Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28275 in VHS
• Released on: 1991-09-18
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Formats: Color, NTSC
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 92 minutes

Customer Reviews

A very good, little known film
"Alligator" is a very good little B movie that deserves a much wider audience than it has to date. I don't even remember it being commercially released; I've caught it several times on late night TV. But it's a tight, fast-paced, unpretentious film, generally well acted and with a few nifty surprises. At the start of the movie, a little girl buys a baby alligator from an old Seminole Indian in Florida. Dad isn't thrilled to have a baby gator in the house, and in a fit of pique one afternoon he flushes it down the toilet. Down goes the gator into the town's sewer system, which coincidentally is chock full of dead pets, mostly kidnapped cats and dogs, which a villainous vet has been injecting growth hormones into before dumping them into the sewer. Fast-forward 12 years later; the baby gator, still in the sewer after chowing down on animal cadavers bloated with growth hormones for the past dozen years, has grown into a behemoth with a ravenous appetite and an indiscriminate taste for anything it can chomp on, including humans. Yuck... body parts start turning up in the city's sewage system, including a couple of sewer workers, a newspaper reporter, and a policeman who went down into the sewer to investigate the shenanigans. His erstwhile partner, nicely played by Robert Forster, and a young biologist (who else but the little girl now grown up?) team up to try to find out what's going on. But the alligator is getting kind of bored stuck in the sewer, and one hot night it blasts itself through a concrete sidewalk in the middle of a stickball game, and the chase is on as the gator turns up in dark alleys, a swimming pool, and the town lake, before indecorously crashing the villainous vet's wedding reception and chomping on the guests. The movie jolts along to a suitably explosive ending and it's great fun from beginning to end. "Alligator" spawned an absolutely dreadful sequel which has nothing to do with the original; the people who made the first "Alligator" knew better than to mess with a good thing. It's a very good, modest, low-budget film that proves again that sometimes small is best after all.

Forget LAKE PLACID!
Following his success with Piranha, screenwriter John Sayles added another tounge-in-cheek B-movie to his resume with Lewis Teauge's highly-underrated giant monster flick, "Alligator". This one has a baby alligator that was flushed down the toilet by its owners and ends up devouring discarded test animals. As a result, it grows to be inhumanly big and ends up feeding on anything and anyone that gets in its way. Robert Forester's overworked homicide cop is the hero of the story as he tries to convince the skeptical press and his superiors that the dismembered body parts floating around in the sewer aren't the work of any ordinary killer. Another childhood favorite of mine, "Alligator" is an old-fashioned fun creature feature from a forgotten time when CGI was still a work in progress. It's a real shame they don't make them like this anymore.

Urban Jaws
A baby alligator named Ramon is flushed down the toilet of a suburban Chicago home and into the sewers. 12 years go by and Ramon has grown into a very large ( 30 feet long ) ravenous monster ,thanks to the illegal dumping of toxic waste into the sewers by a pharmaceutical company .
When it turns its attentions to gobbling up humans action is needed and the intrepid pair of policeman David Madison ( Robert Forster) and herpetologist Dr Kendall (Robin Piker) descend into the sewers to track and destroy the beast .She is particularly absorbed in the case since it was her pet ,before her Dad disposed of it down the sewers
There are lots of gory deaths and the atmospheric scenes in the strom drains evoke pleasant memories of the classic 50's ant movie Them .The basic scenario follows the template set by Jaws very closely -official coverups and City Hall corruption ,the cop who knows there is a problem and the final confrontation .
John Sayles contributes a sharp script with some digs at corporate corruption ,there are excellent performance especially from Henry Silva who goes just abou then right amount over the top as a big game hunter using his jungle honed skills in a new subterranean hunting ground and -essential in a movie like this -Ramon looks pretty good and suitably scary

Intelligent and lively B movie creature feature with lots to recommend it