Entry #12: Alligator

Release Date: July 1980
Budget: $1,500,000

As you may have read in Entry #11, Alligator is a bonus entry to take the place of all Bill Cosby related contestants.  About a month ago, a friend (who is a die hard Florida Gators fan) regaled me with a story of a gigantic animatronic alligator that was donated to the University of Florida by a movie director as a tax write-off.  The alligator was the star of bad horror movie trying to ride the coattails of Jaws.  The original plan was use the alligator in a series of movies, but the alligator failed on the set and the movie failed at the box office, so the gigantic prop was dumped on the University of Florida to use as a mascot at football games.  Unfortunately, the alligator was so glitchy that it made only one appearance for the university, unceremoniously driven out on the field atop a modified golf cart much to the displeasure of the student section who bombarded the gator with both ridicule and beer glasses.

With such a wonderful back story, I took a shot and bought Alligator on a whim.  It's one of those dvds that comes with Korean packaging and you have to change the language to English and turn off subtitles, which should tell you a lot.  Fortunately or unfortunately for Alligator, it falls into a gigantic middle ground of movies that are neither very good nor extremely terrible: unfortunate in that probably killed a few careers and fortunate in that it won't win in my little competition.  The animatronic alligator story was just too interesting to let this one pass without a viewing.

Because I know you won't be watching this, I'll sum it up for you.  A little girl goes to Florida on vacation with her family and sees a gator wrestling show.  She buys a baby alligator and brings it back to Chicago, where her dad proceeds to flush it down the toilet to get it out of the house.  Fortunately for the plot line, a sinister corporation is doing genetic testing on dogs at the same time and dumping the carcasses into the sewer.  Baby alligator, named "Ramon" by the little girl, feeds on the genetically mutated dead dogs, grows huge, wreaks havoc on the city.  I just saved you one hour and 27 minutes.

Some things that made me chuckle in Alligator:

•  the tension filled music leading up to Ramon's attacks seem to be a direct rip-off of the Jaws music, but maybe with the notes reversed similar to the way Vanilla Ice so adeptly rearranged Under Pressure;
• THE POLICE CHIEF YELLS EVERY SINGLE LINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!;
• This 36 foot alligator seems to move about downtown Chicago without being seen, and this was before people had their faces stuck to their phones;
• The final scene (after Forster blows Ramon to alligator hell) is back in the sewer to show another baby alligator flushed down the toilet, thus setting up the sequel that never happened because Ramon is now somewhere in a University of Florida maintenance shed covered with tarps and old paint cans. 

Alligator falls short in several categories (and by "falls short", I mean "succeeds" in the context of this blog): First, Robert Forster, as our hero David Madison, along with his go-to reptile guru Melissa Kendall, played by Robin Riker, are actually good actors and since they are in most scenes, the bulk of the movie isn't painful to watch as has been the case for most of the first 11 entries.  Second, the movie is reasonably well filmed save for the parts where the alligator is clearly acting up and the violence just gets clunky.  There is a scene in which the swat team invades the sewer to try to find Ramon that appeared so real that neighbors watching apparently called it in trying to figure out what the threat was.  I can guarantee you no such calls were made surrounding the set of Troll 2.  Finally, the story is compelling enough that I actually found myself interested to see how things played out and rooting for Madison and Kendall.  That... has happened once in this blog and it was the beautiful romance, Gigli.

I give this the same rating and general summary as Gigl, a big fat ZERO.  Congrats, Alligator.  It's not good, but it doesn't belong on this blog.  In fact, if I was sick in bed on a Wednesday, I would definitely choose Alligator over the sixth hour of Today if I was flipping through channels.