I had planned to hit the local multiplex a second time this past weekend, but a couple other things came up, and I opted to stay home instead. I had planned to see The Fall, a movie where the reviews said it was basically a very well-made B-movie sort of movie. There’s something to be said for a movie like that, one that knows basically what it is and does it well. Granted, I haven’t seen The Fall myself so I can’t say whether or not I liked it, but I can always track down a similar sort of movie, and maybe knock off something from my Fill-In Filmography while I am at it.
Hey, the giant gator movie Alligator is on AMC+…
A young girl on a family vacation adopts a baby alligator at a gator farm. Her father has issues with animals, and, after the family returned to the city they call home, flushes it down the toilet. Years pass, and the gator has grown up to massive size in the city’s sewer system thanks to a corporate lab’s test animal disposal methods of dumping animals injected with a growth hormone into said sewers. The end result is an alligator with a bulletproof hide, an insatiable appetite, and after snacking on one of the lab’s stooges and a journalist looking around the sewers, a taste for human flesh.
Enter world-weary cop David Madison (Robert Forster), a man with a reputation for losing partners. He’ll work with the young girl from the opening, Marissa Kendall (Robin Riker), now an adult reptile specialist. Madison lost yet another partner to the gator, and Kendall knows how alligators work. But now there are other problems. The rich guy behind the research company is blocking things, the mayor is basically his lacky, and no one really knows how to hunt a giant alligator. That becomes especially true when big game hunter Colonel Brock (Henry Silva) shows up, and no one seems much interested in what either Madison or Kendall have to say. Oh, and the gator leaves the sewers and starts wandering around the city, hiding in any body of water he can find, and then popping up when people least expect it. Can anyone stop this giant alligator that shrugs off gunshots and can apparently hide anywhere in town?
I actually had a lot of fun with this one. Considering it was probably yet another Jaws knock-off, the movie actually does two things that set it apart. For one thing, it’s got a very dark sense of humor. For another, Robert Forster does a really good job with a good script to back him up, one where he and his character have some interesting quirks that usually sets off the better protagonists in movies like this one. But the dark humor thing is really prominent. This is a movie where a couple kids in pirate costumes don’t notice the gator sitting in the bottom of the family pool until after they drop their scared kid brother into said pool. Silva’s big game hunter is both slimy and ridiculous at the same time, like a character who would be the hero in another, older movie, but here seems to be spending more time flirting with female reporters and treating local African Americans like they’re the natives of the African plains he is presumably more used to hunting with.
Oh, and of course the gator crashes a high society wedding where a lot of people responsible for its growth and rampage all happen to be. This isn’t the sort of movie that wins awards or does anything particularly revolutionary. It’s just the sort of movie that basically knows what it is, does it well, and left me entertained. Maybe I missed The Fall, but I sure did see the Alligator.
Grade: B+
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