Alligator (1980)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) As B-grade monster movies go, Alligator is remarkably good—and while this may not translate into a good movie on most scales, it does make for pretty good entertainment. Taking the urban legend to heart, this film follows the adventure of a police officer and a herpetologist as they fight a gigantic alligator turned loose in the sewers of “Chicago,” and turned to gigantic size by some pharmaceutical research shenanigans. Alligator does take a while to rev up, but by midpoint the film is able to show (in relatively low-budget fashion) a city gripped with terror and marshalling a grand police response. The highlight of the film is clearly the upscale party sequence in which the alligator eats municipal oligarchs, guests, servants, and cars alike. What’s interesting throughout the film is that the script by John Sayles (then a budding filmmaker, not the indie darling and script doctor he’d later become) constantly messes around with assumptions of the genre in utterly deadpan fashion, throwing various tangents (a nasty journalist, a big-game hunter, corrupt executives, etc.) and reining them in with a reasonably good sense of story structure. On the execution side, Robert Foster is quite likable as a jaded policeman fighting against the monster. Alligator is not particularly great even as a monster film (there’s a significant distance between it and Tremors, for instance), but it’s watchable enough and clever enough to significantly eclipse much of the genre. It’s particularly good for late-night B-movie fans.