What do you get when you put a pet baby alligator and a bunch of genetically-engineered rats in a sewer?
Alligator!!!
Body parts keep showing up and it falls to policeman David Madison (Robert Forster) and gator expert Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker) to find the culprit (Alligator!!!).
I have a bad habit of looking at the least celebrated corners of pop culture, and that includes filmographies
I have not seen any of John Sayles’ films but I have read multiple books and interviews with him. He has a career path that I envy.
Since his early days he has jumped between his own projects and writing genre pictures. His better known credits in this capacity are Joe Dante’s Piranha and Ron Howard’s Apollo13.
1980’s Alligator is pretty significant - it was an early directorial credit for genre helmer Lewis Teague (Cujo), inspired Quentin Tarantino to cast leading man Robert Forster in JACKIE BROWN (earning him an Oscar nomination) and helped pay for John Sayles’ directorial debut Return of the Secaucus Seven.
As a monster movie, Alligator is pretty fun.
While the movie had a modest budget, it has pretty solid sense of scope, and the effects are serviceable.
Accomplished by a real gator on miniature sets, an animatronic and POV shots, they may not always work but there is something weirdly entertaining to watching a real alligator interacting with toy cars on a model street. It also helps that the creature - in its various forms - is a physical entity, rather than a mass of pixels.
While the effects are fine, there are a lot of moments of confused editing which detract from the suspense. The animatronic cannot do much so there is a lot of cutting around it. The tail seems to swing into frame out of the wrong direction multiple times.
The two elements that I really liked were Robert Forster’s performance and the third act.
While the cast are fine, they all feel of a piece with the movie’s tone - they feel like characters in a monster movie. Forster feels like an ordinary guy.
The character is based on a familiar cliche - the veteran cop struggling with a past failure - but Forster natural understatement shaves off any potential cheese. I used to find him a little one-note, but in the last couple of years I have really come around to his performance style.
There is something so grounded, and un-affected about his performance that really connects with me. He underplays the character’s trauma, makes fun of his baldness and comes across as a professional trying to deal with a ridiculous situation. It is a cliche, but he feels like a guy you could meet on the street.
John Sayles' script is really good at finding ways to give this monster story some more meat (no pun intended), particularly in terms of how it manages to work in a subplot about corrupt city politics and corporate greed without feeling contrived.
Early on, it turns out that the city's milquetoast mayor is in bed with the corporation responsible for super-sizing the gator. This puts the brakes on Madison's investigation, forcing him to go it alone in hunting down the deadly animal. It is not as vicious as RoboCop (and feels like a polish of the Mayor from Jaws), but it adds to the world-building, and another layer of jeopardy to the film.
The highlight of the movie is the ending - the gator attacks a wedding at Slade’s mansion. If you are angry at the 1%, this scene is very therapeutic. It is also a blackly comic punchline to the movie's takedown of the mega-rich.
This sequence is followed by Madison's final showdown with the Gator. While he tries to escape, an unknowing driver stops her car on top of the manhole cover he is planning to escape through.
Overall, Alligator is a really enjoyable creature feature, with a strong script and a great lead performance.
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