This fun horror flick attempts to solve a unique question in cinema history, which is simply “How do you steal every last idea in Jaws for a movie that’s set in Chicago?”
Screenwriter John Sayles in his early exploitation years (he also wrote Piranha) has it all figured out. What you do is have a baby alligator who got flushed down the toilet years ago (a little girl took it on as a pet and her father did not approve) and ended up in the sewers where a shady pharmaceutical company are dumping dead animals that they’ve injected with experimental chemical solutions. Our stray alligator eats them and then all that junk in its system eventually turns it into a Super Alligator, bigger than a car and ready to bust out of the sewers, roam the streets and attack children’s birthday parties and fancy garden weddings.
From there, enter the mayor (Jack Carter) who’s in bed with the drug company scumbags and cares most about the upcoming election. Enter the likable reptile expert (Robin Riker as Richard Dreyfuss if he was a pretty redhead). Enter the obnoxious old school alligator hunter (Henry Silva in the Robert Shaw part).
And enter the everyman police detective (Robert Forster, who even kinda looks like Roy Scheider) who’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders and is more determined than anyone to bring down that gator.
You know the drill. You’ve taken this ride before. You know exactly where it’s going.
The only surprise here is how entertaining it manages to be despite all of that. It feels like the makers know full-well that this story comes straight from Sillytown, but they also understand that doesn’t mean it has to be bad. This sucker moves fast, racks up a decent body count, has hateful bad guys, brings no shortage of gator action and builds to a nail-biter climax. Even the practical Super Alligator effects look good (think of the CGI bullshit that they’d use to depict it today).
This might be the best film from director Lewis Teague, who came up working for Roger Corman and looks to have learned the right lessons about how to give the audience their money’s worth on a low budget and with a secondhand story.