Rish's Reviews
I hadn't seen Alligator since I was a kid, on ABC TV. One scene, in which a child is forced to walk the plank (the diving board) into a dark swimming pool where a black shape moves at the bottom disturbed me more than 90% of the movie scares I ever saw, including anything from Jaws. I didn't know if it would hold up or not, especially in light of how jaded I've become, but I recently decided to give it another viewing.
Based on another popular urban legend, Alligator tells the tale of a scaly pet flushed down a city toilet. Instead of meeting death, it feeds on dog corpses used for medical experiments, and grows to monstrous proportion in the city sewers. When folks start winding up as Purina Gator Chow, our heroes investigate.
It starred Robert Forster, a pretty girl (Robin Riker), and the guy who played Pantangeli in The Godfather Part II. There's a piece of crap reporter character, messing things up, as there often is. He dies horribly, but I still think he got off lucky. The filmmakers make good use of the dark, enclosed spaces of the sewers, and fashioned a formidable movie monster. They used a fake alligator some of the time, and at other times, a real (baby) one among miniatures. They did a good job on the puppet/mechanical gator, and it looks pretty real.
The film was not bad. It wasn't great, but it was alright, and I'd recommend it. As I said of Piranha, also written by Sayles, this has too good a script for the movie it is. The characters, motivations, and dialogue are all really good. But then, why shouldn't Horror be well-written? Why shouldn't B-movies have good screenplays? Writers have to start somewhere, right?
Alligator wasn't scary, but it has an air of nostalgia to it (the Eighties are my favourite decade), and there's that swimming pool scene that's still pretty brave, especially in today's P.C. times.