Alligator
Entry updated 7 December 2016. Tagged: Film.
Film (1980). Alligator Associates/Group 1. Directed by Lewis Teague. Written by John Sayles, based on a story by Sayles and Frank Ray Perilli. Cast includes Robert Forster, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger and Robin Riker. 91 minutes cut to 89 minutes. Colour.
A pet baby alligator is flushed down a Los Angeles toilet (see California). Actualizing a familiar US Urban Legends, it or another grows into a Monster, aided by hormone-experiment waste materials illicitly dumped in the sewers (see Pollution). A policeman investigates the increasingly violent and bizarre alligator attacks, which climax with the destruction of a wedding party held by (of course) the wicked polluter. Alligator is funny and well made. Sayles has remarked that "my original idea was that the alligator eats its way through the whole socio-economic system". Many 1970s and 1980s Monster Movies, including this one, have been deliberately subversive of comfortable social norms. [PN]
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