As with every box office success, Jaws spawned a cycle of ripoffs. For a while it seemed that every tough-guy animal actor who owned a bathing suit had landed an agent. There was Orca: The Killer Whale (1977), Tentacles (1977), Barracuda (1978), Piranha (1978), Alligator (1981), and The Great Alligator, (aka The Big Alligator River before the cycle petered out with Crocodile (1986), and Evil Below (1989).
Evil Below and The Big Alligator River are my favorites. Evil Below is noteworthy for its unusual mix of demonism and undersea horror. A Caribbean treasure hunt thriller with borrowings from Satan's Triangle and Jaws.
But The Big Alligator River is better still. Cheesy, shamelessly derivative, stunningly stupid, and enormously enjoyable. In other words, your typical low-budget Italian ripoff.
You already know the plot. You've seen it before. Here it is again: A greedy white businessman (Mel Ferrer) opens an ostentatious hotel in a third world jungle. His timing is awful. Something in the river has begun killing people. The nearby natives think it's the "great god Kruna," who is angry at them for associating with white men.
No, it's not Kruna. You know what it is. The film's title is kind of a giveaway.
Anyway, as you'd expect, Ferrer attempts the usual coverup, lest the tourist trade dry up. The heroes (Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassinelli) suspect something fishy going on, what with all those missing people. Happily, their warnings prove futile. The body count is generous indeed.
One of the fun things about The Big Alligator River is that the victims are so boorish or thinly sketched that one is free to enjoy the alligator attacks. The victims are more colorful than in most slasher films, but in the broad strokes of caricature rather than character. And remarkably un-PC caricatures.
Apart from its relative obscurity, I'm guessing one reason the film has avoided PC outrage is because its story is so stupid, it's hard to take seriously. Another reason is that the mostly white tourists are as unflattering as the colored natives. It's difficult deciding who comes off worse.
The tourists are fat, greedy, lustful, stupid, and disrespectful of the environment (drunkenly shooting monkeys from the safety of a boat). Ugly Americans, boorish Germans, eccentric Brits. (One Brit matron expounds upon UFOs, for no particular reason.) There's even an obnoxiously precocious brat to offer inappropriate commentary on the adults' sexcapades.
As for the indigenous tribesmen, they're cruel, savage, primitive, superstitious, fearful, stupid, and ignorant of science (offering Bach as live human sacrifice to their "great god Kruna"). And in case one human sacrifice proves inadequate to appease Kruna, the natives attack the hotel, slaughtering tourists with gusto. Just last night, these tribesmen were happily performing colorful native dances for the tourists, in exchange for such fabulous gifts as pants and alcohol. Now, they resemble the sadistic savages from Make Them Die Slowly, implying that, while you can take the BLANK out of the jungle, you can't take the jungle out of the BLANK. (We'll let Archie Bunker complete those blanks.)
Article comments
1 - Joanie
I keep waiting for your review of To The Devil A Daughter.
2 - Thomas M. Sipos
It's been a while since I saw To the Devil, a Daughter. I remember being disappointed with it.