cult film freak: ROBERT FORSTER VS THE JAWS OF LEWIS TEAGUE'S 'ALLIGATOR'

Poster art for Lewis Teague's ALLIGATOR Year: 1980

Of the many JAWS-clones, ALLIGATOR is the most original, and, the second with an original screenplay by John Sayles after PIRANHA, there's an extremely memorable opening with a baby alligator getting flushed down a toilet...

Well little "Ramon" grows up, and really, really big since a corporation's testing a growth-serum on dogs, and a pet store owner tosses the enlarged, steroid-filled corpses into the Los Angeles sewer that the gator feeds and grows on: The audience learning all this a step before Robert Forster's cop with a past, David, a kind of old school detective type snooping around and ultimately believing what seems farfetched if impossible. Like JAWS, the mayor cares only about money, and there are enough edgy obstacles to make this creature-feature play like a legitimate thriller...

Leslie Brown as a young Robin Riker in Alligator SCORE: ****

That's what Robert Forster brings to any role, good or bad, a beyond-natural approach like he isn't even trying. Not difficult here with a romantic/working relationship with lovely Robin Riker, as the reptile expert Richard Dreyfuss to Forster's Roy Scheider, while a Captain Quint big-game-hunter Henry Silva doesn't have nearly enough screen time...

And once the gator's on the frenzied citywide body count rampage — starting earlier with pesky reporter Bart Braverman and rookie cop Perry Lang — the show's just about over, leading to a THIRD MAN inspired finale in the sewers, where, pitted against the titular adversary, we get more proof that — as a character-actor who would sporadically shoehorn into leading man category but without losing character — Robert Forster could sell just about anything.