Looking back at Alligator

Nature run amok horrors have proliferated thanks to CG, but you can’t replace the human touch – at least as far as screenwriting is concerned.

That’s what made Jaws so good, with a slew of unforgettable exchanges – something that no doubt influenced Upstate New Yorker John Sayles when he wrote the script for Alligator, one of the better killer croc films along with Rogue or Alex Aja’s Crawl.

So Sayles is who we have to thank for banter like this:

We got a big toe in the morgue once. Nothing else; just a big toe. Never found the rest of him. But, we figured out who it was. Had a funeral and everything.

Must have been a pretty small casket.

Paradoxically, when it comes to comedy, being serious about it is what makes it funnier as Leslie Nielsen has proven time and time again. That’s what the makers of say, Sharknado don’t appreciate: when your movie is already over-the-top and wacky, mirroring that tone with your characters is exhausting. There’s something to be said for being understated – and that’s an understatement.

In Alligator, an Illinois kid on vacation in Florida, hits up a gator farm and purchases a baby one to take home. Much like what happened during COVID, she’s acquired a pet she’s unequipped to deal with, with her frustrated pops flushing “Ramón” down the toilet and into the Chicago sewer system.

Because this is a John Sayles movie (he wrote Piranha), there is some anti-corporate subtext – a pharmaceutical company subplot involving a degenerate pet store owner stealing neighbourhood cats and dogs and selling them as lab specimens and hormones being flushed down the sewer.

Carnivores and random hormones are not a good mix, it turns out.

Soon, “Ramón” grows and grows and grows amidst subterranean filth, methane and most importantly for a poikilothermic creature, a complete absence of sunlight (not to worry, science buffs: a herpetologist weighs in on how cold-blooded creatures make do in the cold confines of a drainpipe).

The massive creature soon begins chomping on sewer workers, finally drawing the attention of investigators.

Everything’s very Old Man and the Sea / Moby Dick / Jaws and there’s even a doff of the fisherman’s cap to Jaws with a Big Game Hunter conscripted to track the giant beast.

What’s great about horror (and in particular eco horror when it’s done right) is that it’s a supposedly “dumb” genre, but has hidden smarts: at its best, it manages to inject all sorts of subtext about class resentment, scientism, the environmental protectionism into the proceedings, making what is essentially a monster movie infinitely more interesting.

***1/2 (out of 5)

Tusk

With a premise that’s part Se7en, part Criminal Minds, you’d be forgiven for thinking Tusk is dumb 2000s-style torture p*rn. But you’d be wrong.

This is a savvy, talky affair, directed by Kevin Smith (Dogma, Clerks) and starring everyone’s favorite whipping boy Scream King, Justin Long (whose punchability is often polarizing, but who’s used to great effect here).

Long plays an edge-lord podcaster, Wallace, lured to Manitoba, Canada by the promise of meeting and thereafter mocking an oblivious light saber-wielding lolcow. But when the gomer ends up dead, Wallace is stuck in Winnipeg with no content to curate/create and nobody to exploit.

Dejected, Wallace hits up a local bar which doesn’t accurately reference either of the Central Canadian city’s pro sports teams. However, the joint does have a strange, enigmatic post in the men’s bathroom, which has nothing whatsoever to do with who is or isn’t a good time and how to reach them. Rather, it’s an enticement of someone with quite a tale to tell.

Wallace calls the number, and hits the open road to a stately mansion north of Winterpeg, where he finds a debonair recluse interlocutor, the improbably named, Howard Howe. The two get acquainted by exploring a wide range of subject matter – ranging from Hemingway to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Before too long, however, Wallace is woozy from tainted tea, and when he comes to, finds himself in quite a predicament.

Smart, gory and often surprising, Tusk is marred by lazy Canadian stereotypes Kevin Smith, an oft-visitor to these parts, should’ve done something…ABOOT.

***1/4 (out of 5)

For more, check out the Really Awful Movies Podcast discussion of Tusk.