October Horror Challenge 2022 #30: "Alligator (1980)"

Back in the 80s there were a whole bunch of urban legends about animals who were flushed down the toilet thriving in the sewers and growing to giant sizes and eating people. I remember my friends and I telling each other these stories trying to scare each other, and those urban legends from the basis for this movie, so when I saw it was on Shudder I knew I had to check it and its sequel out. I know I've seen this movie before, but I don't remember much about it, so it's time for me to give it a re-watch.

In this movie, a pet baby alligator is flushed down the toilet by an angry father, only for it to survive in the sewers and grow to giant proportions until it starts making meals of the locals in town. Soon a herpetologist is the only one who can track the animal down and stop it before it eats its way through the rest of the cast.

This movie starts off with a dad being perturbed that his daughter has a new pet baby alligator, and he makes the fateful decision to flush the animal down the toilet (how rude). Now in real life, the alligator would die in such an environment, but in movieland where this film takes place, the animal mutates and grows to giant size. We see him make mincemeat of a cop pretty early on in the movie (poor guy) and the cop's partner is the only one left alive from this attack, and of course no one believes him, even the herpetologist who is called in as an expert on Alligators, but when a local reporter becomes alligator food and manages to get pictures of the offending alligator when his camera is left behind, the cops finally believe that something is going on, so they try and scare the alligator out of hiding, but when they don't find anything on this expedition, the geniuses in charge decide again that there is no alligator and the cop must be crazy (and what about the pictures? Are those imaginary too?) so it's not until the alligator bursts out of the sewer in front of a bunch of witnesses and chows down on ANOTHER cop that the mayor and the police force FINALLY believe that there really is a killer alligator on the loose and take real measures to stop it. Talk about taking forever to see a threat. Jeeze guys, the alligator had to eat half your cast and be seen by a million witnesses before you would believe that he's real.

The movie tries to shoehorn in a love story between the herpetologist and the cop (dude, you don't have TIME for this, there's a killer alligator eating the city, can't you wait to start banging until a more opportune time?) I have to say though, the creature effects and the gore effects are pretty well done, and there's even a mean and nasty little sequence where some local kids feed one of their friends to the alligator because they don't realize how dangerous he is until it's too late (with friends like these, who needs enemies). So while this movie isn't perfect by any means, it was a fun way to kill an hour and a half. Bring on the sequel!