we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside welcome to vintage video where we're re-watching the 80s so you don't have to we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time over analyzing what you've seen and spoiling what you haven't i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jesse bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of alligator on july 2nd 1980 or possibly november 14th the release date has changed on imdb and wikipedia since i put this list together but most everywhere else the release date is listed as july 2nd and we'd rather review it early than late anyway seems like a summer movie to me but an article in the july 9 1980 hollywood reporter said that it was the last day of principal photography so that seems like it would have been difficult to have it edited and released a week before that [Laughter] insta cassettes yes they're out in theaters before the film is finished it was uh it was written by john sales based on a story by sales and frank ray pirelli and possibly some other people and directed by louis teague and released by group one films alligator was originally intended as a rip-off of jaws in the same tradition of the jaws rip-offs grizzly orca and piranha which was also written by sales i disagree that orca is a rip-off well it's in the vein it was definitely playing off of the popularity i would agree to that i i don't think it's yeah i don't think it's the same kind of thing because those other movies are kind of like comedies like spoofy on jaws whereas this one is just trying to be jaws with alligators well this was trying to be a satire too in the same way that piranha was yeah oh then i think it failed maybe i disagree orca is crazy i haven't seen orca so i can't speak to that one but uh joe dante was approached to direct this though as with humanoids from the deep he worried it was too similar to his previous work and past on the film it takes it takes place in chicago sorry like what was his similar work piranha it's it's literally beat for beat piranha i guess what what part of it is different from piranha just the species right there it's only one it's like one so that's the difference yeah versus versus many yeah but the the film takes place in chicago but every shot is very blatantly los angeles especially the echo park lake stuff and all the palm trees that are everywhere um those are those aren't native to chicago no apparently not uh the first of here yeah uh the first draft of the script was written by frank ray pirelli but sales basically pulled a page one rewrite so pirelli's work was relegated to a story credit it was originally intended to take place in new york based on true stories of reptiles and the sewers but it was eventually relocated to wisconsin when it was decided that new yorkers would be too jaded to react to a giant killer alligator stalking the streets but wait you realize that chicago is not in wisconsin correct in the wisconsin version that pirelli wrote the alligator grew from eating chemical runoff from a brewery apparently sometime later it was moved to chicago okay uh all those growth hormones and the brew yeah uh the live alligator that they used for some of the scenes was a 19-footer named big al from louisiana wildlife preserve the footage was mixed with a 30 foot long remote control contraption that in keeping with the jaws theme was extremely difficult to work with it featured two puppeteers inside of the alligator after production the alligator prop was donated to the florida gators team as a mascot and made occasional appearances at games really yeah after its release screenwriters david weinstein and waheed bachter sued producers brandon chase and joseph mcginn as well as screenwriter sales for breach of implied contract and claimed that the final story for the film was cobbled together from two of their previous scripts one was called see you later alligator and one was something called jaws three network two a spec script they wrote that was a sequel to two popular franchises network isn't even a franchise it's just a movie i really hope the other one was gonna be after a while crocodile although i do wish that there were more double sequels like a movie that represented a crossover of two franchises it really needs to happen eventually but those both sound better than this like i'm not saying that this movie didn't have its moment yeah i'm just saying that those like sound like pure campy rip-off jaws type things and this was i don't think this was that it was it was though i can't find any other work from these guys unless david weinstein is also david z weinstein who wrote big trouble in little china with gary goldman and w d richter but i doubt it based on the fact that he wrote a script called see you later alligator unclear how their 700 000 case was settled brian cranston allegedly worked on this film with the special effects department and he would obviously later work with robert forster on breaking bad that's obvious to us not to richard yeah that did happen another similarity with humanoids uh james horner was set to do the score for this film but the plan was disrupted when there was a strike going on at the time and they had to find somebody else to do it yeah and i read that he actually wrote the score but they just didn't use it they never they never recorded it yeah i really i really want to hear this un unrecorded james horner alligator it's gone forever richard john sales used his paycheck from this movie to fund the return of the secaucus 7 a movie we'll be covering later this year and a sequel to alligator came out in 1991 but doesn't feature any actors or characters from this and it's basically just a remake of this film we open on an alligator's eye and we zoom out to show its bloodied mouth and a man approaching it and we pull back further to reveal that this is an alligator show with an audience so we're immediately less worried until something goes wrong and the star of the stunt show is bit multiple times by a group of alligators a parent in the audience complains about all the fake blood which we just had in stuntman somebody being like oh i wish they wouldn't use so much fake blood and it's like no no that's that's real suddenly a few extra guys are jumping into the fray beating at the alligators not killing them but just getting them away from this guy because they're probably expensive the announcer says as the team carries the victim to safety a girl and her mother seemed like satisfied that this was this is the show that they paid for in the gift shop later the girls parents are somehow tricked into buying her a baby alligator like is this actually an alligator or is it just supposed to be like a lizard that they say it's a baby alligator well i mean yeah they're i mean there are alligator lizards but uh i believe that this is a tiny alligator like a baby alligator to me so the plan is always that you're only going to have it for a certain time and then throw it away because it's not like keeping it in a small cage is going to prevent it from growing too alligator size uh well that's actually not necessarily true are they like goldfish no they won't grow as big as they would in the wild and it will cause you know deformities in their growth if you keep them in too small of a cage because you know they don't have enough room to to grow properly but they won't get as big as they would in the wild well she names this one ramon and she keeps it in a terrarium in her room that's filled with like rainbow marbles and plastic toys and stuff it doesn't look very comfortable i thought for sure that this was going to come back the alligator named ramone what are you talking about it dude it does well no i know but well i don't want to get into spoilers but she never sees it right she never once sees a giant elegant i definitely wanted for this alligator to have some identifying mark yeah so that there could be some sort of reunion yeah so that at the end she could be like oh my god this slashed on its tail i did that with my curling iron on accident like just something like that a radio announcement the next day is announcing the the riots at the 1968 democratic convention in chicago to let us know where and when we are a guy storms into the house while marissa is at school and he picks up the baby gator and flushes it down the toilet in anger i guess he like heard through the grapevine that she got a baby alligator he's like no daughter of mine and just burst into the house and threw it away yeah it really bothered me that it didn't really motivate this action at all there's no explanation for it and that seems to be all he does before he turns around and leaves the house well he says something about like there's alligator turds in the laundry basket but it's like but this alligator seems like it's in the cage yeah like like except for the few hours the day she leaves it in the laundry basket yeah like even if she let it out i don't think she would let it out unsupervised but another woman in the house i don't think it's is it the mom or is it like it's a mother figure okay i couldn't tell who it was but she's her mom she says back later well i know the mom comes back later i don't remember if it was the same actress i thought this might have been like a housekeeper or something oh i'm pretty sure it's the same okay maybe it is but she says what are we gonna tell marissa and he said tell her we found it dead like we did does this mean that the hamsters didn't die did he also flush the hamsters knowing the film's general premise i will wait for mutated hamsters to save the day moving forward we cut to 12 years later so that makes it 1980. robert forster is a cop buying a dog his previous dog was stolen from in front of a store and uh when he says this the guy at the pet shop looks weirdly guilty about it yeah the pet shop owner tries to sympathize with him and also with his male pattern baldness and forester is like why are we talking about this like can't stop touching his head after he says it later at a water treatment plant a team is retrieving a human arm that appears to have been bitten off they also make mention of the remains of a lhasa apso found earlier in the day and the dog's owner shows up to speak with the officers and to identify the body i i really like that the chief of police is involved in this murder like this this body part finding like yeah he came all the way down here and that he's like working with robert forrester's character of david uh dave madison i like that he's so hands-on yeah cause like usually it's like the chief wants to see it's like oh no you know but he's like no the chief is there he's like there in like every scene well yeah you find a disembodied arm you're gonna want to see it in person anyway it's just one of those chief of police of chicago has other things plenty of arms on his desk um but the the guy at the water treatment plant says they found a toe once and were somehow able to id the vic but they never found anything else who keeps their toe prints on file like how do you identify a person from just the toe oh i was gonna get really dark with this but i won't but forrester's comment is it's been a pretty small casket like they've let a coffin just for the toe there are only three lasso opsos registered in the state somehow and so the owner is here at the back of a car iding the dog but she says the markings are all identical but this is for sure not my dog because it's you know it's the size of a golden retriever or like even larger and uh alas opsos like a little purse dog i'm not sure how they decided that that was the breed before they called this woman because the corpse is huge the woman holds up a tiny sweater and she says this fit the dog when it escaped a few months ago so the dog's been missing for months it could have grown since then who knows uh also uh point of note that the dog's larynx had been cut right the pet shop owner finds a golden retriever walking unattended but with a collar and throws it in the back of his van and then he takes a truck full of animals to an experimental lab where a scientist tells him that he needs to bring more puppies that these dogs are not cute enough and he needs to be murdering cuter animals for his science uh the shop owner says that he's a little worried because a cop came by the store today and he thinks they might be onto this illegal animal trafficking operation so the shop owner in addition to selling some dogs also routinely steals dogs and sells them to this lab for experiments this entire premise was very upsetting too yeah especially when we get into forster talking with them you're not allowed to murder dogs in movies no sorry that's a rule it's it's uh you know blake edwards screenwriting books say rescue the cat or save the cat basically the same thing for dogs i would think forster talks with a guy working in the sewers about his co-worker who is missing likely the owner of the arm and the co-worker's name is ed norton which is a weird choice for the character uh even before the actor we recognize as ed norton because there was a character on the honeymooners played by art carney who was a sewer worker named ed norton um so this is clearly a reference to that unless this is a direct sequel to the honeymooners and art carney has been eaten by an alligator shop owner pushes a shopping cart into a drainage channel off the la river and drops a few bags of dead animals from the lab so in addition to providing animals he's also in charge of disposing them so there's not uh dead animals in their garbage i suppose based on this guy's appearance and what he's wearing i don't think he's getting paid enough yeah that's probably true unless he's just really thrifty but also he's very because he's very thorough like he goes all the way deep inside this flood channel like he he just left them like 10 feet from this opening but he he goes really far in there yeah and uh the sound of these bags hitting the ground wakes up this alligator that we see in the sewers and uh one of the dog corpses lands on the side of the sewer not completely in the water so sorry the the meat slapping sound that dog hit was really not what i wanted to hear yeah so he has to climb down this ladder and sort of kick it off into the water this seems less desirable than just tossing them in a dump because these animals will be floating directly to a treatment plant where cops are already finding them but when he gets down into the stream to try and unblock the tube so that the corpses can more easily float through he's very quickly attacked by the waiting alligator back at the treatment plant we find another limb but it's not from the same guy as the arm because he cuts his nails different though people might conceivably cut their fingers and toenails differently i don't know he was wearing alligator wingtips which forced her comments are not regulation sewer worker uniform so this guy was probably not an employee underground they also found kitty litter in the boot which the guy says that he thinks this might be a cat freak which is like or just you know a cat owner in general all cat owners are cat freaks yeah another word another worker hooks a shirt out of the water and forester sees it and basically instantly recognizes it as the pet shop owner's shirt now can you explain to me why he goes to the lab here um what is the clue that leads him to the lab because immediately he's interviewing the scientist uh yeah i don't know how how we got here um it's because he doesn't find out about the larynx cutting thing and at until yeah this that seems to be the thing that connects them so for whatever reason maybe his gut told him go talk to slade labs and uh so he goes to slade and he speaks with the same scientist yeah and i was really concerned because i was like oh my god the pet store owner is dead who's watching after the pets the pet store somebody's got to figure it out yeah yeah like in a week or two in probate no it's gonna be fine yeah he goes to the lab and once he's confirmed that the pet shop owner is the one that died and the scientist insist that if there were an animal shortage that it would just mean a suspension of their research that they wouldn't they wouldn't seek out someone to bring them animals and he said it's it's not it's not unheard of that we would stop down on on our research if we didn't have enough animals to do the experiments he asks if it's possible that a dog could grow very fast or to escape this lab and both answers are no forster observes that the dogs here are awful quiet we cut the larynx when they first come in it helps keep the noise leveled down and the scientists stupidly admits to performing a provable larynx surgery on all animals that have been trafficked through this lab basically admitting to any corpse they find moving forward i'm sure this will come back to bite him the scientist's boss sits him down this is the owner of slade maybe it's slate himself i believe it is slated he sits them down to verify that there's no way the lab can be held liable for what they're doing he seems mostly concerned with bad press because he seems to have the government side of it handled and he also takes a very uncomfortable power stance yeah in his conversation where he comes really close like essentially arthur helms is sitting in a chair in front of this guy's desk but then slade sits on the desk really close to him like with his legs between helm's legs like like you you look up at me while i'm here cradling you we do learn later that these characters have something of a relationship so it's not like they're just employer employee right still uncomfortably close yes so now the robert foster character detective david madison is sent in front of the press to discuss this case and he masterfully avoids all their questions and basically tells them that because of la's sewer system which is chicago's in the movie that the bodies could have been dumped almost anywhere to end up where they did so there's really no telling where they came from and that the bodies were dismembered but they're awaiting a laboratory to confirm the cause of death and when he's pressed for a motive in the killings which he already avoided confirming were murders he said raise newspaper circulation look i can't do this like he's calling out the reporters for having committed the murders a member of the press asks if he's the same officer madison who lost a partner in the hotel baldwin incident in st louis he confirms that he is apparently his partner was shot in an incident prior to joining this department after he leaves the presser a fellow officer david you can't let that ball when hotel things throw you now that was five years ago and nobody blames you and he says well tell that to the press madison asks for a partner to help him investigate the sewers where this might have come from and everybody looks away and so they all blame him for his partner's death yeah but a younger kid says he'll go and it's that house fixer-upper kid from the hearse who uh we learned in that movie doesn't he he seems to be the only person who will trust you when everyone else doesn't also things don't always go his way no not especially another cop gives him [ __ ] about his hairline on his way out of the station and then suddenly we're introduced to a crazy looking dude with a big box under his shirt he takes credit for all the murders and when the cops aren't taking him seriously he presents a time bomb from under his shirt and the young cop tries to draw a gun but madison tells him to stand down i assume because he doesn't believe it's a bomb or maybe they they have a history with this crazy guy but he says that he has orders to blow the station and that they came from a radio broadcast and then he starts to sing the chorus of donna summers on the radio which we had earlier this year as the theme for foxes thanks to giorgio omaroder's pop infused composition work madison tries to leave pretending not to believe what's going on and suddenly everyone is grabbing the crazy guy from different angles and they defuse what turns out to just be a radio on his chest he seems too crazy to have made this convincing a bomb but then there's a lot of different kinds of crazy so in the sewer tunnels the young cop finally realizes that he should have asked why madison left st louis it's difficult to understand some of their dialogue here because the tunnel is very echo-y and this is clearly the audio from set it seems like this kid trusts him they wander into an apparently breathable methane pocket where madison urges him not to light any matches here they step into a hole in the wall to look down below and madison tosses a loose brick into the water to see how far down it is i guess but as he steps away he realizes kelly the younger cop is gone he's silently disappeared and he starts moving around to try and track the kid down he's mostly finding a lot of rats madison inspects a smaller tunnel with something blocking it it looks like maybe the same tunnel that the pet shop owner was trying to dislodge when a pov is suddenly sneaking up quickly behind him and kelly the younger cop just grabs his ass yeah i don't know why he surprises him move somebody there's not a lot of reason to do that yeah especially this guy that you barely know who's like a senior officer at the station it's weird standing up very quickly madison knocks his head against the concrete ceiling of this small tunnel he seems to have found a small lantern and i can't tell was it still on when he found it no it was it was definitely off but because for some reason they think oh that it's clear that someone was here recently it's like couldn't that have been here for a long time yeah it's not like a brand new lantern or anything as they inspect the sewer blueprint again we get a glimpse of an enormous alligator and an errant flashlight beam over their shoulder and it slowly turns to face them before we lose it in the darkness again coming around a corner kelly comes face to face with the monster and fires multiple shots into its mouth before turning to run yeah he's really quick on the draw yeah uh the gator is chasing them full speed down this tunnel like as fast as they can run can gators actually go that fast they can they can go really fast that's why you have to go serpentine because they can't turn very quick but they can charge at you real quick this is good this is good valuable information for our listeners serpentine movements when you're being chased by alligators sewer alligator specifically they get to a ladder up to a manhole cover and madison climbs to the top but he can't get it open and he watches in horror as the monster clamps down on kelly's legs and just rips him away below and we dip to white before we uh wake up with madison in a hospital having lost two partners now likely flying solo for the remainder of this adventure from his nurse and boss's comments it seems like everyone thinks he's just crazy like he came out of this manhole cover shouting about an alligator and they all think that he's insane the shitty reporter from yesterday rubs it in again that now he's two partners down a biologist tells him that the alligator he's describing is impossibly large an alligator half that size would starve in a week there's no sunlight they're toxic fluids and gases not to mention the question of how it got there in the first place i was already certain that this was marissa from the from the get-go yeah i was like this has to be the girl right there's no reason we would show a girl and skip 12 years and then not have it be the girl unless it's just the alligator he asks if he can borrow her book about alligators from her lab and she says yeah sure you can keep it as they're driving away he's talking with his chief and he says look she's a kid she lives with snakes what did you expect and then the chief says i didn't say she was normal i said she had the word on alligators the reporter apparently wrote a front page story about madison's repeat partner loss and his boss reads it aloud in the car when they get back to the station the fellow officers are also reading it in the locker room here we see a poster over someone's shoulder on the wall that says moving machinery is dangerous with an illustration of these sharp mechanical gears coincidentally resembling an alligator's head and teeth when he opens his locker he's greeted with a toy alligator that's been like taped to the door of the locker but it swings out at him apparently this station likes to prank cops when their partners die like within 12 hours this is like a funny thing they do it it's it's very similar to like most movies where they're when the lead character is in disbelief they always put something in similar like right into the mock them yeah like uh was it i was like in batman when they have uh alexander knox when they're showing the drawing that they did to the batman it's a guy it's a bat in a suit yeah the reporter in a hospital now uh is extracting madison's medical record from a very gabby nurse yeah i was really bothered by this i get that like hipaa didn't exist in 1980 but still i feel like there was some sort of like doctor-patient privilege that was still generally respected before there were laws against this yeah and she also she says something along the lines of he's on a lot of meds and then the reporter's like 20 minutes medication but i imdb trivia says that meds was not a popular term at the time and it's like in 1980 i'm pretty sure people knew what meds meant yeah i thought it was more like him just sort of being sly like i'm gonna play dumb and you're gonna feel like an expert so you're gonna tell me more than you intend to it still jumps out in the scene where you're just like what why is he why did he even say that there's no way that she would buy that he didn't know that well and to me it's almost like the nurse is defending what david was saying in the sense that he was on a lot of meds he could have he could have said that he saw jesus you know she didn't say this but i mean that's my opinion but uh i think she was saying she doesn't realize she's digging a deeper hole for him she's trying to get him out of it he learns about madison's claim of alligators in the sewers and he decides to head down there himself because he's that confident that madison is just insane so he goes to what does he expect to find though because if he thinks he's exactly he will find nothing and if he thinks and if he's not crazy he's going to find an alligator both of these are terrible reasons there's other terrible options here too so he's going to where all the disembodied limbs keep flowing away from for all he knows madison is a serial killer yeah like he thinks this guy's crazy and he's been there when all these other people are dying so really the best case scenario is you find an enormous alligator cause otherwise you're just gonna get killed by this guy but he finds a pile of dead dogs and he gets photos of that he gets a photo of the pet shop guys demolished shopping cart and then suddenly ramone starts peeking on him and we get that pov shot again and hopefully kelly is not about to goose this guy nope it's ramon uh luckily the reporter doesn't stop taking pictures for the entire attack and back at home madison is reading a book from dr kendall's lab while his newly adopted dog tries to back out of a chinese food box on the carpet closing the book he realizes that dr kendall herself was the author so when she said oh you you can have that book she was actually tricking him into taking her book home because she needed the sales uh but here we see a first name to marissa confirming my suspicion he gets a call that the reporter is dead and he's secretly ecstatic but it doesn't show i thought for sure this was gonna be uh you know the reporter's dead where were you last night oh sure yeah it was gonna be another nightmare situation yeah but no it's just like he's dead but a similar thing happens in jaws where they get the photographs of the teeth and it's like an argument in his favor right it's in jaws too but it does too yeah they get um it's a the diver is taking photographs and um it's of the eye of the shark yeah but no one in the council seems to see it even though it's the same council from the previous movie yeah it's like how can you not see that there's a shark's eyeball in this photo at the station the chief hands madison kemp's camera and another guy comes out with the developed photos of an obvious alligator well he'll make the front page anyway that's all he really wanted but he already made the front page last week with the report about you killing two partners like seems like this guy's on the front page pretty often i don't think this was like a bucket list situation i was actually kind of surprised that this movie went there because they spent so long focused on not believing him yeah like so much of the movie was about you know that this isn't possible you are dumb you're crazy and then like just suddenly okay now we all believe you either you need to carry this storyline throughout and have it be problematic for longer or you probably shouldn't have hung on it for a third of the movie well they tried to go both ways with it because even now that they have the photographic evidence they try to turn it around and make him look crazy again after that yeah and it's like well no you already like you decided that it was true that he didn't make the thing up but also these pictures were taken so close up it could have been a toy alligator for all you know like maybe he killed this guy in the sewers and he took a bunch of pictures of a toy like i don't know so now the headline above a hand trapped in an alligator's jaw reads reporter takes pics of own killer with the smaller headline beast stalks the city sewers madison channel surfs through five news reports on alligator attacks that he is in charge of investigating in search of an attractive woman apparently because he stops on an interview of marissa who now appears to confirm his alligator diagnosis she still believes that it's a regular-sized alligator maybe smaller than regular dwarfed by the lack of sun it's hard to tell from a few hastily snapped photos i don't know if they were hastily snapped i would be doing it pretty hastily if i was getting eaten accidentally snapped i don't know that they were hastily snapped as he flips through maps he uncovers a potentially second alligator toy i thought it was the same one but you said that it didn't look the same to me the first one so maybe they stuffed another toy in his junk that he took out he's just collecting crappy alligator toys now or maybe he's had them this whole time and that's where his psychosis started suddenly we see swat teams storming the sewers really wishing at this point that ramon had an identifying marker so that marissa would be able to recognize her childhood friend that her dad told her was dead 12 years ago uh we're getting sandbags and barbed wire set up to stop a 50-foot alligator that earlier ate live rounds being fired from a cop gun dr kendall arrives on the scene as madison is explaining the plan to force the alligator out of a specific path she seems to think that they can corner it because she's still expecting a tiny alligator several units check in as they're moving through parallel tunnels to flush the gator out but we see ramon hiding as they go by so they're they're missing it already and we get a couple of like red herrings of like hey unit two isn't checking in i've been trying them all you know like we can't get a hold of them and i was like uh oh like this is how it's going to go like like another unit's going to be going down like but it's just the concrete it's making it harder to talk madison calls her a kid and she says she's not a kid to which he replies everybody younger than me is a kid the plan doesn't appear to work makes it very problematic to date yes oh i'm dating this new kid she's great the plan doesn't work uh the men complete the tunnel and exit the sewer without any sign of an alligator somehow this cancels out the photographic evidence and everyone thinks madison's crazy again and that the pictures just don't exist and also those two people who died didn't die yeah they're still alive everybody's fine and he's just crazy he didn't he didn't even actually have a partner so he didn't lose anyone down there the cops pass a street baseball game on their way back to the station and shortly after they pass the gator just bursts up through the sidewalk and starts running through the neighborhood it's like full-on kool-aid man just erupting first they do this terrible effect of just like shaking the frame yeah of the camera's like oh that's pretty bad and then you get the stretchy concrete floor yeah but like the kids are getting way too close yeah i'm like ah this get out of there why are you hanging around yeah um an arriving police car swerves to avoid the running kids and then slams full speed into a parked car setting both cars on fire and while he's trying to climb out of the patrol car he gets his leg chomped off by the alligator joey one of the kids in the street baseball game runs inside his house to grab a knife from his kitchen while his mom is ignoring his his terrified please i mean not only is your kid running in and yelling at you but he grabbed a knife yeah maybe he paid attention and she's just like oh that's one of my good knives come back here like are you going to murder someone what is happening and she's like this kid is driving me nuts it's like yeah what no this kid is hang up outside we see dr kendall is speaking with joey and he corroborates uh for dr kendall that the alligator was about the length of a an eldorado plus a tail right that was what he said yeah we cut to them just floating around echo park lake in boats because they assume that it went into the lake and they're just setting off charges just blindly throwing explosives into the lake and setting them off hoping to just kill the gator by sheer chance madison and kendall on the sidelines are being replaced with a big game hunter who they called in this is colonel brock ash and misty yeah people are selling gator toys and live gators outside the lake because they're trying to make this into a tourist attraction suddenly i don't know how they got here so fast they literally just decided to set off bombs in this lake the game hunter flirts with a reporter who's trying to get information on the alligator and madison offers kindle and iguana in exchange for some science information they look at cells of the dead lhasa opso under a microscope and they notice mutations in the pituitary gland which is what causes extreme growth specifically in people with like like giants you know like people that have like growth hormone problems that just keep growing their whole lives it's usually something with the pituitary gland she says that dark blue globules indicate that it's been bombarded with some sort of hormone derivative madison prays out loud that the alligator will just die of cancer the game hunter finds a pile of gator [ __ ] in an alley i guess it's out of the water again we suddenly see the alligator sunbathing as it's it's wandered into a residential neighborhood and climbed into the pool in their backyard madison heads back to slade medical and here they admit that some chemical tests can lead to an insatiable appetite which is just a secondary side effect of the extreme growth situation the owner of slade puts in a call and by the time madison gets back to the station he finds out he's losing his badge so he called the mayor and he said call the police chief and he and the police chief said hey you don't work here anymore on his way out of the station he pops into the evidence locker to take the fake time bomb from earlier and also a real bomb [Laughter] that's convenient yeah well it's also convenient that you can use a fake bomb to make a real bomb if you just add dynamite yeah it's like wasn't this a radio didn't we determine this was just a radio i mean i guess it had a clock function but it doesn't have like a triggering mechanism does it or i guess you set it to the alarm yeah so the yeah when the timer count counted down they they didn't get the when they were trying to disarm the bomber they couldn't do it so when the countdown reached zero the radio came on right uh and so i guess he's just saying hey i'll just replace the radio portion with this dynamite yeah because that's how that works yeah i don't know how much electrical charge it takes to ignite dynamite i imagine enough for a spark i would guess yeah madison tells dr kendall that he was fired and she agrees to team up and hunt down the alligator in a small bite-sized group he asks if she's ever had any boyfriends weirdly and she starts to just go through her relationship history while they're hunting the alligator in the sewer they also recruit calen yeah the guy that was talking to them about his co-worker dude why would this guy volunteer to go into the sewer when they absolutely know there's a gator down there yeah it's weird madison advises them to split up insanely yeah i wonder which of these three is about to get eaten the leading man the leading lady or what's his name [Laughter] dr kendall yanks a dog collar out of a wall and suddenly like a whole dog carcass falls out of it toward her we cut from the sewers i liked your observation here where you're like how did the alligator get this big if he's only eating parts of these ducks one bite of each step uh also i was just horrified by this moment because she falls full body backwards into the water yeah and it gets all over her face and then at one point she licks her lips [Music] you have so many like you like you're gonna get mercy you have covered a thousand right now oh also when he comes and you know checks on her it's like are you okay yeah i'm fine i'm like no no you're not no you're not that that is not gray water that is the blackest of black water we cut from the sewers to mr slade organizing what looks like a wedding reception i feel like this is where you step into full satire mode where you're like okay i get it i see that it's a joke yes this part was cheesy and well anticipated yeah moment you know it's like oh my daughter's big day it's very clear right away this the day of my daughter's yes uh slade lectures the mayor for holding up products that he's worried about getting tracked back to the company he's basically advising the mayor to not let anyone look too closely at this alligator for fear of implicating slade and costing the mayor his precious donation money that he needs to get reelected slade introduces his future son-in-law arthur hill and this is his number one boy the [ __ ] scientist from slade enterprises who's been hitting mute on all of the stolen dogs in town so after they hunted down the alligator and found nothing dr kendall decided she's going to come back to madison's home and she calls her mom from there who i guess she lives with and her mom is very excited about her daughter finally getting laid we cut to the darkest scene in this whole movie it's so sad and dark compared to everything else we're at a pirate-themed children's birthday party the gator had found that nice pool in the backyard and a pair of older brothers blindfold their younger sibling to make him walk the plank into their pool but just before he reaches the tip of the diving board their mom turns on the pool lights and the kid can see the gator in the pool underneath his blindfold and starts freaking out but his brothers don't know why he's screaming and they think he's just scared of the water and they think it's funny so they push him into the pool and then the gator swallows the kid whole well it wasn't totally whole there was a lot of blood that's true yeah i guess there was at least a bite there's some champion going on but still it was just like they're not gonna kill this kid right that's so crazy uh yeah my big my all caps oh [ __ ] in my nose that was like so much darker than i expected this film to go anywhere because and like it's worse because the kid sees it like it'd be one thing like if the kid went into the pool blind like yeah like but also because his brothers did it yeah it's their fault and they're gonna live with that for the rest of their lives and he was scrambling and screaming for his life before they killed him yep so dark back at madison's place above his bed we see a poster for ramon santiago who i guess robert forster was actually a fan of or friend of and he suggested this poster for the wall but it's clearly a reference also to ramon the alligator and maybe ramon the alligator is a reference to this guy oh maybe before they leave for dinner madison asks hey just so i know are we going to have sex later and she says yep and you think like okay so sometimes patrick paraphrases on this show just to be funny that's not actually what they said but that's pretty close to what they said yeah i'm lightly paraphrasing madison tells marissa the story of his first dead partner because what else gets a girl in the mood his partner was killed while he thought he had a gun trained on him but it turned out the guy that was holding him up had a roll of pennies and the other guy had a gun so he can't forgive himself because he assumed these pennies were a gun and he let his partner get shot well but not only that the neither of them actually had a gun when they went in they took his gun so his partner got killed with his own gun oh okay which is probably why everyone's like nah i'm gonna hang out here at the station and i made 50 cents yeah there you go that's a cheap gun she plays with his hair a little bit and he brings up his baldness again and says he's very sensitive about it apparently all these jokes about the the male pattern baldness were forster's idea to bring up in the scene yeah because the whole time i was like wow he's really going along with this like i feel like that would be impossible as a screenwriter to be like hey is it cool if we make fun of how you look like occasionally in the movie but i guess he was pretty sensitive about it at the time so he's like i don't want to go through this whole movie and have people just see this going on and have me not comment on it so can we just make a joke about it every once in a while wow and uh the joke carries through the movie jackie brown because that's the whole reason that tarantino put him in the movie is because he's basically playing the same character from this movie and so they do a lot of male pattern baldness jokes in that movie too which are really the only two like major instances of him doing that in a movie so it's clearly a reference to this the trophy hunter brock hires a group of children to help him uh track the gator through the alleys of the city because he doesn't really know his way around once again he's not patrick is not being funny they are literally they're like 14 and 15 year old kids well but it's also pretty offensive because he talks about how he would like go on a safari and hire the locals yeah you know and like the natives to wherever he's on safari this is his equivalent to that yeah these are the locals so he asks them to help track this gator because he doesn't know where ali's lead and we see ramon hiding in a pile of garbage brock sees the gator's shadow as he's moving down the alley and he drops his flask in surprise because he's getting sauced on the job once uh once ramone finally snaps he makes very quick work of brock he just marches forward and just sucks him right in it and he takes a few rifle shots to the face but he takes him like a champ and uh the kids that were quote-unquote helping him uh try to fire the gun but i guess it's out of bullets or jammed and so they end up dropping the gun and just running away so we don't murder any more children in this movie that's nice at a diner a pair of cops enter and madison is there having dinner with dr kendall and they tell him what happened dr kendall says i understand how you must feel and madison says don't understand me so quick which just seems like kind of a forced fight between the two of them but uh she's pretty upset about it and she leaves and he chases her out with mom will be waiting to just pick on her for not affording uh an independent lifestyle because she knows a lot about alligators instead of like a real job you know you don't know if that's why she lives with her mom maybe her mom's crazy and needs help because we find out later her mom is not crazy at all her mom is the least crazy person i've ever met really he has a nightmare flashback to kelly's death in black and red he wakes very loudly shouting kelly in his apartment at a television that's playing an old dinosaur movie that features reptiles as dinosaurs where they just sort of put like clay molds on a reptile to give it frills and there that's a triceratops now with a long lizard tongue he decides that he's gonna go talk to dr kendall again so he goes to her house and we just cut immediately to him sitting in her kitchen with her mom around a dinner table how does he even know where she lives i don't know he's a cop i guess he's picked her up before he's not a cop anymore but he still has the detective skills he's gonna cop a feel if you know what i mean i'm not sure if you know what i mean but he's gonna grover uh dr kendall's mother tells him that she has an evil eye and she makes him guess which one it is covering them one at a time until she makes a blatantly evil face for the second eye which is a great joke and i love it dr kendall finally enters in a robe and they are immediately having sex again like they just wander out of the room to have sex i i love i love her her flirt line of want to see my rock because collection a euphemism for it i just think it's a reference to her being a nerd yeah it's like it comes because it's my rock collection it would make more sense coming from him though but he's not a nerd she he we're establishing that she's the nerd yes all right the next day they head back for me it was clear it was totally no it's hard but i thought there should be a double entendre of whatever she's offering to show him just for that joke i dumped sand in my crotch you like it no maybe she's looking for something equally as hard to add to her collection i need something else to throw in the tumbler that's what i call my vagina um the next day they head back out on the hunt and it looks like they're driving down pleasant valley road by the camarillo airport kind of teams of cops on boats are training automatic weapons on the alligator as it surfaces in a man-made waterway they fire on it repeatedly before it dives and even at this point i was like there's no way they're gonna lose this thing again this is ridiculous if they lose it at this point it surfaces again mere feet away and they charge it with their boat instead of shooting at it uh for no apparent reason i don't know what the plan was here yeah one of the men one of the men pulls out a grenade from a big box of grenades and he pulls the pin just before they ramp off of the alligator yeah um i mean is this supposed are they jumping the shark here like literally trying to like yeah jump over the alligator it was visible for 30 seconds before they hit it so it's weird that they ramped off of it but in the air he drops the live grenade into the box with all the other grenades which don't match like none of these are the same grenades yeah um it's just a miscellaneous grenade prop box um and the whole ship obviously is blown sky high killing everyone aboard except for the reckless guy with the grenade who lands in the middle of the river and a second speedboat races up to pull him out but they show up seconds too late and it costs him a couple legs he's got some below the knee amputations going on chief shouty shouts more unnecessarily into a radio the wedding reception at slade's place is underway the mayor weirdly interrupts slade's barbecue lesson repeatedly i i love the look on the mayor's face like he's he's so eagerly awaiting the story that he's making mental notes as he's talking he's like yeah you use hickory hickory okay okay and you do a lot of that okay and he just keeps jumping in with these words and slade could not be more obvious with the signals that he's saying like i'm hitting on this girl stop talking to me stop interrupting my story i thought he was like trying to tell him about like oh there's police on the way or something like that but he's just no he's literally just wants to be a part of the conversation ramone shows up fashionably late to the party everyone is screaming and freaking out and tripping over each other uh the gator chomps down on a woman in a full french maids outfit yeah who is delivering drinks around this party she disappears bloodly into ramon's gullet it's real that's also really horrifying these people are being swallowed whole yeah that's what happened to brock too he just went right down the bride is knocked into the pool by rioting party-goers and see i was so excited for everyone to get in the pool i was like oh man this pool scene's gonna go crazy this is gonna be dark red water no it doesn't happen yeah a guy fires the smallest gun yet at the biggest gator anyone's ever seen ramon flies under tables after people he throws a full table high into the air he's tossing guests back with wax of his tails he sends one flying right through the wedding cake slade slams shut his limousine and locks the door before the mayor can get in stranding him as gator bait in the yard the groom gets munched he's sideways in the mouth though he doesn't get swallowed whole which i don't know i guess i would rather get swallowed whole than crunched in half i don't know that's a good question me the mayor gets eaten also he can't find another car to hide in and slade even though he's in his protective limousine uh it's just getting bashed to pieces by the tail of this alligator like the alligator knows very clearly what it's doing yeah and it literally just crushes this thing tighter than a compactor at a junkyard well and and even when slade got in and locked the door and the alligator was coming by notice here why isn't the driver driving yeah as soon as the door was closed that car should have been in motion yeah but uh but he doesn't and this limousine gets smashed completely flat and uh slade juice just starts dribbling out of the bottom madison and dr kendall arrive at the gate apparently no one has managed to leave this party because the guy the gate has no idea that anything is amiss he's like can i see your invitations please and they point a gun in his face and he's like oh go right in then i'm not getting paid to like keep criminals out or anything that's not my job wait no that is my job [ __ ] come back they determined that the gator has escaped back into the sewer madison heads back down with another flashlight and tiny gun and possibly madison climbs down the same first ladder that the pet shop owner climbed down but from a manhole cover instead of going in through like a tunnel off of the waterway it doesn't make any sense but we're using the same location again madison immediately runs into ramon and fires several shots at him he puts on a gas mask and starts to head back through the methane cloud intending to kill this gator with an explosion so he really didn't need the dynamite i guess he's just looking to enhance the explosion i guess enhance he fumbles through his backpack for the time bomb which he sets for two minutes before ramon uses tail whip and it's super effective my concern with like with like setting a timer when you already have the dynamite connected is that it starts at zero yeah and i was like like just powering it on sets the bomb off yeah i was like i was like set it for two minutes then connect the dynamite then start the timer yeah right as he starts to lift the manhole cover a car pulls up on top of it dr kennel sees this from above and after a fruitless argument she shoves the woman out of the driver's seat to move the car free so that madison can uh get out of this hole and the bomb just tears ramon to shreds yeah and all the manhole covers nearby are getting blasted into the sky cars are exploding if they're parked on top of them in the aftermath chief shouty tells him that everything's going to be okay madison threatens to set him up with dr kendall's mother i wanted more from him in response to this he's just like what what are you talking i wanted to be like what does she look like like he's kind of into it but uh they look back down into the sewers and then we get the line we got him they sure did they close it up and back below we see a new baby alligator tumble out of a spout into the uh the chemically sewers i know that uh for the previous episode when you were saying on the reading the imdb synopsis the navy synopsis is incorrect that's not your fault but what was it it says that um the alligator was living off of genetically modified sewer rats yeah it was the dogs it was dogs it was puppies maybe i guess but there's rats down there too but there's clearly no rats in the lab yeah they're not gmo uh rats which is weird because why wouldn't you work with rats like that's what laboratories have been doing forever you want to make reo us's aren't rats closer to humans than dogs i would think that's why you work with pigs yeah this was directed by lewis teague he directed a couple stephen king titles cujo and cat's eye he directed jewel of the nile which is the the second film right correct the not as good one yeah he also directed collision course which is the original rush hour starring pat morita and jay leno that's a buddy cop feature wow i don't ever need to watch that and what else did he direct ooh navy seals um writing credits we have john sales obviously his first screenplay was piranha in 1978 yeah he had three features in 1980 this return of the sakaka 7 which he directed and battle beyond the stars which we'll deal with later next he'll have the howling again for joe dante next year he also wrote brother from another planet clan of the cave bear and more recently he wrote the spiderweight chronicles movie which i actually kind of enjoyed um the story here was by frank ray pirelli he has mostly acting credits he has extras and a lot of random stuff dating back to the mid-50s most recently he was an old italian man in wedding crashers coincidentally this film also features a wedding crasher robert forster was david madison he plays rex cherry and jackie brown which is sort of a continuation of this character but with fewer alligators he was in the last season of breaking bad he was sheriff truman on twin peaks he just passed away in october and our friend susannah fogel directed one of his final acting credits in uh the apple tv plus series the the reboot of the amazing stories but uh looks like a cool one i haven't gotten around to checking it out yet i don't even know if it's been released yet by the time this drops it will have been released so look up the one about superheroes with robert forster it's probably cool because she's very funny robin riker played marissa here not a lot of credits really a lot of one-offs on a bunch of tv shows she was in a slider she was in a buffy she was in a justified she was also brink's mom in the disney channel movie brink so it's a rollerblading or something like that or skateboarding yeah and it's been a long time since i watched it over and over and over the um michael v gazzo was chief clark or shouty he plays frankie pentangelli in the godfather and he's the torelli mob boss in last action hero with another ed norton art carney dean jagger was slayed it's pronounced jagger but when i saw his name in the opening credits i said hey dean yeager that's what i said too which is a lesser used ghostbusters reference uh he won an oscar for his supporting role as major stovall in 12 o'clock high he's credited as prospector and vanishing point he plays dr land in game of death and this was his final film sydney lasik was gutchall that's the pet shop owner uh who no one ever calls guetchell i don't think uh yeah i think he says gutchal's pet store maybe at some point but uh he played cheswick and one floor over the cuckoo's nest that's the guy that's always playing chess he played roscoe and cool as ice and he was also the crystal healer in man on the moon another milo's foreman film obviously we used a lot of people from one floor over the cuckoo's nest but that's the guy who was at the end of andy kaufman's life cheating him out of money by pretending he was removing the cancer with crystals and stuff perry lang was kelly we just had him as paul gordon in the hearse mostly tv directing credits actually henry silva was brock he appears in both versions of ocean's eleven he's our second killer kane this year after stacy keach in 9th configuration because he played killer kane in the 79 buck rogers movie he's also ray vargo and ghost dog and he's got one of those faces like david leisure and airplane where i feel like i know him really well from something but i have no idea what it is i went over his imdb page multiple times if anybody can think of something that's like just a huge title that he did that i might have missed i know that i recognize him and it's not from ocean's eleven i feel like and it's not something that we've covered either this year well i'm trying to find get a hold of this movie called johnny cool from 1916. he's the main character he's the main character and with elizabeth montgomery and i saw this photo here i was like yeah i want to see this movie yeah it looks awesome it's like a bond rip off kind of sue lyon was the she's credited as abc news woman but she's wearing an nbc uniform and holding an nbc microphone i was hoping that he's not going to get this out this like abc woman was like was it going to be somehow the gator cheetah yeah later on she was abc um no she's not featured in any of the attack scenes uh this was her final film appearance but uh she was charlotte goodall in the night of the iguana she's sylvia baran and end of the world and she was lolita in kubrick's lolita she just passed away the day after last christmas actually dan hayes was meyer i'm not sure who meyer is but he played adkins the pimp and don't answer the phone earlier this year i think that's the guy who was reading the newspaper in the locker room but he's the one who had the big band-aid on his head that they shot a bunch of times and he's like what do you mean we i missed john f goff played ash he was al williams in the fog he was that i think that's the missing guy from the boat that was janet lee's husband where they didn't recover his body and there's also an uncredited kane hotter credit as the alligator on this page but i think that's a mistake because apparently he was the alligator in alligator 2 and someone may have put it on here thinking that he wasn't credited for playing the alligator but um i couldn't find any confirmation that he was in the first one but he mentioned the second one multiple times he's probably most famous for his multiple portrayals of jason voorhees over the course of that franchise uh i wanted to add a favorite character actor of mine uh royce d applegate who played callan the sewer worker that they hire oh okay um he is he's a he's a coen brothers regular he uh was one of the main characters on sequest dsv back in the day and that's why that's when i first took note of his name just because his name is royce d applegate yeah um and i know that was a very interesting name i want to mention him but also more importantly i want to talk about the composer craig huxley okay because he is an inventor of a crazy musical instrument called the blaster beam and sounds wonderful tell me more it's it's just a bunch of wire aluminum wire and a tube that you drag this tube back and forth and you rattle a stick inside of it it's super crazy and he does it sound interesting at all it doesn't sound like it works it sounds great all the stuff in star trek the motion picture that's used for v yeah when when um when you see like the cloud approaching and it goes brown like that's all the blaster beam stuff did he do that or yeah it's all him he he is like the only one who knows how to play it uh that's what happens when you invent an instagram yeah uh so you're looking no tutorials anywhere hey yeah you still you look at his he doesn't do many like compositions for films but when you look at all his credits uh like dr sleep blaster beam the orville blaster beam 10 cloverfield lame blaster beam that's funny uh he he he's the only one who knows how to play this musical instrument that's like when i got you the theremin and we were looking up like oh is there a place to get like theremin lessons and it's like no because there's no right way to play a theremin it's like the opposite of a reese's peanut butter cup uh but i'll send i'll send a couple links to his videos you can put on the page because um it's really interesting uh to watch him play it interesting and uh that this thing exists and that people desire it yeah well he they had to you know i mean he walked through a picket line right to do the sound for this movie yeah exactly so he couldn't use uh any union instruments no no i'm not a musician see look all i have is a bunch of wires and a balloon and a tube uh i don't think it was obviously it was used before this but um because the motion star trek the motion picture it was used on there yeah um and because he's mostly as a synth artist but uh yes like the black hole star trek the motion picture or like some of the earlier blaster beam stuff but yeah i enjoyed this film a lot i thought the effects were great i think foster was great i think everybody else played their part really well i mean they were all plugged in as just the cogs in a typical horror movie um but i feel like it was a little bit smarter in the way that it joked about stuff and the obviously the wedding reception is like the ps2 resistance yeah for the whole thing but um i really liked it a lot yeah i think they could have pushed it a little more i liked it but i think you could have that's probably true you could have pushed it over the top more i think that that's why i say that it doesn't really feel like satire because it's not super extreme yeah it's um the the scene with the kid going into the pool was like oh they're not going to do this yeah and they did it and i was like oh boy i got like really like ptsd from yeah we were pretty bummed about it uh oh well i get like really like my heart hurts from watching frank gerebot's version of the blob yeah and when that kid goes in and then he is like screaming melted skeletons is reaching for his friend i was like i cannot believe that they did that or when they kill the kid in uh dr sleep oh yeah that whole scene is nightmarish that's intense so whenever something like that happens in a movie i i for some reason in real life no reaction but when it happens in a movie it's just really psychically damaging yeah oh i know it's it's it i i was it's weird to say that i was glad that they did it no yep that's weird richard no i get it it needed something like that i was like okay this movie is this movie's not afraid of of this it definitely needed just a dollop of what the [ __ ] and that was it uh yeah but i think that it needed more couple more dollops of that more no more comedy to counteract it honestly well i feel like forster plays the part brilliantly though and i feel like there's enough comedy in in his character to carry the entire movie because he's the only one who seems to like have a sense of humor about it even though it's all happening to him yeah yeah i don't know i think that everything could have just been pushed a little further yeah maybe not the child murder scene but everything else and maybe it was just harder to sell for you know what is the studio called didn't it wasn't a major group one films probably didn't wanna like push the uh push the envelope when they were putting this in theaters but uh what do we think on this uh up or down jess yeah i'm still gonna give it a nap yeah yeah that's definitely not for me yeah oh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna give it up and and usually like my criteria obviously is like do would i recommend this movie to people and i can't think of that there's too many people i would recommend it to but definitely some yeah that i would i feel like i would definitely include it if i was going to do a marathon with like some of those like grizzly and this or piranha and this um i think it'd be it'd be a fun marathon situation um letterboxed what are we looking at guys so i'm gonna put it um gosh i think that this is it's above windows so it makes the threshold here um it's actually a little ways above it i'm gonna put it below the last flight of noah's ark but above najinsky okay uh i am also putting this above windows and it's pretty high up there no no well pretty high in the mid range i guess um i'm going to put this just below kearney and just above galaxina okay i am putting this just below galaxina and just above the gong show movie but it seems like we're all in similar place yeah i think that's about it for this one if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share with us we're vintage video pod on twitter facebook instagram and letterbox where as i've said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year we can also be found at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider rating us on itunes to help people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can support the show through patreon.com vintage video podcast thank you so much for listening and i hope you'll join us next time when we'll be discussing blue lagoon which imdb describes like so in the victorian period two children are shipwrecked on a tropical island in the south pacific with no adults to guide them the two make a simpler life together unaware that sexual maturity will eventually intervene we leave you now with the trailer for a blue lagoon a wooden ship a fire at sea and two young children are cast adrift fortune washes them ashore on a fertile aisle [Music] but fate deserts them and they are left utterly alone the years passed but no ship ever did yet the boy and the girl grew strong and tall and beautiful raising themselves on instinct in the bounty of their lost paradise [Music] but this was no eden em and where are you there were mysteries at work here disturbing and compelling the one mystery lay on the forbidden side of the island dark sinister the other mystery was hidden deeper still [Music] what are you doing richard [Music] within this girl now woman this boy now man the mystery of desire she sees that his shoulders are wide she senses there is one secret here she doesn't know what are you looking at your muscles and something inside her stirs i feel so funny in my stomach me too my heart's beating so fast mine too [Music] columbia pictures presents a sensuous story of natural love starring brook shields and introducing christopher atkins [Music] [Applause] the blue lagoon [Applause] [Music]