Creature Features! Summer Film Favorites from hoopla and the APL DVD Collection!

Summer is still very much with us, and you just may be craving the sort of  blockbuster viewing that the season usually provides. Something to take your mind entirely off of the pressures of real life and plunge you into the midst of impossible drama and adventure. Something with fabulous special effects to engross the senses and take you somewhere else, far from the world as it is. If you haven’t yet made it to a drive-in theater, or if you’re eager for more of this sort of thing, APL has you covered! Whether you prefer streaming video or watching DVDs, you’ll find “creature features” on hoopla and via our easy Curbside Pickup Service.

hoopla dishes up ravening dinosaurs, alligators, and sharks galore (also see this week’s Shark Week post) with its specially-curated Creature Feature category. Here, you can wander at will in unabashedly B-movie territory–because who doesn’t secretly love them, however bad the reviews may be? If you’d like a dollop of literature with your sci-fi/fantasy/horror experience, you might go for Journey to the Center of the Earth or Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, both of which reimagine classic 19th-century novels in modern terms. Or perhaps try a comic take on H. P. Lovecraft’s famously weird tales with The Last Lovecraft: The Relic of Cthulhu, in which the author’s last living relative must reckon with the fearsome monster.

Once you’ve exhausted the 47 possibilities represented in hoopla, hop over to our library catalog for a bijou, hand-selected list of DVDs that are sure to give you those chills and thrills you crave! Get reacquainted with Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, or opt for a real-life adrenaline rush with the documentary Shark Dive. If you’re in the mood for something a little gentler than Jaws, have a look at a critically-acclaimed, fantastical film full of tall tales: Big Fish. There are vintage heebeegeebees to be had too, if you want to try the classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If you’re new to hoopla, take a look at our FAQs page to get started. And if you haven’t tried our Curbside Pickup Service, learn all about it here and check the updates here. Oh–and you’ll be happy to know that there’s currently no fee for DVD checkouts!

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Celebrate Shark Week with Abbot Public Library!

Every summer, Discovery Channel hosts a week full of new films and documentaries about carnivorous Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes), a celebration known as Shark Week. Featuring a range of subjects, from Great Whites breaching to catch seals, to the little-known species of the deep, every year there are new surprises to learn about these long-feared creatures.

If you don’t subscribe to Discovery Channel, or if you want even more than what Shark Week can provide, Abbot Public Library can help! Check out the following selections from our collections in physical format through the library catalog, or online through Overdrive and hoopla! 

You’ll find a curated collection of Shark Week movies on hoopla with a few family-friendly titles such as Sea Level and Shark Lady (also in print format); to selections geared towards mature audiences, like the horror movie Shark Lake or the action/adventure Swamp Shark, two movies about shark attacks which give these peaceful creatures their bad reputation. But if you watch documentaries such as Tiger Shark: Predator Revealed, you’ll find that sharks don’t seek out humans as prey, but prefer their natural appetite of fish, seals, and other sea creatures. The documentary Sharks shows how many shark species are becoming extinct and need our help in order to survive. 

IndieFlix has a few shark videos you can stream as well, including Sharks in My Viewfinder, about an underwater photographer who went around the world to film sharks; and the short, The Shark and The Can, in which a shark tries to find acceptance from the other ocean creatures who are scared of him. Log into IndieFlix via Abbot Public LIbrary’s RB Digital Services to access these and more IndieFlix videos. 

You can check out even more shark movies in DVD format! While Abbot Public Library is offering curbside service, there will be no fee to check out DVDs. Reserve them online for Curbside Pickup and make an appointment to pick them up from the rear entrance of the Abbot Public Library. Read these instructions for the full details. There are kid-friendly titles like Finding Dory and Wild Krats: Shark-tastic! to the adult thrillers Jaws and The Shallows. For something realistic, try the documentaries Oceans, which features other sea creatures as well, or Shark Dive. 

If you’d rather read about sharks than watch them (some of these shark attack movies can be pretty gruesome and scary), check out Abbot Public Library’s print, Overdrive, and hoopla collections for all ages!

Some feature fiction titles for kids include Swimming with Sharks by Heather Lang, about how Eugenie Clark saw a shark at the aquarium when she was young and grew up to be a scientist who studied them; Shark Baby by Ann Downer, about a lost baby shark trying to find out what kind of shark he is; and Fins by Randy Wayne White, about three kids who help a marine biologist research the local endangered sharks. 

Adults can enjoy titles such as the horror classic Jaws by Peter Benchley, which you can reserve in print format for Curbside Pickup or listen to with no wait as an audiobook on hoopla. You can also reserve the movie based on the book. The Shark Club by Ann Kid Taylor features a woman who is attacked by a shark and grows up to be a marine biologist. 

To learn true facts about sharks, check out some of these nonfiction titles on hoopla! Discover The Truth About Great White Sharks, learn 101 Amazing Facts About Sharks, and find out about Deepwater Sharks and the World’s Weirdest Sharks. You can also learn about individual species such as the hammerhead, Great White, thresher, bull, tiger, goblin, whale, and more!

Between the Abbot Public Library’s online collections and digital resources, you’ll learn everything there is to know about sharks!