Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Thank goodness this movie is finally available on DVD. "Alligator" is a very good little B movie that deserves a much wider audience than it has to date. I don't even remember it being commercially released; I've caught it several times on late night TV. But it's a tight, fast-paced, unpretentious film, generally well acted and with a few nifty surprises.

At the start of the movie, a little girl buys a baby alligator from an old Seminole Indian in Florida. Dad isn't thrilled to have a baby gator in the house, and in a fit of pique one afternoon he flushes it down the toilet. Down goes the gator into the town's sewer system, which coincidentally is chock full of dead pets, mostly kidnapped cats and dogs, into which a villainous vet has been injecting growth hormones before dumping them into the sewer.

Fast-forward 12 years later; the baby gator, still in the sewer after chowing down on animal cadavers bloated with growth hormones for the past dozen years, has grown into a behemoth with a ravenous appetite and an indiscriminate taste for anything it can chomp on, including humans. Yuck... body parts start turning up in the city's sewage system, including a couple of sewer workers, a newspaper reporter, and a policeman who went down into the sewer to investigate the shenanigans. His erstwhile partner, nicely played by Robert Forster, and a young biologist (who else but the little girl now grown up?) team up to try to find out what's going on.

But the alligator is getting kind of bored stuck in the sewer, and one hot night it blasts itself through a concrete sidewalk in the middle of a stickball game, and the chase is on as the gator turns up in dark alleys, a swimming pool, and the town lake, before indecorously crashing the villainous vet's wedding reception and chowing down on the guests. The movie jolts along to a suitably explosive ending and it's great fun from beginning to end.

"Alligator" spawned an absolutely dreadful sequel which has nothing to do with the original; the people who made the first "Alligator" knew better than to mess with a good thing. It's a very good, modest, low-budget film that proves again that sometimes small is best after all.

Judy Lind

Seen this classic on cable years ago. It was only on vhs for a short time. Finnelly it's on dvd. Father flush baby alligator down the toilet. Do to the toxics it grown huge, and get his reveng in the city. Strongly recommend this title. Great movie to watch over, and over again.