’s status as a fan favorite in the comics, he hasn’t been a regular in the MCU. “Every time I see Kevin Feige, I say, ‘What’s wrong with you? You’ve got one of the coolest characters and you don’t use him!'” jokes McDonough. “That’s the kind of character for me to play, a lughead from Boston who likes to have fun, but if there’s a fight to be had or someone messes with his family, watch out. I love that about Dum Dum, he’s tough as nails and all-American. C’mon, Kevin! Figure out how to bring Dum Dum back!” Whether or not Dum Dum Dugan will appear in Avengers: Doomsday remains to be seen, but until then, we know where we can find McDonough, playing the strong and silent type, whether that be aboard the USS Enterprise or holding tight to a bucking bull.

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The step-grandson of a famous Great Lakes shipwreck finder recently made his own historic discovery in Wisconsin—the long-lost remains of a tugboat deemed one of the largest and most powerful of its era. But unlike many other vessels sailing in the region at the time, the story of the J.C. Ames ended with an intentionally fiery grand finale.  Earlier in the month, Christopher Thuss went out angler fishing on the foggy waters of Lake Michigan about 43 miles south of Green Bay near Manitowoc. Thuss noticed his onboard sonar observing a sizable object nearby, and after steering towards the location, he saw a ship’s remnants barely nine feet below the water’s surface. After Thuss reported it to the state’s historical society, the organization reached out to the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association and orchestrated a dive to check out the mystery wreck. Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archeologist Tamara Thomsen matched the decaying wood hull with archival records. After 102 years resting in the shallow waters, experts had rediscovered what’s left of the J.C. Ames. Built in 1881 by the Rand and Burger shipbuilding company for $50,000, the 670-horsepower tug initially named the J.C. Perrett was at the time one of the largest of its kind in the Great Lakes. The vessel was initially commissioned to haul lumber, and managed as many as five barges’ worth of timber at once. In 1889, a steambarge struck Perrett and damaged its stem, requiring extensive repairs. A subsequent overhaul of the ship’s boilers along with new owners six years later resulted in a name change to the J.C. Ames. In addition to lumber, the Ames also hauled railroad barges between Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. The J.C. Ames was scuttled in 1923. Credit: Tamara Thomsen / Wisconsin Historical Society The tug finally reached its retirement after over four decades of service. In 1923, the Ames set on its final voyage after being stripped of anything of value, including its replacement boilers and engine. As was customary at the time, the hull was towed out near the coast of Manitowoc and set aflame for onlookers to enjoy. It then sank a few feet to the bottom of Maritime Bay, where it has remained for over a century. While buried under sand for decades, it appears the lake currents only recently re-exposed the J.C. Ames. The hull portions currently sticking out from the sediment are only partially covered in quagga mussels—a destructive and invasive species of mollusks that have caused problems across the Great Lakes for the last 30 years. Quagga mussels can grow so dense on sunken aircraft and ship remains that they ultimately crush the surfaces beneath them. The wreckage slowly being destroyed by invasive quagga mussels. Credit: Tamara Thomsen / Wisconsin Historical Society Discovering wrecks runs in Thuss’ family. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s announcement, the fisherman’s step-grandmother is “Shipwreck Suzze” Johnson. Johnson took up powered parachute and ultralight plane piloting after retirement, and made headlines for discovering three Lake Michigan shipwrecks in three days while flying over them in 2015.

The daughter, son-in-law, and grandson of French crypto mogul Pierre Noizat were the victims of a botched kidnapping attempt in Paris earlier this week.The trio were walking near Square de la Roquette in the French capital early Tuesday morning when a van bearing a Chronopost logo — something like the French UPS — pulled up next to them.Three masked individuals then jumped out, and a brief struggle ensued as they attempted to drag the mother and son into the back of the van. The woman's husband intervened and was hit with "blunt objects," according to The Telegraph.During the struggle, the woman appears to disarm one of the attackers and throw a handgun aside (it would later turn out to be an airsoft gun.) The would-be kidnappers fled in the vehicle, before abandoning it on a nearby street.The victims were treated for minor injuries, according to the Telegraph.It's a horrifying attack, but unfortunately par for the course for the cryptocurrency industry. Criminals have been some of crypto's biggest adopters throughout its short history, drawn to the decentralized currency as a way to move huge sums of money quietly, without ever alerting a centralized bank or financial authorities.Had the kidnappers succeeded, the ensuing ransom could have been virtually untraceable.A longtime crypto magnate, Pierre Noizat is the co-founder of Paymium, one of the world's first cryptocurrency exchanges. Though his exact fortune isn't known, at the time of writing, his business processed over $132 million in Bitcoin in the last week alone — making him and his family an attractive target, to say the least.While rich executives have long been targeted by criminals — there's literally a cottage industry called Kidnap, Ransom, and Extortion Insurance — crypto bigwigs and their associates are becoming prized trophies in violent crime circles.In November of last year, Dean Skurka, CEO of crypto platform WonderFi, was nabbed off the streets of Toronto and held for a $1 million ransom. That same month, three teenagers kidnapped one of the executives behind Tokenize 2025, a Las Vegas-based crypto event, driving him out to the desert where they demanded his crypto passwords at gunpoint. Though the group has since been identified, they made out with an estimated $4 million worth of crypto and NFTs.Similar incidents involving high-net-worth crypto traders have been reported in Pakistan, Spain, Australia, and Bali. Back in France, this is the fourth high-profile kidnapping case involving crypto whales recorded in recent months.One particularly stunning incident involved David Balland, the co-founder of Ledger, along with his wife, who were abducted from their home back in January. The couple was freed following a massive raid by French national police, but not before Balland had his finger cut off and mailed to his co-founder as part of his kidnappers' $11.2 million ransom attempt.On Wednesday, the French interior minister announced a meeting with high-value cryptocurrency magnates to "work with them on their security, and so that they can become aware of the risks."Whether it will stymie the huge upswing in crypto kidnappings is anyone's guess. Financial analysts have found that more millionaires than ever are placing their fortunes on the blockchain — meaning crypto-conscious criminals are spoiled for choice.Share This Article

The Czech Factory Where Oskar Schindler Saved 1,200 Jews Is Now a Museum in Their Honor Under the stewardship of the Jewish family that owned the factory before World War II, the museum is reclaiming the dilapidated site and its dark history The Museum of Survivors is dedicated to the testimonies of the 1,200 Eastern European Jews who lived through the Holocaust with the help of German industrialist Oskar Schindler. The Arks Foundation The former textile factory where German industrialist Oskar Schindler employed and protected 1,200 Jews during the last years of World War II opened this past weekend as a museum dedicated to the stories and memories of survivors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Located in the Czech town of Brnenec, nearly 100 miles southeast of Prague, the Museum of Survivors held its grand opening on May 10, just after the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end in Europe on May 8, 1945. Nearly a century before the factory came under Schindler’s ownership in the 1940s, it was a thriving textile mill owned by the Löw-Beers, a Jewish family from the region. As the Nazis encroached on Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Löw-Beers fled. The Nazis seized the factory, converting it into a munitions plant and later a branch of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Daniel Löw-Beer, the grandson of the factory’s last Jewish owner, set up the Arks Foundation in 2019 and spearheaded the effort to purchase the building and turn it into a site of memory. Making a Museum Watch on “We had to flee for our lives, lost a bit of our history, so putting a little bit of history back to a place and hopefully bringing out as well the history of Oskar Schindler and the village is what we’re doing today,” Löw-Beer tells the Associated Press’ Karel Janicek. At the opening weekend, Löw-Beer was joined by hundreds of guests, including descendants of Jews whom Schindler is credited with saving. “This is a place for education, to learn about our parents and how they lived,” Hadassa Bau, the daughter of survivor Joseph Bau, tells TVP World’s Alex Webber. While Schindler was born in Svitavy, a town just north of Brnenec, he spent much of the war running an enamel factory in Krakow, Poland, which employed Polish Jews who lived in the Krakow Ghetto and were later imprisoned in the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. As the Soviet Red Army collapsed the Nazi’s Eastern Front in 1944, Schindler’s clout as a member of the Nazi Party and an agent of the Abwehr, the German military-intelligence service, allowed him to shift his operations—along with a list of 1,000 Jewish prisoners he employed—to Brnenec. His list of names likely saved those Jews from mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the Soviets liberated Brnenec, the Jewish survivors presented Schindler with a golden ring created out of melted-down gold from their teeth. It bore an inscription paraphrased from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler’s actions earned him Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations medal and formed the basis of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical novel Schindler’s Ark, which in turn inspired Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Schindler’s List. Before it was purchased by Daniel Löw-Beer and his Arks Foundation in 2019, the factory had fallen into disrepair after decades of neglect. The Arks Foundation Margaret Keneally, the author’s daughter, was in attendance at the recent ceremony, and on behalf of her father, she delivered three documents for inclusion in the museum’s collections: original transcripts of interviews her father conducted with survivors; documents relating to the trial and execution of Krakow-Plaszow commandant Amon Göth; and portions of the original, hand-typed manuscript of her father’s book. “Part of the story he told will be here, and this place is an important part of continuing to tell that story,” she said, per Radio Prague International’s Danny Bate and Barbora Soukupová. Despite the ceremony, the Museum of Survivors is still a work in progress, and it doesn’t yet have regular visitation hours. Awaiting renovation are key sites like Schindler’s office; the barracks where SS troops lived; and the so-called Schindler’s Ark building, where the Jewish prisoners worked and lived, per the AP. For now, a transparent glass wall separates the ruins from the completed portions of the museum—a thin barrier that invites viewer’s contemplation about the ruins of history and the promises of the future. “It’s a universal place of survivors,” Löw-Beer tells the AP. “We want those stories to be told and people to make their own opinions.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

This weekend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s new health czar, once again demonstrated his general lack of qualifications for the job by taking his grandchildren swimming in a toxic Washington D.C. waterway. Kennedy, who is Trump’s new director of the Department of Health and Human Services, inscrutably decided to take his grandkids for a dip in Rock Creek, a tributary near the nation’s capital that has been officially deemed not suitable for human activity. “Mother’s Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson, and a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek,” Kennedy posted on X, over the weekend. This pastoral scene might be endearingly folksy, were it not for the fact that Rock Creek is the unfortunate dumping ground for the region’s sewage discharge. As such, the government has officially banned area residents from swimming, or even wading, in the creek. “Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels,” the National Park Service has said, of the creek. “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban – this means wading, too!” In the photos shared online by Kennedy, the HHS director can be seen dunking his grandson into the bacteria-laden water. Gizmodo reached out to the HHS for more information about this photo-op. The HHS director happily dunking his head in a poop-polluted creek seems like an apt visual metaphor for national health policy right now. Indeed, Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration seem to be doing everything in their power to make more areas of America like Rock Creek—that is, polluted and uninhabitable by humans. Over the past few months, the Trump administration has sought to drastically cut environmental regulations across the board—including for water and air safety. At the same time, the HHS, under Kennedy, has attacked vaccine programs and laid off thousands of federal workers at the Food and Safety Administration and other parts of the federal health workforce. At the same time, Kennedy has leaned increasingly into unproven conspiracy theory rhetoric, signaling a willingness to spend federal money and resources on his own personal preoccupations and fringe science.