In the immediate post-Jaws years, studios and producers across the globe scampered to make their own knockoffs by swapping out a great white shark for other giant critters. In my opinion, only two of the so-called Jaws rip-offs managed to rise about their crummy brethren to become worthwhile in their own right: Piranha and Alligator. Though the former is the more acclaimed, I have always preferred the latter.
Robert Forster, better known in later years for his Academy Award nominated role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, stars as a gruff Chicago police detective who suspects a giant mutated alligator is stalking the sewers. Were you expecting a different synopsis from a movie called Alligator?
Both Piranha and Alligator are blessed with screenplays from legendary independent director/writer John Sayles. His screenplay for Alligator is smart, snappy, with witty dialogue, plenty of gore, and characters that have (pardon the pun) some meat to chew on. Most crucially, Sayles and director Lewis Teague keep Alligator from taking itself too seriously. This is a quick-witted, sly and self-aware creature feature that pokes good-natured fun at it’s own outlandish concept.
Typical of Sayles, he subtly injects some social consciousness into a typical B-movie structure. This isn’t just a monster alligator; he’s grown to an enormous size by snacking on the bodies of dogs that were pumped with an illegal growth hormone by a pharmaceutical company, and then dumped into the sewers. When the alligator goes on his rampage, there’s a certain sense of justice from nature. He eats his way up the socio-economic ladder, starting in the sewers and working his way to the same corrupt scientists, businessmen, and politicians that caused his abnormal growth.
If this seems overly highfalutin for a giant reptile movie, never fear! There are plenty of scenes where the alligator chomps off legs, drags screaming cops through the dark sewers, and smashes apart a car with his ginormous tail, squashing to death an amoral CEO in the backseat. One particularly heart pounding scene involves a backyard swimming pool, a groups of boys, a diving board, and the alligator lying in wait in the water.
Alligator is really a terrific time thanks to a satiric screenplay, strong acting, and surprisingly good special effects (real alligators already look fake and plastic, so it’s hard to tell the authentic ones from the robotic). The film completely understands it’s assignment as a B-movie and provides the right balance between social commentary and gator-related carnage.
-T.Z.
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