Alligator

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🎙️ EPISODE 380: 11.04.21 If you think I feel like writing a review for 1980's monster animal / horror "definitely not a Jaws rip-off" Alligator, well I have bad news for you: You might be a redneck. JK. I'll write the review. Sure, I will. My reviews are great and everyone loves reading them. I don't wake up every morning wondering why the hell I do all this. Haha, that would be CRAZY. And I am not crazy. I am sane. I am just a man who likes watching Neil Breen movies on his $49 Kindle Fire on the gym stair-master. Nothing to see here. Carry on.

This is one of the dumber movies I've seen in awhile and that's saying something. It's funny how you could just get away with making something mainstream like this that was just horribly stupid from a general storytelling perspective. The funniest thing (and there are many funny things) about this movie is probably how they are constantly looking for this 40-foot alligator that some how sneaks away after every kill no matter how many people are around including the National Guard. I think the thing about Jaws is that yeah a shark has the entire fucking ocean to chill/hide in. A massive science freak gator in Chicago? You sort of lose that element from the very beginning.

This is the beginning of something I'm calling #GatorVsCrocVember wherein I will review (and then rank) the following movies every Thursday in the month of November 2021: Alligator (1990) – today, then Alligator II: The Mutation (1990), Tobe Hooper's Crocodile (2000), and Crocodile 2: Death Swamp (2002). Forget the fact that there are two other movies named Crocodile (1980 and 1996); the latter is a South Korean movie that isn't even about crocs! (Also — duh — there's a bunch of other interesting gator/croc flicks out there with different names, like the Lake Placid movies and this one somehow also directed by Tobe Hooper from 1978 that looks intriguing. You know, come to think of it, I kinda have to review that one. I'm slowly doing a Tobe Hooper Director Focus without even realizing it. Maybe I'll do a #CrocCember2Remember(Because I Forget These Croc Movies in November) Week next month? What am I doing with my life?)

Alligator is about a young girl from Chicago who goes on vacation to Florida, sees an alligator kill a trainer during a demonstration at an alligator show, decides that she wants one as a pet because of this (?), her parents buy her one, but her dad throws it down the toilet because he hates her mother because she has early onset dementia. Fast-forward 12 years and she's the country's leading herpetologist... who also happens to have great tits...


Her baby alligator has been living in the Chicago sewers all this time, eating the corpses of local dogs who have been stolen by a crooked pet store owner and experimented on with hormone drugs at a nearby pharmaceutical testing facility. These dogs all grow many times their original size (because of hormone) and this in turn leads the gator to become a giant gator because science. The crooked pet store owner / dognapper is also in charge of dumping the bodies of the dead dogs in the sewer once the pharma scientist is done with them. He's the second human the alligator kills (after a random construction worker). Did you know being a construction worker is 10x more deadly than being a cop? Just saying. That's neither here nor there.

The presumptive 'villains' in this are of course the head of the pharma co., a decrepid, balding, Monopoly ass man looking guy who can't act, as well as (much later, without a speck of setup) The Mayor of Chicago and the super alligator who is just a super alligator, an indiscriminate killing machine, ends up getting revenge (?) on both of them at a wedding...


Meanwhile, down-on-his-luck homocide detective Robert Forster is hot on this gator's trails, well when he isn't falling in love with large-breasted lady scientists and playing with alligator toys...


Do you think they ever connect the dots that the scientist's pet alligator is this very same killer alligator? Well, no, they do not. Is there a completely random sequence early in the movie where I guy tries to do a "suicide by cop" by pretending a radio is a bomb, and then said 'bomb' is later used by Forster to create a REAL FULLY FUNCTIONAL TIME-BOMB at the end of the film which ultimately kills the gator? Why yes there is...


?!?!?! It's all incredibly dumb. But I can't say it isn't dumb fun, because it is. The creature design is nice, they spare no expense with the gruesome killings (they even kill a random small child!) and Forster in this leading role IS good in that solemn, deadpan, "strong but silent" type way. This is legit one of the worst screenplays¹ I've come across in awhile (and — again — I'm currently watching EVERY SINGLE NEIL BREEN movie), but I'm really psyched to see what they cooked up in the ten years between this and its sequel. They had TEN YEARS so I am sure that it will be good.

1. I didn't even get to mention the Big Game Hunter character, the film's true villain perhaps. Although, I guess "get to" and "didn't want to" are interchangeable in this case. [BACK]

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⫷ EPISODE 379 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 381 ⫸

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