It’s one week to the Thibodaux Alligator Festival and this stretch of Louisiana backwater is about to come face to face with a menace which will put their fiftieth annual celebrations under threat. Or maybe it’s not exactly face to face, as the generally soused townsfolk are under threat from something that has a specific M.O. of “eatin’ people - by the ass”!
Executive producer, writer and director Paul Dale’s DIY creature feature opens with a promotion for the forthcoming Alligator Festival which captures the ramshackle nature of both local advertising and the movie itself. Sewer Gators is an ultra-low budget enterprise which spends a substantial proportion of its time swerving flashy visuals and special effects, relying on its sense of cheesy humour and the overriding sense that this is a bad film that knows it’s bad.
As welcome an idea as this could be, there isn’t an endless supply of goodwill that can be generated from pointing at your own work and inviting you to chuckle along at how terrible the on-screen action is. Eventually, the viewer is likely to cross that line into the territory of “Hold on, this really is terrible, why am I watching this?”. For connoisseurs of this kind of thing, Sewer Gators staves off a trip there – just about – by virtue of its short running time, its cast of eternally bewildered, backwoods monster fodder and its penchant for Jaws references. Everyone else? All bets are off.
Even at just over an hour, the plot still manages to tread water more than its occasional shots of real alligators, throwing in skits featuring intrepid local Live Action News reporter - not to mention generally awful human being - Brock Peterson (Dale again) and a weird subplot involving a wandering Mormon who gets fairly short shrift from the locals as he attempts to spread the good word. This particular strand of the story is resolved in a bizarre way which you will not see coming. That’s not to say it’s logical, or even good, but you will not see it coming.
The opening spools out to a fun song but even at that early point in the proceedings there’s an ominous taste of the leisurely approach this will take when it comes to the alligator action. The titles flash up messages such as “DON’T WORRY” followed by “THE FILM WILL START SOON” and although there’s something audacious, perhaps oddly amusing, about such blatant time filling even before the bloody thing’s even reached the ten-minute mark, it’s also annoying.
The first victim of the titular beast is the unfortunate Pete, who lives in a house with little furniture and he buys the farm before he can fulfil his partner’s request that they should “go to the IKEAs”. From then on, the story alternates between the day to day activities of Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau) and various gator versus citizen vignettes, the kills delivered via bloodless POV. The fleeting glimpses of ketchup look as if it’s just that being deployed – ketchup. I was left feeling hungry for chips rather than having my bloodlust satisfied.
A good while after the point at which the story looks like it’s going nowhere at all, alligator expert Laura Andrews (Manon Pages) shows up and the scene is set for the forces of law order, the forces of science and the forces of seasoned prepper/gator hunter Shane (Austin Naulty) to team up and definitely not mirror anything that happens in a very famous shark movie I may have mentioned earlier.
To be fair, some of those homages are responsible for raising the few smiles on offer here. There’s a familiar face off between Mayor and Sheriff about the prospect of the Festival being cancelled, the rip-off of the “nails down the chalkboard” sequence is nicely done and Shane’s dialogue can best be described as Quint-essential, let’s put it that way.
I’m willing to bet that this was a whole lot of fun to make but I spent the bulk of Sewer Gators willing for that joy to translate into the film I was watching. The scattershot approach to the material isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the gator menace often takes a back seat to odd characters doing weird things for comedic effect. It’s pleasing there are running gags throughout but the quality of them is often ropey and there’s a tendency to hammer the more inspired ideas into the floor.
When Thibodaux’s finest are under attack in the final act, the focus moves from unseen terror to inanimate, rubber facsimiles being thrown at the actors who are required to wrestle with them as best they can. I’ll admit, I cracked up laughing the first time it happened but the law of diminishing returns sets in extremely quickly and by the time Sheriff’s Office employee Gladyis (Sophia Brazda) was flailing around her kitchen with tiny plastic critters stuck on her face, I had to check that someone hadn’t spiked my cup of tea.
It has to be said that Sewer Gators does pull out all the CGI stops for its climax. Well, some of the CGI stops anyway. Well, maybe a couple of CGI stops. There is a payoff but it’s brief, unspectacular and doesn’t match the ridiculousness of what’s gone before. Fade to black. At just over fifty-two minutes. Huh? Let’s just go back and check the timer there. Yes. Just over fifty-two minutes. I mean, I don’t think it could be justifiably called a short, but…
Let’s also give a shout out to those end credits which are the slowest moving I’ve ever seen, taking the best part of NINE minutes to finally shift themselves from the screen. I’ve seen Marvel movies get their cast and crew info out of the way more quickly and they employ a small country’s worth of talent. Still, this gives plenty of time for those actors to enjoy their name in lights and the means to get the movie over an hour in length using a method so barefaced in its cheek that one of the credits actually tells you it’s doing so. If you’re a fan of procrastination, this could be the film for you.
The result of this literal crawl is that you can hear a conspiracy-laden local radio broadcast called Swamp Talk as you wonder whether those names are actually scrolling at all, then there are a few out-takes, an infomercial of sorts for a Freedom Toilet (I’m not making this up) and a closing song which, as self-referential tunes go, falls some way short of the gold standard for this type of ditty set by the peerless, Sinatra-style crooning from Zombeavers.
Even with a runtime that’s one helping of episodic television once you chop off the front and back acknowledgments, casual viewers are going to be checking their watches after the first couple of characters have died from having a camera zoom in on their face and bad movie buffs might well be annoyed at how much they’re being purposely, consistently nudged about the lack of quality on display here.
Performance-wise, Pages and Bellau aren’t exactly Streep and De Niro – and you shouldn’t expect them to be - but they’re not terrible and, to be fair, the material doesn’t allow them to do much other than goof around and pause for the audience to laugh. And I really did want to laugh. As someone who makes a point of trying to steer folks towards underseen, micro budgeted efforts, titles such as Sewer Gators, for all the enthusiasm on display, don’t provide the greatest evidence to challenge those raised on multiplex-friendly flicks.
If you’ve partaken of more alcohol than even the most sozzled of Thibodaux’s perma-refreshed population, Sewer Gators may be for you. If you’re a bad movie completist, this review will probably have you downloading it right now. For the rest of the planet, this will feel like a series of loosely-related sketches stretched to breaking point. Gorehounds, genre buffs, gator fans and giggle aficionados alike will all feel short changed by this one.
Executive producer, writer and director Paul Dale’s DIY creature feature opens with a promotion for the forthcoming Alligator Festival which captures the ramshackle nature of both local advertising and the movie itself. Sewer Gators is an ultra-low budget enterprise which spends a substantial proportion of its time swerving flashy visuals and special effects, relying on its sense of cheesy humour and the overriding sense that this is a bad film that knows it’s bad.
As welcome an idea as this could be, there isn’t an endless supply of goodwill that can be generated from pointing at your own work and inviting you to chuckle along at how terrible the on-screen action is. Eventually, the viewer is likely to cross that line into the territory of “Hold on, this really is terrible, why am I watching this?”. For connoisseurs of this kind of thing, Sewer Gators staves off a trip there – just about – by virtue of its short running time, its cast of eternally bewildered, backwoods monster fodder and its penchant for Jaws references. Everyone else? All bets are off.
Even at just over an hour, the plot still manages to tread water more than its occasional shots of real alligators, throwing in skits featuring intrepid local Live Action News reporter - not to mention generally awful human being - Brock Peterson (Dale again) and a weird subplot involving a wandering Mormon who gets fairly short shrift from the locals as he attempts to spread the good word. This particular strand of the story is resolved in a bizarre way which you will not see coming. That’s not to say it’s logical, or even good, but you will not see it coming.
The opening spools out to a fun song but even at that early point in the proceedings there’s an ominous taste of the leisurely approach this will take when it comes to the alligator action. The titles flash up messages such as “DON’T WORRY” followed by “THE FILM WILL START SOON” and although there’s something audacious, perhaps oddly amusing, about such blatant time filling even before the bloody thing’s even reached the ten-minute mark, it’s also annoying.
The first victim of the titular beast is the unfortunate Pete, who lives in a house with little furniture and he buys the farm before he can fulfil his partner’s request that they should “go to the IKEAs”. From then on, the story alternates between the day to day activities of Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau) and various gator versus citizen vignettes, the kills delivered via bloodless POV. The fleeting glimpses of ketchup look as if it’s just that being deployed – ketchup. I was left feeling hungry for chips rather than having my bloodlust satisfied.
A good while after the point at which the story looks like it’s going nowhere at all, alligator expert Laura Andrews (Manon Pages) shows up and the scene is set for the forces of law order, the forces of science and the forces of seasoned prepper/gator hunter Shane (Austin Naulty) to team up and definitely not mirror anything that happens in a very famous shark movie I may have mentioned earlier.
To be fair, some of those homages are responsible for raising the few smiles on offer here. There’s a familiar face off between Mayor and Sheriff about the prospect of the Festival being cancelled, the rip-off of the “nails down the chalkboard” sequence is nicely done and Shane’s dialogue can best be described as Quint-essential, let’s put it that way.
I’m willing to bet that this was a whole lot of fun to make but I spent the bulk of Sewer Gators willing for that joy to translate into the film I was watching. The scattershot approach to the material isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the gator menace often takes a back seat to odd characters doing weird things for comedic effect. It’s pleasing there are running gags throughout but the quality of them is often ropey and there’s a tendency to hammer the more inspired ideas into the floor.
When Thibodaux’s finest are under attack in the final act, the focus moves from unseen terror to inanimate, rubber facsimiles being thrown at the actors who are required to wrestle with them as best they can. I’ll admit, I cracked up laughing the first time it happened but the law of diminishing returns sets in extremely quickly and by the time Sheriff’s Office employee Gladyis (Sophia Brazda) was flailing around her kitchen with tiny plastic critters stuck on her face, I had to check that someone hadn’t spiked my cup of tea.
It has to be said that Sewer Gators does pull out all the CGI stops for its climax. Well, some of the CGI stops anyway. Well, maybe a couple of CGI stops. There is a payoff but it’s brief, unspectacular and doesn’t match the ridiculousness of what’s gone before. Fade to black. At just over fifty-two minutes. Huh? Let’s just go back and check the timer there. Yes. Just over fifty-two minutes. I mean, I don’t think it could be justifiably called a short, but…
Let’s also give a shout out to those end credits which are the slowest moving I’ve ever seen, taking the best part of NINE minutes to finally shift themselves from the screen. I’ve seen Marvel movies get their cast and crew info out of the way more quickly and they employ a small country’s worth of talent. Still, this gives plenty of time for those actors to enjoy their name in lights and the means to get the movie over an hour in length using a method so barefaced in its cheek that one of the credits actually tells you it’s doing so. If you’re a fan of procrastination, this could be the film for you.
The result of this literal crawl is that you can hear a conspiracy-laden local radio broadcast called Swamp Talk as you wonder whether those names are actually scrolling at all, then there are a few out-takes, an infomercial of sorts for a Freedom Toilet (I’m not making this up) and a closing song which, as self-referential tunes go, falls some way short of the gold standard for this type of ditty set by the peerless, Sinatra-style crooning from Zombeavers.
Even with a runtime that’s one helping of episodic television once you chop off the front and back acknowledgments, casual viewers are going to be checking their watches after the first couple of characters have died from having a camera zoom in on their face and bad movie buffs might well be annoyed at how much they’re being purposely, consistently nudged about the lack of quality on display here.
Performance-wise, Pages and Bellau aren’t exactly Streep and De Niro – and you shouldn’t expect them to be - but they’re not terrible and, to be fair, the material doesn’t allow them to do much other than goof around and pause for the audience to laugh. And I really did want to laugh. As someone who makes a point of trying to steer folks towards underseen, micro budgeted efforts, titles such as Sewer Gators, for all the enthusiasm on display, don’t provide the greatest evidence to challenge those raised on multiplex-friendly flicks.
If you’ve partaken of more alcohol than even the most sozzled of Thibodaux’s perma-refreshed population, Sewer Gators may be for you. If you’re a bad movie completist, this review will probably have you downloading it right now. For the rest of the planet, this will feel like a series of loosely-related sketches stretched to breaking point. Gorehounds, genre buffs, gator fans and giggle aficionados alike will all feel short changed by this one.