Review of Alligator (1980) by R.c. K — 18 Sep 2007

This review may ramble, may run longer than usual---who knows, but the reason for any of it is that I. Love. This. Movie.

Though I'm known to be near-incapable of making a simple list of favourite movies, I usually take the simple route--the movies I've seen a hundred thousand times and never got sick of in my youth, and would pull off the shelve when bored to just watch and watch and watch and watch. A lot of the list is not unusual for my age; Transformers: the Movie is, while usually more popular with males who have a few years on me, not unbelievable for a child of the 80s. Gremlins, while many my age were scared to death of it in their youth, is also not surprising--and few would begrudge me Aliens, an action movie by James Cameron, which makes it eminently watchable. Ghostbusters, too, was an extraordinarily popular movie, and it's no surprise how often I saw it.

But, there are a few oddities throughout; movies most people couldn't recall if they had perfect memories, for so few have seen them. Many of these have been sitting on my DVD wishlist for ages--often because they've never recieved a decent DVD release--if any release at all.

Alligator is one of these movies, and it was only released today (or yesterday, if you will, since it's past midnight by a fair bit)--and oh boy was I ever excited. I've watched this movie a million times, much like The Monster Squad--another long-awaited favourite. But this movie, for all that I know there are plenty of others who have seen it, is one of the ones I can mention to people and 99% of the time they have no idea what I'm talking about, though of course anyone can easily assemble an idea from the title and age of it.

Watching this was an avalanche of nostalgia, mixed with various notes of surprise and discovery, as things that were unclear before became clear now.

Movies like this are absolutely ingrained on my brain, even though many of these I have not seen in some years now, on occasion up to ten years since my last viewing, and there is a comfortable familiarity as they unfold in that same old fashion, never boring me, but revealing those events I know are inevitable, waiting excitedly for those few exceptional moments that always stuck out. It should be noted that this movie is one I used to watch on VHS, a copy on VHS, an old copy, and it never had a large budget in the first place, and a ton of it takes place in a sewer.

To give a rough idea of the plot, which is hardly surprising overall, a family buys a baby alligator in Florida, and in a fit of rage the father eventually flushes it down the toilet, and so we populate the sewer with one of the most tenacious urban legends--the alligator in the city sewer. We are then dealing with--12 years later--an alligator which has been feeding on under-the-table illegal animal experiments, infused with growth hormones which lead it to an unimaginable size, probably thirty feet long at the least, and we are dealing with it in the hands of tired, beaten down cop David Madison, who comes from a nasty past on the force and a reputation to go with it, contending with a snotty, arrogant dirt-digging reporter and a mayor who has ties to the man responsible for the illegal experiments.

It sounds very ridiculous on the surface--and I'm well aware of that, but I first saw this at age 9 or 10, and have always had a tendency to suspend my disbelief beyond all reason when it comes to a movie like this. One of the reasons I like to review movies is to give a viewpoint I think is often sorely lacking, though I suppose it's a viewpoint that's lacking in viewers in the first place--the viewpoint I myself hold. When a movie has a concept, plot or central conceit I stand behind, I'm willing to accept some wiggle room on most fronts--things like biology, some degree of acting, effects especially and so on, because I realize how rare it is for these to come around in the first place, and when you factor in the kind of money given to a film of this nature, well, if you want to see a giant rampaging alligator, you're going to have to accept that it isn't going to be made into a film by Martin Scorsese and starring De Niro and Harvey Keitel. This brings me into conflict with most major reviewers--Ebert's completely random and seemingly illogical choices sometimes fit with mine, and Maltin's preference for classics and non-genre films (with a special loathing for most horror, probably the most maligned genre) left me exasperated in my youth. Inevitably, I would flip through my father's copy of Leonard Maltin's film guide, looking up some obscure title I had just seen, or a sequel, or an idea just to see if it existed. Most of the time I would find myself looking at a review that began "BOMB" or "2 Stars" or, if I was lucky, "2 and a Half Stars." I ignored these ratings, because I knew I'd love C.H.U.D. anyway (and I did, even if I didn't see it until a good 10-15 years after I first decided I wanted to see it).

I don't watch these with a sneering, cynical, jaded eye and laugh at how 'bad' they are, nor do I ignore their flaws, nor do I (obviously) simply write them off for their genre, content, obsession with gore, or budgetary--and thus associated--limitations. I love horror from the eighties for reasons I absolutely cannot easily pin down. I love seeing a monstrous alligator destroy a wedding, but I care about the characters, as two dimensional as they may or may not be, and I actually often enjoyed the plot outside the monstrous elements. It's a viewpoint that never appears in reviews, and one that I rarely even find mutually present in other "normal" viewers. But, here I am.

That said, this film is a curious exception.

Leonard Maltin rated it three stars. This is nearly unheard of in my childhood film repertoire, and when I first read it, I remember a jolt of fist-pumping vindication--he at least got one of them! The entire review was stapled to a wall somewhere in my brain, including the phrase "Dir: Lewis Teague" which popped into my head as soon as his name showed onscreen as I watched the DVD excitedly. I remembered instantly pausing the VHS copy when the credits for "John Sayles" as writer and "John Sayles and Frank Ray Perilli" for story came up, because I'd seen a book in a used bookstore years ago which bore the image of an alligator and I was convinced was the basis of the movie or at least an adaptation--and adaptations were completely ok with me, because for years my only experience of Alien was Alan Dean Foster's adaptation, a book I read literally in half.

Re-watching with my now more critical eye--though one that still doesn't judge these films harshly in the least--I saw that Maltin was right in this. The way this kind of concept, or horror in general, was approached in the eighties is my favourite. It's almost the approach to film in general in that decade; there's a large dose of humour, but it's never self-referential--though it may give you a nudge and a wink--or over-the-top, and the plot is carried along outside it. Scares are for scaring, jokes are for joking. You don't try and completely combine the two; you learn to switch back and forth, and you make the jokes a part of the characters so that they don't pull you out of the moment. Robert Forster, who plays David Madison, apparently brought a lot of the humour about male pattern baldness in himself. But when it comes up--a number of times--there is no loud music, reaction, or pause to say "HEY, THIS IS A JOKE." It's just some pet shop owner harassing him for it when he's in there buying a dog already. We don't get the idea that he's in a pet shop simply so someone can make this joke, but that the joke happens naturally in this environment.

I just feel that in this John Sayles--who wrote, directed and edited the rather acclaimed Lone Star, amongst other things--and Teague, well, "got it." When the alligator leaves remains of someone somewhere, it doesn't feel like an exercise in gross-out, even if that's what it was. I'd say subtle, but it's gory enough that that isn't the right word; nor is low-key, but it's something in that general vein. While there may be much ado about the effect itself, it never seems a scene is centered around it, at least not to go, "Hey, look at this badass gory stump!" bur rather, "Hey, isn't this kind of gross and disturbing? Doesn't this bring the threat a little closer to the surface, when you can see what the alligator actually does to someone?".

And so we are led further into scenes of disturbing and scary natures; almost anyone who has seen this movie inevitably reminisces with me about "the pool scene." This scene is absolutely terrifying, especially to a child, and I'm not toing to ruin the joy of it by explaining any further what occurs within it--suffice to say, if it doesn't freak you out, you are a boring cynicist or inhuman.

The other scene that inevitably comes up I've already made reference to--a wedding which is crashed by the alligator. This is the kind of wedding crasher I like to see. I love the havoc wrought by this monstrous beast, who is simply trying to make its way in a world that really isn't built for it. The appearance does not feel like an excuse for chaos, as it's a wedding established by relevance to characters in the movie, and is geographically located between destinations for the beast, which is a further example of how well-crafted this movie is, despite the absurd concept. We address the alligator as a living animal, because alligators are real, and then we point out how insane an alligator this size is--it simply doesn't happen in the real world, but the characters, even Robin Riker as herpetologist Marisa Kendall, accept it when faced with visual proof. We get a cursory, not entirely unacceptable explanation with illegal hormone experiments, achieving the right balance between 'acceptable believability' and 'I have no idea, so I'm not going to tell you,' without derailing things with excessive explanation or going so far that you no longer understand why they did this (perfect example: the abhorrent Deep Blue Sea: "We made their brains bigger. As a side effect, they got smarter." What on earth? That is one of the worst lines of dialogue ever written--nevermind that somehow a larger brain allows an animal to defy its own physiology in that movie. If I'm smarter, can I bend my knees backwards? That would be awesome!).

And, on the note of Riker, and to move back to Forster--there's a decent skill, craft and honesty to all the performances here--which also include those of Henry Silva, Sidney Lassick and Michael V. Gazzo--which support the smart plotting, writing, editing and general craft exhibited here that make it so darn successful.

A quick skim through reviews of this movie showed the same sigh-inducing responses I'm used to--one person railing against the film for demonizing alligators (which it, if anything, it goes against, and instead demonizes greedy humans) and everyone else telling that person it's an "intentionally cheesy, tongue-in-cheek b-movie." It raises my hackles ever-so-slightly every time I see someone malign a film I love like this with such terms--while tongue-in-cheek is definitely true, and b-movie is factually true, cheesy (especially intentionally!) is far from the truth. It seems this adjective is quickly becoming meaningless; "cheesy" now refers to "I don't want anyone to know I enjoy this movie, so I will talk down about it," or "this film only had so much money and did what they could, but I refuse to acknowledge the problems forced on a production by those limitations." It's not a cheesy movie if you are willing to sit back and relax and just enjoy it. But, I think modern horror in the hands of jerks like Wes Craven and his idiot Scream have ruined that ability--making it all about finding the flaws, trivia, jokes, humour and cynical looks down the nose.

It's a shame, really, but I'll keep enjoying these, and more's the pity for those that can't see the joy.

On a final few notes: as I first saw Marisa in her lab again, I was suddenly reminded that this was the movie that taught me the word "herpetologist" and set me on a path of interest in the field for many years, which was a bit shocking. I also was finally able to make out the graffiti Maltin references in his review--"Harry Lime Lives." It's still meaningless to me, but I just read in IMDb's trivia that it refers to The Third Man, which is a part of my ridiculously long waiting list of movies to watch. The most exciting revelation was a scare I had never seen before which was intensely creepy and reminded me of Carpenter's much-lauded work on Halloween, especially one scene notorious for cinematographer Dean Cundey's influential effect on it.

I must also applaud Lion's Gate for this release--a very clear picture for a low budget, unappreciated 27 year old movie--and an actual commentary (Teague and Forster) as well as a newly recorded interview with the very engaging John Sayles. I'd like to get a hold of Alligator II: the Mutation, but, as the title implies, it is not so sublime an experience--even as much as I enjoy it, I can admit that.

NOTE: I rate movies on intrinsic value, not comparative value. Just because I rate this five stars and Spartacus three and a half does not mean I think this film is objectively "better"--it simply means that, for me, it "works" better as a whole.