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Feb 22, 2022 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

Over the summer of 1975, Jaws became the highest grossing film of all time, not adjusted for inflation. Although it would only hold that title for less than two years - until the release of Star Wars in 1977 - studios and filmmakers would be ripping it off for years to come. Films like Orca, Grizzly and Piranha would return to the “man-eating animal” formula throughout the late 1970s, and the trend was still going strong when Alligator was released in 1980.

Directed by Lewis Teague - who would go on to helm several Stephen King adaptations, including Cujo - and written by John Sayles - who would parlay his early B-movie writing career into several Academy-Award nominated writer-director projects - Alligator is possibly the platonic ideal of a B-movie ripping off a blockbuster. Although Teague is no Spielberg, he knows what we’re here to see, as proven by the opening sixty seconds of the film, which features some gnarly practical gore effects as an alligator wrangler gets mauled at a tourist trap while a fascinated little girl looks on. Her parents buy her a baby alligator as a souvenir, but her father soon becomes fed up with it and flushes it down the toilet. Over the next ten years, it feeds on discarded animal carcasses disposed of by a pharmaceutical company experimenting with growth hormones and grows to monstrous size. One series of unexplained gruesome murders later, and you’ve got yourself a Jaws ripoff.

As the kids might say today, Teague and Sayles understood the assignment. The film is lousy with deserving gator bait, including a cocky rookie cop, a scummy reporter, a sleazy big game hunter and the aforementioned callous pharmaceutical executives. In addition to being a straight-forward monster movie, the film also doubles as a winking cop drama, with Robert Forester’s homicide detective protagonist, who changes his shirt while walking and talking with his disapproving chief and who eventually gets thrown off the force for making too big a deal out of the giant alligator murders. By the time he teams up with a renowned reptile scientist who can’t get any respect because she’s a hot lady, you can almost feel the movie laughing along with you. Possibly the funniest part is that the scientist is the little girl from the opening scenes, which the characters never address.

There’s a lot of pleasures here, all of them relatively simple. The special effects and gore are very well done and look terrific in the new 4K transfer from Scream Factory. Robert Forester is extremely charming as the lead, making it easy to see why Quentin Tarantino thought he deserved a star-making role when he cast him in Jackie Brown 17 years later. Also on hand is Michael V. Gazzo - who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Godfather Part II - as his apoplectic superior officer as well as some hilarious wipe edits and a little kid getting eaten by the titular creature, just to make sure they’re staying on top of the limits pushed in Jaws. By the time the alligator crashes the outdoor wedding reception of the daughter of the evil pharmaceutical executive, you’ll be cheering for more.

(www.shoutfactory.com/product/alligator-collector-s-edition?product_id=7763)