And so we come to the end of Movie Monthly’s celebration of
Shark Week, Sharknado 3, and the Jaws 40th Anniversary with
our Terrors From The Deep series with a look at the 1980 horror comedy Alligator. Alligator is an
odd flick in more ways than one.
The film came out at the tail end of the post Jaws creature feature boom, coming out 5 years after Jaws already made everyone afraid to go
in the water. As such Alligator takes a very different
approach to animal horror than a lot of the other Jaws knock-offs like Orca. The first major difference is that Alligator is actually a land locked
horror film but more than that the movie is grounded in a much goofier premise
that kind of informs the odd mix of anger and levity that informs the film
overall.
The basic premise of Alligator
is that 12 years in the past, a young girl’s parents flushed her pet baby
alligator down the toilet. Rather
than dying on the ride or in the sewers the alligator somehow survived and grew
to gargantuan size off the strange toxic wastes being dumped into the sewers by
a nearby business. Now, the
alligator has emerged from the depths beneath Chicago to exact brutal,
animalistic vengeance on the forces that made it along with pretty much anyone
else it encounters along the way.
