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.

Day of the Animals

Day of the Animals is not a sequel to 1976's Grizzly. Same producer, same director, a few of the same actors, released the following year. Sure, but it's definitely its own thing. Day of the Animals asks the question, "What if, instead of making Jaws, we made The Birds?" In the movie, a group of hikers fight for their lives after the depleted ozone layer causes animals to go crazy and attack people. And you better believe this movie is chock full of animals. There's tons of gorgeous second unit animal footage and a surprising amount of footage of trained animals interacting with/attacking the actors/stunt doubles. If nothing else, I will tell you that this is a movie where a bare chested Leslie Neilsen both throttles a child and wrestles a bear. If that doesn't pique your interest, then you and I are very different people.

Rating: 69%

(Image from Wikipedia)

Voyage of the Rock Aliens

A group of aliens, who look like discount Devo, come to Earth in a guitar-shaped spaceship to discover the source of Rock and Roll. The leader of the aliens falls for an Earth girl named Dee Dee. Dee Dee's boyfriend Frankie doesn't take too kindly to the intergalactic interloper and sics his gang/band, The Pack, on the aliens. Meanwhile, for some reason, two maniacs escape from the local mental hospital and start a killing spree. Unfortunately for the good folks of Speelburgh (yes, that's the name of the town where all this takes place), the local Sheriff, played by Ruth Gordon, is too occupied with hunting down the aliens to notice all the corpses piling up around her. And, I'm not kidding when I say this, that's not even a comprehensive account of all the weird shit in this movie. I'm brushing past the robot voiced by Peter Cullen, the Jermaine Jackson cameo, the polluted lake, the battle of the bands and the Lovecraftian tentacle monster. Voyage of the Rock Aliens feels less like a movie and more like a series of music videos cobbled together into a loose narrative. It's a fascinating thing to behold. Highly recommended for lovers of bad movies.

Rating: 52%

Fun Fact: One of the escaped maniacs in the movie was played by Michael Berryman, the poster boy for Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.

(Image from Wikipedia)

Frosty Returns

Frosty Returns isn't really a Christmas Special. It's some hippy-dippy bait-and-switch environmentalist propaganda bullshit. It's also not very good. It looks good and it has a great voice cast but that's about it. And, as much as I like John Goodman (he's in at least two of my favorite movies), he really has no business singing. I haven't really liked any of the Frosty specials so far, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that I didn't end up liking Frosty Returns.

Rating: Yellow Snow%

(Image from IMDB)

12 More Days of Christmas Specials: The Christmas Raccoons

This one is probably a bit obscure for any of my non-Canadian brethren out there. The Raccoons was a cartoon series that ran from 1985 to 1991 on the CBC. The series was preceeded by a number of television specials, the first being The Christmas Raccoons. The show and the Special had a bit of an evironmentalist agenda, every week the Raccoons faced off against Cyril Sneer, an aardvark industrialist bent on maximizing profits whilst destroying the Evergreen Forest. Since the Christmas Special was the first ever adventure for the Raccoons it mostly just introduces the main cast of characters. The Raccoons bump heads with Sneer for the first time after the aardvark cuts down their home for lumber. And when I say they bumped heads, it's pretty much what actually happened. The Raccoons are only able to stop Sneer from clear cutting the forest after they beat him up. And who says all Canadians are friendly?

Rating: 75%

(Image from gilsinan.com)

Paying For Plastic Shopping Bags

Once upon a time stores used paper bags and that was fine. Then, after awhile, they switched to plastic bags and that was fine. Now some stores are charging their customers 5¢ per bag for plastic shopping bags and I'm not cool with that. If the 5¢ fee is supposed to offset the environmental cost of the plastic bags, why not go back to paper bags or make bio-degradable bags? Here's an idea: if your company/store thinks that plastic shopping bags are so bad, stop fucking using them. Don't nickel and dime your customers to death because you're not willing to find an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic bags.

Rating: 0.05%

(Image from milkandcoco.ca)