In the aftermath of Jaws, it’s hard to count the actual number of knock offs and clones made to capitalize on the success of that film. They ranged from big budget wide release films like 1977’s Orca to low budget affairs like 1976’s backwoods effort Grizzly, a movie that featured an actual grizzly bear. Known today for his independent films like Eight Men Out and Lone Star, writer and director John Sayles started his career writing two of maybe the most memorable Jaws knock offs; Piranha and Alligator. Both films exhibited a dark sense of humor missing from horror movies of the period. 1977’s Piranha was the more obvious Jaws riff of the two movies, a film about a school of killer piranha threatening summer vacationers. Alligator is an entirely different animal. Based more on urban myths, Alligator certainly has elements of Jaws in it, especially the final scene. That said this is a wild and funny movie that’s leans hard into both the absurdity of the premise and its monster movie roots.
The movie opens with a young girl on vacation in Florida witnessing an alligator attack at a tourist trap. Unfazed by the violence she just witnessed, she buys a baby alligator and brings it home to the midwest. Later her reptile hating father flushes the gator. It ends up in the sewer where lives for the next 12 years on a diet of hormone filled lab animals dumped there. It grows to enormous size and begins eating any person that goes into the sewer. Then it gets out.
John Sayles wrote the script for Alligator thinking about the urban legend of gators in the sewers and combined it with the subject of animal testing. A gator in the sewer is a solid enough premise for a movie but a giant gator in the sewer created by man’s greed? For a movie going public with Jaws still on their mind, it’s pretty perfect. This tie to modern concerns about animal testing and pharmaceuticals connects Alligator to the monster movie legacy of films like Frankenstein, a film about the desire of men to control life and death, and Godzilla, a creature created by atomic testing. Director Lewis Teague directs the film in a way that makes the monster feel huge. Yes, you know you’re probably watching a regular sized an alligator walking down miniature sets but Teague and the rest of the filmmakers always make the gator feel like a genuine threat.
Additionally, Sayles scripts a very funny film. It never stops being funny when the alligator just eats people whole or when people get dismembered. At one point, a kid sees the alligator, runs home and grabs a knife to stop it. His mom is only concerned he’s using one of her good knives. The alligator hides in a swimming pool looking like a giant floating turd. At another point, kids at a birthday party play walk the plank and accidentally feed their friend to the alligator. Known film tough guy Henry Silva tries to seduce a news reporter with an alligator mating call. People only believe the alligator is real once the photos are released from a reporter who was getting eaten at the time. The film’s climax takes place at a wedding where the alligator treats the proceedings as a buffet. During this, it also helpfully kills the corrupt mayor and head of the pharmaceutical company that lead to its creation. The straight man in all of this is Robert Forster. Forster brings a grounded, earthy presence to any of his performances. Here, he sells the danger and a general concern for public safety. He’s also is smart enough to know he’s in a movie about giant alligator without acting like he’s in a movie about a giant alligator. He’s clearly having fun trying to kill this monster.
Alligator is a wonderfully dumb film made by incredibly smart people. It’s got clever social commentary and people game to be in a movie about a giant sewer dwelling alligator. The filmmakers know how absurd the premise is but also are keen to make it a genuine horror film. This was one of three horror comedies that John Sayles wrote, the others being Piranha and The Howling. It’s a genuine shame in his directing career he never wrote and directed one himself. Based on his track record, it probably would have been pretty funny and pretty scary.
Cinema Dual 
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