Looking Back at ALLIGATOR: A Ginormous Slice of 80s Fun

In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people watched the original Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future, but video rental stores had their own heroes, and one of them was an anonymous, gargantuan alligator whose two-part series may not have been a distinguished work of art, yet perfectly fulfilled its promise of providing solid entertainment.

Alligator is not a niche production known exclusively to connoisseurs of bad cinema. At one time, it was practically a staple of every self-respecting rental store’s collection. The tape with the first part begins rather surprisingly, not with a trailer, but with an overlong summary of the second part pretending to be a trailer… Evidently no one suffered from spoilerophobia at the time.

The film itself, meanwhile, deals with two threads. On the one hand, there is an alligator flushed down the toilet, mutating under the influence of radioactive animal carcasses discarded by an evil corporation; on the other, there is an extensive story about… the baldness of the main character. The hair of the nearly forty-year-old Robert Forster was indeed thinning in a rather unusual shape, and perhaps rightly the filmmakers decided to draw attention to it themselves in a humorous way.

Forster here is, in turn, a somewhat more combative and swaggering version of Sheriff Frank Truman, whom he portrayed recently in the third season of Twin Peaks. His charisma was appreciated by Quentin Tarantino, who cast him in Jackie Brown as Max Cherry and mentioned in one interview that he modeled that character precisely on the protagonist of Alligator.

The wild, twelve-meter reptile does what one would expect from a predator, but after all it is not his fault that human ignorance led him to the bottom of the sewer and that his diet consisted mainly of mutagenic dog corpses. For me, however, the true villain and true predator here is the hunter (Henry Silva) with his slippery manner. He greets the lady doctor with the contemptuous Lizard girl, and begins giving an interview with: You are beautiful, but we came here to talk about alligators.

When he finally ends up in the mechanical jaws (for those were still the beautiful times when even such cheap films were made using practical special effects), one feels like high-fiving the ruthless beast.

The screenplay by John Sayles is painfully stale. Courtship in his vision looks like this: – When I met you, I thought you were a girl to pick up. – You were mistaken. – Shall we go to dinner? – Yes. There would be nothing strange about this – after all, in the 1980s there were plenty of similar stories – were it not for the fact that we are dealing with a director known today for the Independent Spirit Award–nominated The Secret of Roan Inish and two Academy Award nominations (for the screenplays to Matewan and Lone Star).

On the other hand, perhaps I should not be surprised; after all, I have never seen any difficulty in watching productions by Sam Firstenberg, Federico Fellini, Lloyd Kaufman, and Krzysztof Kieslowski one after another.

The moments with the highest ludic value are, of course, those in which the alligator enters the action. The blood may not gush left and right, but the desperate attempts to make the clumsily moving mechanism (which, incidentally, constantly broke down on set) look menacing can bring one to tears with laughter… because surely none of you have any doubt that the film by Lewis Teague (later the director, among others, of Cujo and The Jewel of the Nile) is meant to entertain, not to frighten.

A decade later, the fashion for sequels gathered momentum. Subsequent installments of many horror films sold surprisingly well, so someone came up with the idea of reviving the killer alligator after eleven years of rest. The idea guiding the return did not contain an ounce of originality—it was supposed to be faster, louder, and more explosive, which makes Alligator II: The Mutation clearly worse than the original, if we approach the art of filmmaking seriously, and indisputably better if we are looking for intentionally tacky entertainment.

Precisely every character has been copied from a template. There is the standard lone cop who defies his superior’s orders; there is the evil-to-the-core rich man concealing the existence of the threat in the name of his own interests; there is the not very bright captain’s daughter in love with a young policeman and her furiously jealous father; and even the typical Latino with a switchblade. One can be outraged by all this, but I will not hide that it gave me great pleasure, because after all it was precisely such experiences that I expected when reaching for this series.

The dialogues, however, have the greatest power. For example, the police officer tries to calm the crying boy, Felipe, with the words: Have some gum and calm down; and two adult men use in an argument such phrases as: Does your mommy know you still wet your panties? Of course, there could not be a lack of a few lines of extremely dreadful flirting.

The aforementioned young policeman at one point says: Are your pants very tight? Has no one ever told you that you have a pretty backside, but this cannot compare with the line of the slimy villain: You are a child. Stay with me, and I will make a woman out of you. No one talks like that, no one!

Yet it is precisely this exaggeration, this theatricality at the level of a school drama club, that makes it hard to take one’s eyes off The Mutation, because the thought keeps knocking around in one’s head: What else will they come up with…

And they come up with a lot. The words in the original soundtrack are accompanied by numerous gags—charred meat served to a tardy husband, a knife throw faster than a kick by Bruce Lee, or a television crew with a gigantic camera and additional lighting moving silently, sneaking unnoticed into a public restroom to film an attempt to rescue an officer glued to the toilet seat.

Alligator II is worse in every respect than the first part, and thus in the perverse world of lovers of B movies it is heaven-sent and now, years after the first viewing, I watched it with even greater fascination. It is best, however, to gather friends and organize a mini-marathon, because such films are perfect material for a well-spent Friday evening.