I have no 4th of July plans this year, so Tuesday Night Trash was sort of my unofficial barbecue pool party minus the barbecue and the pool.
Instead, I got a double-feature of low-budget Jaws rip-off films, a full bar and a good crowd at the best movie theater in Dallas. And that’s better, if you ask me.
I don’t want to hang out by a swimming pool anyway until I’ve lost about fifteen (okay, twenty) pounds. What I need is a nice, dark room.
In any case, this show put me right in the Independence Day spirit.
How could you not feel the love after seeing Alligator? It’s a 1980 film that attempts to solve an important question in movie history, which is simply How do you steal every last idea in Jaws for a movie that’s set in Chicago? Even better, it turned out to be a real roof-raiser with a climax that provided all the fireworks that I needed for the week.
The good times kept coming for the stalwarts who stayed afterward for Cruel Jaws (also known as Jaws 5). Alligator comes off as stunningly original next to this 1995 remake/brazen hijacking of Jaws on a budget of about $150. It was directed by Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei who sometimes took exploitation films to whole new levels by not only copying more popular movies, but sometimes copying them word-for-word and re-purposing shots and music from them. That’s what he mostly did here and you could sometimes hear the room collectively raise eyebrows in disbelief. The theatre screened it from a low-definition digital file and the sound was less-than-booming, sometimes downright murky, but it didn’t matter. You didn’t need to hear every line of dialogue to be impressed by Mattei’s ridiculous heist job of Hollywood. (This is, I believe, the second Mattei film shown at Tuesday Night Trash; I saw his Hell of the Living Dead there a little over a year ago).
All in all, my kinda 4th of July.