1979’s The Great Alligator disappointed me in many ways, not the least of which is because it is not the film adaptation I’ve been waiting for of John Grisham’s novel The Alligator Litigator, about an anthropomorphic gator who struggles both in court for the rights of the oppressed and within himself to restrain from eating those same clients. It would probably help if that book actually existed, which it does not.
Instead, what we get is yet another Jaws rip-off, set in an unspecified country, though my money was on somewhere in South Africa. I would have lost that bet, as IMDB helpfully informed me what I was seeing was Sri Lanka. That is a country with crocodiles, and not alligators, so I’m only minutes into the movie and already confused.
Though possibly not as confused as the filmmakers. Mel Ferrer runs a resort in an area rich in wildlife, though he really puts the emphasis on the opportunity to see crocs. When we first see Romano Puppo, Ferrer’s all-around organizer and tough guy, he has piglets on ropes he tosses into the water to “fish” for the reptiles. Fair warning to animal lovers out there: it is a bit unclear as to whether any actual piglets are hurt, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn they had been.
Ferrer tells photographer Claudio Cassinellii about this on the helicopter ride there. He also goes on to talk about how good the tourism has been for the natives. Then there’s a smash cut to trees being felled and areas dynamited, all while such locals observe the proceedings with sadness and anger. I have to give the film credit for this social commentary.
Unfortunately, I can’t give it credit for much else. Let’s start with the titular and supernatural predator. The beast that will prey on the resort’s employees and guests is, indeed, an alligator, and that had me wondering why local lore in a place with crocodiles would have alligators in its pantheon. It’s like missionaries for a gator-based religion had wandered through the area at some point and it inexplicably took hold.
As expected for this kind of tripe, the gator is a lousy construct which I don’t believe we see in its entirety in a single frame. Basically, the viewer is given repeated flashes of the same components of the thing and it is up to the viewer to put them together in their mind. There’s a big fake mouth which opens and closes. There’s a single eye. What we see the least of is the bulk of the body, which is completely solid and inflexible. Part of me wonders if somebody constructed that or if it was a stuffed specimen of the real thing. Most of me doesn’t care.
Eventually, the locals will take up arms against the White people, presumably because gator God isn’t going about his revenge fast enough. It wasn’t obvious at first that is what is happening. So, when it is discovered the helicopter has been dragged into the lake and the antenna of the radio for the resort has been destroyed, I hoped the gator had done these things. Actually, I’m still not 100% certain it was the locals and not the lizard, so I’m hoping the great gator will eventually pair up with the preposterously clever killer whale from Orca and engage in a plot of world domination.
The characters are eejits all around. Of the cast, Barbara Bach, as the lodge’s manager, fares the best. Ferrer cashes yet another paycheck while expending the minimum amount of energy. Cassinelli is the Italian double Matthew Perry never knew he had, and seems curiously intent on doing things like breaking up the native dance that was staged in the hotel for him to photograph.
One guy (I think it is Bobby Rhodes) gets the gator’s share of the best lines. When Cassinelli is about to take a boat into tribal territory that is only about two miles away, Rhodes adds “and about 30 centuries”. The man also has this bon mot when allaying fears of the beast potentially attacking him while he tries to get the copter out of the mud: “The alligators are asleep in the mud; at least, the well-behaved ones.”
While this is a deeply awful movie, there are some aspects which might be enjoyed by those with a taste for cinematic schadenfreude, or “schinemafreude”. The dialogue contains such wonders as “Hope is a very long word”. I guess it is if you can’t count past three. It is a better line than this one, from a kid who yell out an odd inducement to get others to jump in the water: “You can shit on yourself down here and nobody will know!” A hermit priest in a cave looks and acts like the Monty Python “It’s” Man so much you’ll think that character had relocated to a warmer climate. Guests fleeing the gator seem to be hell-bent on impaling themselves on the spikes of the gator-proof fencing in the water. A laughably tiny model of the resort is consumed by a fire where each individual flame would be several stories tall. Every item of clothing on display screams the 70’s, and we learn blue jeans are the gift welcome around the world. Three tribal women at the funeral of a warrior are painted in such a way that I yelled, “Finally! The Blue Woman Group!”
There was something else I yelled a few times while watching The Great Alligator. This was in reaction to a recurring tune which immediately brought to my mind a certain Fleetwood Mac song. On a particular beat during the first time we hear this, I yelled, “TUSK!” Then we hear it many many maaany more times, and I felt compelled to keep doing this, albeit less enthusiastically each time. What can I say, when watching dreck like this, you gotta make your own entertainment.
Dir: Sergio Martino
Starring Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Mel Ferrer
Watched on Code Red blu-ray