1980's "Alligator," directed by Lewis Teague and written by John Sayles - and, along with Joe Dante's 1978 "Piranha" - was really, at the time of its release, the latest in a long line of man-vs.-nature-themed animal-attack creature-feature science fiction and horror films released in the wake of the ground-breaking blockbuster success of Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" in 1975.
"Alligator" has come to be regarded as a kind of camp cult classic over the years, and also one of the better of these so-called "Jaws" clones (or, if you will, knock-offs), and very often for the same reasons as Joe Dante's earlier "Piranha." Despite its inherently silly premise, the film is still genuinely thrilling and suspenseful in some spots (even, dare I say, SCARY), but its thrills & chills are balanced out with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and some knowingly satirical broadsides aimed squarely at the increasingly tiresome genre conventions and stereotypes. There is even some social commentary in there, as well, with its underlying theme of a man-eating monster literally eating its way up the socio-economic ladder, first by bursting out of the city sewers, and then making its way through the suburbs and into wealthy, upscale society. Perhaps it is no small coincidence, then, that "Alligator" was written by Sayles, who was also the scribe behind "Piranha" just two years earlier, which also contained some hefty doses of satire itself.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let's go back to my childhood growing up in the early-to-mid 1990s. My late mother had a strange fondness for campy and sometimes out-right terrible science fiction and horror "B"-movies; "Alligator" just happened to be one of them. The film would often be included on the Sci-Fi Channel's (as it was known back then) day-time weekend line-up of back-to-back sci-fi, fantasy, and horror features. Of course, because I was especially close to my late mother, I would often be hanging around her while watching some of these movies even though I knew I shouldn't have been, since I got scared very easily and would often spend nights sleeping in my parents' bedroom because I was too scared to sleep by myself; movies like "Alligator" were to blame for that back then.
Years ago, as an adult in my late 20s, I purchased "Alligator" on home video when Lionsgate released a new DVD edition of the film with a digitally cleaned-up picture and sound quality. I was amazed to notice all the little details about "Alligator" as a film that I could not have understood as a child. And I realized then that after seeing "Alligator" and comparing it to its 1975 blood-spawn "Jaws," it is not a bad picture at all. And in fact, its firm balance of taking itself seriously when it has to and its moments of self-aware satire and humor, is what makes it one of the better pictures that this genre is ever likely to see and is what is key to its success, however marginal that may be - and is also commendable since it was also one of the earliest films in the horror genre to ever attempt to do so (a little over a decade-and-a-half before "Scream," in 1996, opened the door for the new breed of self-aware horror-satire, which would become a new sub-genre upon itself but never done quite as well ever again - at least until Drew Goddard's well-received "The Cabin in the Woods" in 2011).
"Alligator" begins in 1968 in Florida, when a young girl purchases a baby alligator, which she names "Ramon," from a local tourist trap. Her family then drives back to their home in Chicago, and, when "Ramon" turns out to be too much of a nuisance for the girl's animal-phobic father, he promptly flushes "Ramon" down the toilet, where for the next 12 years the reptile begins feeding on the contaminated, discarded carcasses of animals used in a series of illegal experiments to test a new synthetic growth hormone meant to address the world's food shortage crisis...
Enter into the picture: troubled Chicago City Police Department homicide detective David Madison (the late Robert Forster), who in 1980 begins investigating a series of gruesome homicides in which the severed body parts of missing sewer workers are turning up in the local water treatment plant. Not yet ready to conclude that there's some sort of "Jack-the-Ripper"-style psychopathic killer on the loose, and given the location of the disappearances as having most likely occurred in the sewers, Madison thinks that's a good place to start looking for clues, and, along with an amiable but unfortunate young Chicago City police patrolman named Kelly (Perry Lang) - and in the most genuinely suspenseful and scary moment in the entire film (which still puts me on the edge of my seat to this day) - discovers that the rash of disappearances and mysterious deaths are the work of a 36-foot-long monster alligator, grotesquely mutated into a ravenous man-eating behemoth super-beast after having fed on the aforementioned contaminated and discarded animal carcasses for the past 12 years.
Of course, no one believes David's story about Alligators In The Sewer (the film's concept was reportedly inspired by the famous urban legend), but a shocking sequence of events, namely indisputable photographic evidence procured from a sleazy local newspaper journalist at the involuntary cost of his own life, force everyone to confront the truth that a monster mutant alligator is loose in the Chicago City sewer system. Madison is joined in his pursuit of the killer reptile by herpetologist Dr. Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), who was actually the young girl who first purchased "Ramon" back in 1968 and who later becomes his love interest, and an arrogant big-game sport hunter named Colonel Brock (the late Henry Silva), who does get some of the most laugh-out-loud funniest, most self-knowing moments in the entire film.
As you can see, "Alligator" sounds a lot like "Jaws," though obviously on a much lower budget and is clearly an independent "B"-level horror picture through and through. Yet, despite its clear "B"-movie roots, it is not limited by those roots and it has a formidable cast of top performers, the best of which is the late Robert Forster, who despite Madison's unfortunate reputation as a partner-killer, also reportedly managed to improvise a very humorous running joke about his character's receding hairline into the movie, which Lewis Teague loved so much that he kept in the picture. In fact, according to Quentin Tarantino, it was Forster's performance in THIS movie (rather than some of the late actor's other, higher-profile roles) that got him interested in him in the first place and then later cast him in his third directorial feature "Jackie Brown" (1997), which earned Forster a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Robert Forster is one of the main reasons you come to see the movie.
As for the rest of the film and the titular "Alligator" itself, I still find myself genuinely on the edge of my seat during certain moments. Most people will forever be traumatized by one death scene in a backyard swimming pool (which has become widely familiar amongst genre buffs) an hour into the picture that does have a way of unsettling the viewer and lodging itself into one's memory. In that sense, "Ramon" is a formidable adversary with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Brought to life flawlessly through a combination of real-life alligators on miniature sets and a 36-foot-long full-scale animatronic puppet, "Ramon" has the distinction of being one scary reptile who will devour anything that gets in his path. And when "Ramon" attacks, the prosthetic make-up special effects used to portray the film's human deaths have the benefit of being both appropriately gruesome and shocking - but without being overly graphic and gory, and thus grossing out the audience rather than terrifying them.
"Alligator," alongside Joe Dante's "Piranha," deserve their places in the horror genre not just because they're "Jaws" clones, but because both pictures rise above their genre trappings by planting themselves firmly in two disparate genres, horror and satire, and finely tip-toeing the lines between both without venturing too far into either category and thus risk becoming farce ("Alligator" still has a hilarious early sequence at the police station involving a would-be suicide bomber that proudly displays the film's tongue-in-cheek bona-fides). That delicate balance - rather than simply playing it straight - is the key to the success of both films as celebrated camp cult classics of the man-vs.-nature animal-attack sub-genre of horror brought on by Steven Spielberg's mega-blockbuster hit "Jaws."
8/10
P. S.: Regretfully, "Alligator" was followed up 11 years later by a vastly inferior straight-to-video sequel, "Alligator II: The Mutation" (1991), which featured none of the characters, actors, or crew members from the original 1980 film.
"Alligator" has come to be regarded as a kind of camp cult classic over the years, and also one of the better of these so-called "Jaws" clones (or, if you will, knock-offs), and very often for the same reasons as Joe Dante's earlier "Piranha." Despite its inherently silly premise, the film is still genuinely thrilling and suspenseful in some spots (even, dare I say, SCARY), but its thrills & chills are balanced out with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and some knowingly satirical broadsides aimed squarely at the increasingly tiresome genre conventions and stereotypes. There is even some social commentary in there, as well, with its underlying theme of a man-eating monster literally eating its way up the socio-economic ladder, first by bursting out of the city sewers, and then making its way through the suburbs and into wealthy, upscale society. Perhaps it is no small coincidence, then, that "Alligator" was written by Sayles, who was also the scribe behind "Piranha" just two years earlier, which also contained some hefty doses of satire itself.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let's go back to my childhood growing up in the early-to-mid 1990s. My late mother had a strange fondness for campy and sometimes out-right terrible science fiction and horror "B"-movies; "Alligator" just happened to be one of them. The film would often be included on the Sci-Fi Channel's (as it was known back then) day-time weekend line-up of back-to-back sci-fi, fantasy, and horror features. Of course, because I was especially close to my late mother, I would often be hanging around her while watching some of these movies even though I knew I shouldn't have been, since I got scared very easily and would often spend nights sleeping in my parents' bedroom because I was too scared to sleep by myself; movies like "Alligator" were to blame for that back then.
Years ago, as an adult in my late 20s, I purchased "Alligator" on home video when Lionsgate released a new DVD edition of the film with a digitally cleaned-up picture and sound quality. I was amazed to notice all the little details about "Alligator" as a film that I could not have understood as a child. And I realized then that after seeing "Alligator" and comparing it to its 1975 blood-spawn "Jaws," it is not a bad picture at all. And in fact, its firm balance of taking itself seriously when it has to and its moments of self-aware satire and humor, is what makes it one of the better pictures that this genre is ever likely to see and is what is key to its success, however marginal that may be - and is also commendable since it was also one of the earliest films in the horror genre to ever attempt to do so (a little over a decade-and-a-half before "Scream," in 1996, opened the door for the new breed of self-aware horror-satire, which would become a new sub-genre upon itself but never done quite as well ever again - at least until Drew Goddard's well-received "The Cabin in the Woods" in 2011).
"Alligator" begins in 1968 in Florida, when a young girl purchases a baby alligator, which she names "Ramon," from a local tourist trap. Her family then drives back to their home in Chicago, and, when "Ramon" turns out to be too much of a nuisance for the girl's animal-phobic father, he promptly flushes "Ramon" down the toilet, where for the next 12 years the reptile begins feeding on the contaminated, discarded carcasses of animals used in a series of illegal experiments to test a new synthetic growth hormone meant to address the world's food shortage crisis...
Enter into the picture: troubled Chicago City Police Department homicide detective David Madison (the late Robert Forster), who in 1980 begins investigating a series of gruesome homicides in which the severed body parts of missing sewer workers are turning up in the local water treatment plant. Not yet ready to conclude that there's some sort of "Jack-the-Ripper"-style psychopathic killer on the loose, and given the location of the disappearances as having most likely occurred in the sewers, Madison thinks that's a good place to start looking for clues, and, along with an amiable but unfortunate young Chicago City police patrolman named Kelly (Perry Lang) - and in the most genuinely suspenseful and scary moment in the entire film (which still puts me on the edge of my seat to this day) - discovers that the rash of disappearances and mysterious deaths are the work of a 36-foot-long monster alligator, grotesquely mutated into a ravenous man-eating behemoth super-beast after having fed on the aforementioned contaminated and discarded animal carcasses for the past 12 years.
Of course, no one believes David's story about Alligators In The Sewer (the film's concept was reportedly inspired by the famous urban legend), but a shocking sequence of events, namely indisputable photographic evidence procured from a sleazy local newspaper journalist at the involuntary cost of his own life, force everyone to confront the truth that a monster mutant alligator is loose in the Chicago City sewer system. Madison is joined in his pursuit of the killer reptile by herpetologist Dr. Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), who was actually the young girl who first purchased "Ramon" back in 1968 and who later becomes his love interest, and an arrogant big-game sport hunter named Colonel Brock (the late Henry Silva), who does get some of the most laugh-out-loud funniest, most self-knowing moments in the entire film.
As you can see, "Alligator" sounds a lot like "Jaws," though obviously on a much lower budget and is clearly an independent "B"-level horror picture through and through. Yet, despite its clear "B"-movie roots, it is not limited by those roots and it has a formidable cast of top performers, the best of which is the late Robert Forster, who despite Madison's unfortunate reputation as a partner-killer, also reportedly managed to improvise a very humorous running joke about his character's receding hairline into the movie, which Lewis Teague loved so much that he kept in the picture. In fact, according to Quentin Tarantino, it was Forster's performance in THIS movie (rather than some of the late actor's other, higher-profile roles) that got him interested in him in the first place and then later cast him in his third directorial feature "Jackie Brown" (1997), which earned Forster a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Robert Forster is one of the main reasons you come to see the movie.
As for the rest of the film and the titular "Alligator" itself, I still find myself genuinely on the edge of my seat during certain moments. Most people will forever be traumatized by one death scene in a backyard swimming pool (which has become widely familiar amongst genre buffs) an hour into the picture that does have a way of unsettling the viewer and lodging itself into one's memory. In that sense, "Ramon" is a formidable adversary with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Brought to life flawlessly through a combination of real-life alligators on miniature sets and a 36-foot-long full-scale animatronic puppet, "Ramon" has the distinction of being one scary reptile who will devour anything that gets in his path. And when "Ramon" attacks, the prosthetic make-up special effects used to portray the film's human deaths have the benefit of being both appropriately gruesome and shocking - but without being overly graphic and gory, and thus grossing out the audience rather than terrifying them.
"Alligator," alongside Joe Dante's "Piranha," deserve their places in the horror genre not just because they're "Jaws" clones, but because both pictures rise above their genre trappings by planting themselves firmly in two disparate genres, horror and satire, and finely tip-toeing the lines between both without venturing too far into either category and thus risk becoming farce ("Alligator" still has a hilarious early sequence at the police station involving a would-be suicide bomber that proudly displays the film's tongue-in-cheek bona-fides). That delicate balance - rather than simply playing it straight - is the key to the success of both films as celebrated camp cult classics of the man-vs.-nature animal-attack sub-genre of horror brought on by Steven Spielberg's mega-blockbuster hit "Jaws."
8/10
P. S.: Regretfully, "Alligator" was followed up 11 years later by a vastly inferior straight-to-video sequel, "Alligator II: The Mutation" (1991), which featured none of the characters, actors, or crew members from the original 1980 film.