Alligator is a 1980 American independent horror film directed by Lewis Teague and written by John Sayles.
Set in Chicago, the film follows a police officer and a reptile expert who track an enormous, ravenous man-eating alligator flushed down the toilet years earlier, that is attacking residents after escaping from the city's sewers.
[4][5] In 1968, a teenage girl purchases a baby American alligator while on vacation with her family at a tourist trap in Florida and gives it the name Ramon.
When the family returns home to Chicago, the girl's surly, animal-phobic father promptly flushes it down the toilet and into the city's sewers.
The baby alligator survives by feeding on the discarded carcasses of animals used in illegal experimentation and dumped into the sewers.
These animals had been used as test subjects for an experimental growth formula intended to increase agricultural livestock meat production.
During the 12 years spanning 1968 and 1980, the baby alligator bioaccumulates concentrated amounts of this formula from feeding on these carcasses, causing it to mutate and grow into a perpetually ravenous 36 foot (11 m) monster resembling a Deinosuchus-Purussaurus hybrid with an almost-impenetrable hide.
The resulting discovery of body parts exiting the sewers draws in world-weary police detective David Madison who, after a horribly botched case in St. Louis, has gained a reputation for being lethally unlucky for his assigned partners.
The two of them edge into a prickly romantic relationship, and during a visit to Kendall’s house, Madison bonds with her motor-mouthed mother, Madeline.
No one believes Madison’s story due to a lack of a body, and partly because of Slade, the influential local tycoon who sponsored the illegal experiments and therefore wants the truth concealed.
This changes when obnoxious tabloid reporter Thomas Kemp, one of the banes of Madison’s existence, goes snooping in the sewers and procures graphic and indisputable photographic evidence of the beast at the involuntary cost of his life.
The ensuing hunt continues, including the hiring of pompous big-game hunter Colonel Brock to track the animal.
This wasn’t my idea; I had been very skeptical about it because I had heard about all the problems Steven Spielberg had with his giant rubber shark when he had made Jaws.
So I had my doubts about this rubber alligator, but the producer had already started spending money to build it before I got hired to direct the film.
It gives the actors something to do apart from “Look!” “Watch out!” and “Duck!”"[15] Teague later said he wanted to make the film "scary, but I sort of changed course right before we started shooting."
[10] The internal mechanics used to bring the Alligator to life were created by Richard Helmer who had previous worked on the shark in Jaws.
"[16] Commentary on the Lions Gate Entertainment DVD gives the location as Chicago, the police vehicles in the film appear to have Missouri license plates.
[21] Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave the film a mostly positive review, writing that its "suspense is frequently as genuine as its wit and its fond awareness of the clichés [it uses]".
"[23] Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film one out of four stars, suggesting that it would be best to "flush this movie down the toilet to see if it also grows into something big and fearsome.
[25] In 2007, Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty called the film "Clever, funny, and wonderfully bloody," and wrote that "[this] B movie deserves an...
The film had previously been available on DVD in other territories, including a version released in the United Kingdom in February 2003 by Anchor Bay Entertainment.
Factory released a collectors edition of Alligator in the two-disc 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray set on February 22, 2022 under their Scream!