The Great Alligator River

aka The Great Alligator

A photographer is hired to take promotional pictures for a newly built tropical resort. The local tribe worries that the resort's construction has angered Kruna, a god that will take its revenge in the form of a giant alligator. Sergio Martino's The Great Alligator River shares a little DNA with Joe Dante's Piranha but it's a Jaws rip-off through and through. The alligator in the movie isn't really a puppet or an animatronic, it seems to be more of a statue than anything else. There are a number of scenes where you see the alligator underwater and it's stiff as a board. When the alligator attacks the tourists, it isn't chomping down on them so much as they are swimming into its mouth. Let's just say, it's no Alligator.

Rating: 60%

(Image from Wikipedia)

Fun Fact: Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassinelli were both in Sergio Martino's Island of the Fishmen.

Killer Crocodile

You get to see a lot of the crocodile in Killer Crocodile. A surprising amount, really. There's a daytime shot of the crocodile in the first minute of the movie. In fact, there are a lot of daytime shots of the crocodile. There are a lot of closeup shots as well. They don't make the crocodile look any more believable but, at the same time, it was honestly refreshing to see a Jaws rip-off that showed off so much of its killer critter. And it's quite fitting to call this a rip-off, John Williams should have sued the pants off the people behind this one.

Rating: 60%

(Image from IMDB)

Lake Placid 2

The Syfy channel is in the business of making garbage. For the most part this means combining various predatory animals with really bad CGI special effects and D grade actors. In the case of Lake Placid 2, Syfy shuttled Bo Duke and a handful of other actors off to Bulgaria in order to put together what is essentially a remake of the original Lake Placid, a process they would repeat at least twice more. Every aspect of the movie's production (ie: acting, directing, special effects, story, etc.) has been dialed back. It's as though someone at Syfy said: "You know that Lake Placid movie was really good. How can we piggyback off their success, but for a lot less money?"

Rating: 36%

(Image from ablogofhorror.com)

Lake Placid

The first Lake Placid movie reminds me a lot of Joe Dante's 1978 movie Piranha. They're both unabashedly Jaws ripoffs, but they have sense enough to throw in some colorful characters and humor to offset all the people getting eaten. Having been made by a legit movie studio means that Lake Placid has some decent actors in it, including Betty White (kids love Betty White). The special effects from Stan Winston Studios hold up well considering they came about during the early CGI era. It's a better movie than the string of SyFy sequels would have you believe.

Rating: 60%

(Image from impawards.com)

Blood Surf

I think Blood Surf was hoping to catch on with extreme sports fans by mixing surfing with sleaze and saltwater crocodiles. The trailer beats you over the head with various in-your-face fonts and radical spellings of the word ‘extreme.’ The movie follows some brain dead surfers and a couple of opportunistic documentarians hoping to shoot some surfing footage in an exotic local teeming with man-eating sharks. They run afoul of a grizzled sea captain (played by Duncan Regehr of Monster Squad fame), some rape-happy pirates and finally a giant killer croc. None of the characters really have any redeeming qualities or self-preservation instincts, which left me hoping for a real downbeat ‘70s style ending where either everybody dies or nobody really survives intact. This, however, was not the case.  

Rating: I wish the croc had won%

(Image from connect.collectorz.com)

Crocodile

Combining standard Jaws ripoff fare with some slasher movie elements raises Crocodile just above terrible, but not by much. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist), Crocodile finds a batch of horny college students on a spring break lake cruise getting stalked by a killer croc. The animatronic crocodile used in the movie is decent, but more often than not the movie relies on a CGI croc that looks pretty damn terrible. Whenever the computer generated croc has to move around in the same frame as some of the actors the effect is laughable. Not that the real live actors do much better. Across the board the acting is all pretty bad, but a special mention has to be made for the male lead who is remarkably terrible. The crappy cast is at least rounded out with some older, grizzled character actors who easily act circles around the rest of the main cast.

Rating: Chomped in half%

(Image from scifi-movies.com)

Crocs

I think I read somewhere that crocs were responsible for over 3000 cases of fashion police brutality in the U.S. alone last year. Or maybe that was just a dream I had.

RATING: 20%, or 90% if your life is fucked and your job happens to require closed-toed shoes