Alligator (1980) Review

WEEK 4: WHAT A CROC 

Alligator (1980) Review

Welcome to a brand-new week of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema! A brand-new week means a brand-new theme, and this week’s theme is alligators and crocodilians. In my search for giant reptile films, I discovered there are a great number—an overabundance, perhaps—of movies that feature crocodiles, but very few that feature alligators. While the difference between the two species isn’t tremendous, it’s nice to see something different, and that’s one of the reasons Alligator initially stood out to me.

Alligator starts out at a wildlife sanctuary, with an animal handler stepping carefully through an alligator exhibit, and a crowd of people watching. Within the first few seconds of the movie, an alligator attacks the trainer in a bloody, thrashing ambush, terrifying spectators, who at first think it’s staged. It’s an effective way to open the movie; my attention was grabbed immediately, and there’s never a question about how dangerous the gators really are. A little girl gets a baby alligator as a pet from the sanctuary, but her dad doesn’t want her to have it, so he flushes it down the toilet. There’s a weird spiral camera effect for whatever reason as the baby goes down the tubes, and then it ends up in the sewers (a la the well-known urban legend). The movie skips ahead over a decade, and introduces a cop who’s down on his luck. He runs into a shady pet store owner, who we soon find out supplies stolen dogs for a local pharmaceutical company that’s doing genetic testing. The store owner disposes of their contaminated dead dogs by dumping them in the sewers, where the gator feeds on them, and grows to an immense size. The alligator eats him, and his severed limb is later found. The cop, who works homicide, is puzzled, and soon finds himself in the sewers, running from an alligator twice as long as a car, with an insatiable appetite.

The two strongest parts of Alligator are its original concept and starring creature. The gator is kept hidden in the first part of the film, but is slowly revealed more and more with each scene it’s in. At first, it seems like the special effects are going to be very limited and of poor quality (which, as I’m sure is already evident from previous reviews, can be quite common with these sorts of creature features) but the alligator doesn’t look terrible, and there are some clever techniques utilized, including an adult alligator crawling through a miniaturized set (less obvious than it sounds), an animatronic head, and a full-body animatronic, though the latter is shown only in very brief glimpses, probably because it’s the least convincing. The alligator, though shown sufficiently, is still used sparingly, and to maximum effect. There are a couple pretty creative kills in this movie, and while the R-rating might not be used to the full potential, there’s no shortage of blood and severed limbs. Unfortunately, the alligator still isn’t technically the “star” of this film.

The main character is not the worst I’ve seen for a gator or croc film, but he’s not particularly compelling, and his acting is pretty laughably bad when it comes to the intense scenes where he’s supposed to be scared. There’s a scene where he goes into the sewer with a fellow police officer, and a really lame false scare is used, but then a minute later, it’s followed up with an effective surprise reveal of the gator. They get attacked, and no one believes the cop afterwards, but his emotional levels never seem to change beyond mildly annoyed the entire movie. The best character in the film, hands down, is the police captain. He sounds like he has gravel in his voice box, sports an epic moustache, is bald, and his eyebrows are as bushy as Eugene Levy’s. There’s also an annoying reporter who’s trailing the cop and his homicide case, as well as a big-game hunter who pursues the gator, but they both soon become tasty morsels for the beast.

Just like the speed of an alligator on land, this movie often moves at a pretty slow pace. While the alligator scenes are all mostly great, there are many other scenes without it that drag the movie down. There’s a really bizarre scene in the police precinct where a “suicide bomber” comes in and says he’s going to kill everyone by blowing them up, and there’s some confusion (both for the characters and the audience) as to whether he’s joking or being serious. He reveals a countdown clock strapped to his chest, and he says the radio told him to blow them up. They restrain him, stop the clock seconds before it’s going to “explode” and find out it’s just a radio. It’s an extremely random scene, with zero tension, and I really don’t get the point of it. It’s just this odd scene that has no reason to be in the movie, and it’s not the only one.

There are several boring, talky scenes that should have been removed to improve the pacing. Ultimately, this movie suffers from being too much like Jaws. As original as the concept for the killer alligator is, there are too many plot points pulled straight out of Jaws, from the main character being a police officer, to him teaming up with an expert on gators (instead of sharks); no one in town initially believes him; a big group of people try to hunt down the creature and fail; etc. There’s an over-reliance on POV shots in the first act, but it’s toned down as the gator is shown more. Admittedly, there are a few clever nods to Jaws, such as when the cop is reading a book about alligators. It just would have been nice if the filmmakers took a more original approach with the execution of an otherwise promising concept.

Alligator is a pretty decent killer animal film. It’s not one of the best, as it does suffer from ripping off Jaws in many ways, but it has a sense of humour, while also trying to be scary and exciting. A lot of the tension falls flat, and the characters are mostly bland, however the gator delivers, and the special effects, though a little dated, hold up pretty well. The whole movie is on YouTube, so I would say give this one a shot.