Jon Hess

(On Cable TV, October 2022) It’s slightly impressive (and informative) to see how much director Jon Hess’ Alligator II: The Mutation copies, borrows or steals from its 1980 prequel without really understanding why it worked. If John Sayles ever wants to feel better about himself, he can just watch this sequel and itemize how many plot points of his original script this sequel reuses and botches. Once again, local unscrupulous businessmen dump chemicals who make sewer alligators grow to gigantic size, and it’s up to a renegade police officer to end the menace. There’s a little bit of business about racial discrimination (many of the characters are from the Latino community) but everything in this sequel feels rote and by-the-numbers. It doesn’t rise above the level of a Direct-to-Video monster movie, and it shows its limitations more often than not. I did like some of the matrimonial banter between the protagonist and his wife, but that’s about it—the rest of Alligator II feels incredibly generic even when it steals what made the first film slightly better than the average.