Today we’re going way back to one of the earlier tapes in my collection.
The film today is Alligator, ranking third in the late 70s/80s monster movie pantheon, fairly far behind Piranha and Jaws. This film has a link with Piranha, though, as the screenplay was written by John Sayles, which always helps to elevate this kind of thing.
The story opens at an Alligator Park, where a man gets badly mauled by one of the alligators. A little girl gets a pet alligator there, but later her father (for no reason I could discern) throws it down the toilet because he’s angry. This was 1968.
Fast Forward to today (1980 by release date) and detective Robert Forster is buying a new puppy, after his last one was stolen.
The pet store owner is played by Sidney Lassick who I recognised from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Forster is called to the local water purification plant, where some human remains have washed up.
There’s dogs too, some of them far bigger than they should be. A local lab is doing experiments on dogs, and the pet store owner has been supplying them with dogs, and getting rid of the dogs in the sewers. But he also meets a grim demeez.
This leads Forster to the lab, but the lead scientist there is adamant they breed all their dogs or get them from the pound.
One of the local newspapers is The Daily Bugle!
Forster goes down into the sewers, with a young officer who’s the only one who will go with him.
But naturally, it ends in tragedy as they come across the alligator of the title, and the young rookie gets dragged away. That’s the second partner Forster has lost.
Now they know it’s a giant alligator, they need an expert, and wouldn’t you know it, the little girl whose alligator was flushed in the opening sequence has now grown up into Robin Riker, playing Marisa, and she’s an expert herpetologist.
A reporter on the National Probe has a thing against Forster, hence this story rubbing salt into the wound.
He’s asking at the hospital where Forster was recovering after losing partner number 2, who tells him he was talking about ‘Alligators in the sewers’ – precisely the line that got referenced in ET a couple of years later, by little Drew Barrymore.
He goes looking in the sewers, and doesn’t make it out. His camera is flashing and taking pictures as he dies.
Nice to see his newspaper treating his death with the reverence it deserves.
After an attempt by the police to drive the alligator into a waiting firing squad that yields no results, the alligator finds another way out of the sewer. Even given its size, this seems unlikely, but it’s fun.
They don’t stint on the eating of people. A cop who arrives and immediately crashes his car gets caught and eaten.
Now along comes Anton du Beke from Strictly playing a big game hunter. Only joking, it’s the great Henry Silva, playing Col Brock. But he is a big game hunter. And an enormous sexist to every woman he meets.
The evil head of Slade Pharmaceuticals, the company running the dog laboratory, is deep in the frame for giving hormones to animals which make them grow massively, and Forster has asked one too many questions, so he gets him fired from the police force.
This film has some genuinely brutal moments, like when the kids are playing around their pool, they push a little kid in, and he gets swallowed.
Not only is Brock a sexist pig, he’s also racist. He recruits three local men as ‘native bearers’ to help him look for the alligator.
But he’s a rubbish hunter so he’s soon alligator food.
Forster has a nightmare, but there’s a weird film glitch in the broadcast.
Nice use of an amputee to show someone get his legs bitten off.
The evil Big Pharma goon is at a family wedding – his daughter is marrying the creepy scientist. This wedding isn’t going to to smoothly.
Although I’m not sure it’s fair that the maid was the first to get it.
There’s an enormous number of stuntmen being thrown through the air in this sequence, and I’m happy to report that one of them definitely did land on the wedding cake. That’s the law.
Pharma-guy gets into his limo and locks the door, so the mayor (I think it’s the mayor) gets eaten. But the alligator still trashes the limo, so Pharma-guy is toast.
So now some really rich people have died, it’s time to stop the monster. So Forster once more goes into the sewers, and sets a time bomb in the alligator’s lair.
He hurries to his escape route, a manhole to the road. But there’s a car stopped right on top of it. And of course it’s driven by a little old lady.
Marisa arrives at the escape point, and tries to get the old woman to move her car. She refuses to budge even when Marisa bangs on her window and screams at her to move. Doesn’t she realise? So Marisa just carjacks the car, pushing the old lady over to move the car.
To be fair, old woman should probably thank her, because look what happened to another car parked over a drain.
This is a lot of fun. Not quite as satirical as Piranha, but highly enjoyable.
After this, recording switches, and there’s an episode of V – The Series. The Hero sees the evil lizard aliens pretend to be the resistance and cause trouble, so the government, who are working with the alien Visitors, can crack down to the Black Lives Matter Resistance fighters. That’s Judson Scott there, possibly familiar from Star Trek II.
Elizabeth Maxwell (Jennifer Cooke) has telekinetic powers. I think she was the one who was a baby in the mini series, which makes her being an adult now slightly dodgy. But here she is making her boyfriend’s bed rise up and down.
This was the 80s. You can tell. Alien bosses Diana and Lydia have such great hair.
And their boss Charles is so louche, literally a lounge lizard.
At this point in the story, quisling head of the Earth collaborators, Donald Trump Nathan Bates is suffering from Covid 19 a bullet wound after a resistance attack. So the aliens offer the Earth government a computer simulation of Bates, a ‘deep fake’ if you will, which will say anything they want.
Bruce Davison guest stars. He’s one of several people in a copy shop who are taken hostage by the police, and, thanks to the fake Nathan Bates, one of them will be handed over to the visitors for execution each day until the leaders of the resistance hand themselves over.
There’s an attempt to get close to the copy shop by Willie and Elias Taylor, but the aliens have got a disintegration beam, and Taylor gets killed. This seems like a pretty big deal, killing off a character who’s in the main titles.
To stop Bruce Davison from being killed, Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) hands himself over, and faces up to Charles. The rest of the resistance attack, there’s some general running around and fisticuffs, but everyone manages to get away, somehow.
The tape ends right after this episode.
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