Of all the Jaws knockoffs, from Blood Beach to Orca to pretty much any of Jaws Sequels, one of the best is Alligator.
It takes itself just as seriously as a movie about a giant alligator living in the sewers of Chicago should.
Alligators in the sewers is a tale that’s almost 90 years old at this point, so seeing them as the focus of a movie post-Jaws isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is how intelligently and deftly the film handles its admittedly silly subject.
And it has the titular beast tear up a wedding reception, when is that not fun?
Like many an oversized monster, this beast is natural comeuppance for corporate greed and pollution—like Captain Planet, only with more bite.
The main villains besides the gator itself are the scientists whose poor cleanup after hormone treatments created it and the company that employed them and tried to cover up its illegal animal testing (using stray and stolen pets).
In the early 80s, it foresaw the evil that would be propped up in the film Wall Street. But used a giant gator to gobble them up or crush them with its tail.
But the film goes further than that; it’s not just about the Gator and its unintentional quest for revenge on nature’s behalf.
Like a good monster movie, its people’s reactions to it that make it all the more fun. The people in Chicago try to turn it into a tourist opportunity once the great Big Game Hunter begins his work – to the point where one unscrupulous person tries to sell a small gator he acquired as a pet.
Even though that is what partially created the monster in the first place.
To compound how opportunism won over common sense in this case, he tries to do this to a (plainclothes) detective.
The message of the dangers of greed and short sighted policies come to a head in one comic little scene.
Biology
One of the great things about this little monster movie gem is that it really goes over how bad an environment the sewers are for a gator. They have been known to wander into sewers on occasion in Florida, but not to make a home there.
The environment is full of toxins—from heavy metals, to, well, raw sewage.
This is not the best environment for them. It certainly will be warmer than most cavernous environments, but it’s still not what a gator needs. Sewers do provide homes for things from rats, spiders, roaches and centipedes, to more bizarre creatures like the Tubifex – the “Sludge worm”. A cluster of these critters made their way into internet fame when a video of a group of them in a sewer was presented asking “What is it?”
The Gator itself is over 33ft in length and that would make it quite a monster, especially when the largest known American alligator only reached a little less than 20ft. Heck, the largest living crocodilian, the salt water crocodile, attains a length of 28ft, so this would be a monster.
But there have been bigger in the past.
Deinosuchus was an alligator from the late cretaceous period, living some 80 to 73 million years ago and attaining a length off almost 40ft—nature outdid the monster of the movie.
And this was not even the panicle of crocodilian size.
The largest ever was Purrusaurus, a caiman (a subgroup of alligators) which could reach 43ft in length, and with a muzzle long enough to swallow a person whole.
These crocodilians were largely aquatic to support such a massive weight, compared to the amphibious and super-strong monster in the film—literally erupting out of the sewer like a dwarf Godzilla. This enhanced of strength from the various chemicals it was exposed to would allow it to support itself on land with greater ease than Deinosuchus.
It’s also unlikely that Deinosuchus was as bulletproof. The monster shrugs off rifle shots pretty well. While some heavily armored animals can luck out and deflect a bullet, such armor plating is a bit beyond most nature.
Not that alligators are not heavily armored naturally—aside from the leathery skin of their belly, their surface is covered with scutes: scales with bits of bone in them to make them even stronger. How this mutant got them to be bulletproof is unknown, but we got to go with what happens on screen.
One surprising thing that isn’t talked about in the film is the bite force of an alligator. At least Primeval (2007) gave us the glory of seeing a crocodile pop a skull like a boney zit.
Perhaps that was too gory for 1980—judge for yourself…
