One of the more famous urban legends is the one about the alligator in the sewer. The story usually goes that a family buys a baby alligator while on holiday in Florida or Louisiana and brings it back home with them to the "big city" (usually New York). When the little alligator starts getting too big for the tank, however, it gets flushed down the toilet and ends up in the sewer, where it has to fend for itself and feed on whatever else ends up down there. It's quite the terrifying idea - something as ancient and single-mindedly vicious as the alligator living right under people's feet - and gains even more traction when you learn that there actually has been the occasional alligator found in a city's sewers. None, however, have been like the alligator found in the aptly-named Alligator.
In 1968, a little girl gets a baby alligator whilst on holiday in Florida, and names it Ramon. Back home in Missouri, however, her mean father flushes him down the toilet while he's still alive. 12 years later, body parts and half-eaten dogs are turning up in the city sewage plant and the police are investigating. Ramon has been surviving down in the sewers all these years, and in fact is now thriving since his diet became supplemented with illegally dumped dogs from an experiment involving a synthetic growth hormone that's made the dogs grow quite big. Because of this, Ramon's become quite a big boy himself, and so his tastes are changing to long pig. Will Detective Madison be able to convince the police and everyone else of Ramon's existence before the latter really gets started on the human buffet?
After the runaway success of Jaws, there were of course a good many knock-offs, and Alligator is effectively the urban (and indeed landlocked) one. The most notable similarity - other than the giant carnivorous creature snacking on people and generally making a nuisance of itself - is the fact that the police officer is disbelieved and ignored when he tries to warn people about the threat, because of the potential cost/bad publicity/revelation of illegal animal experimentation, until it's too late. And of course, when Ramon does emerge into the daylight (although I'd have expected him to be more of an albino and possibly blind after 12 years of living in the darkness of the sewers) at the film's climax, he gets to turn an outdoor wedding party into a smorgasbord, chowing down on several deserving people. This is actually another thread that runs through the movie - with only one or two exceptions for emotional and tension-building effect, the people Ramon eats are all pretty unpleasant people who we're happy to see devoured - amoral scientists and a man who steals pets to be experimented on and vivisected are chief among the victims.
Alligator is aware that it's very much a B-movie, and as such keeps its tongue in its cheek for most of the running time. There's a lot of knowing little jokes and nods to the camera, and several characters are more caricatures than anything - the incredibly sexist and racist great white hunter they bring in to try to hunt Ramon at one point is a prime example of this. There's also a sexy herpetologist brought in to help, who of course (a) ends up in bed with the detective and (b) was Ramon's original owner at the start (although sadly there's no scene where she comes face to face with Ramon, now all grown up, and the two of them have a moment of tearful recognition before Ramon bites a passerby in two). There's also a cunning case of Chekov's fake bomb and Chekov's underground methane deposits being brought together at the film's end that almost comes as a surprise given the way they're brought up in such a throwaway manner near the beginning and then apparently forgotten about.
Of course, another similarity Alligator shares with Jaws is the "Bruce" effect - and sadly I'm not talking about Bruce Campbell here. In Jaws, the mechanical shark built for the movie turned out to look very unrealistic in closeups, and the same thing happens here in Alligator. The filmmakers try their best to cover this up as best they can by shooting Ramon half-hidden in darkness, or only shooting parts of him rather than the whole fake alligator, but there are still scenes where it shows through anyway. On the other hand, they make up for some of this by shooting a regular alligator making its way through a scaled-down model set, which might only be a couple of steps above a man in a rubber Godzilla suit stomping some cardboard skyscrapers, but it does look good.
In the end, Alligator is enjoyable B-movie fun and comes complete with some sequel bait at the end (try not to think too hard about the biology, it'll just make your head hurt). It's not trying to be anything groundbreaking; just a fun, gory little creature feature.
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