Alligator

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Year:	1980
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Lewis Teague
Genre:	Quality creature feature
Starring:	Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael V. Gazzo
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080354/
Tagline:	At first, no one believed. But now, no one will ever forget!
Favourite line:	"I've seen what this animal can do.  You'd better take all the help you can get."

A monster movie with real teeth.

The plot:
A young girl buys a baby alligator from a fair, much to her father’s annoyance. Tolerating the critter, briefly, he finally loses his patience, and flushes it down the toilet.
Skip forward ten years or so, and Slade Laboratories are working on drugs which will genetically enhance livestock, so they grow massive, thus yielding more meat. Experimenting on rats and stray dogs, the laboratory illegally disposes of the animals corpses in the sewers.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Alligator only goes and eats the corpses, thereby absorbing the ‘massive-matter-molecules’ and growing to an enormous size.
When people start turning up dead, clearly eaten, a local detective becomes convinced that something sinister lurks in the sewers.
Then the monster bursts free of the sewers, and goes on a bloody rampage……

Penned by genre favourite John ‘Battle Beyond the Stars, The Howling’ Sayles, this is elevated from bog standard B-movie to something eminently watchable by a really, really good script, and a cast who can actually turn in convincing performances.
Robert Forster, in the lead role of Detective David (!), is tough as old boots, seeming almost to be chiselled from granite, his Italian-American good looks making him the perfect tall, dark near-silent hero and Robin Riker as Marisa, the female scientist drafted in as croc-expert, does just fine, too.
With plenty of social commentary, the pacing is near perfect, with very little in the way of aimless wandering around that you would normally expect to see in a movie of this kind. When exploring the sewers, the characters are actually given interesting things to say to each other, so it does not drag for a minute.
Effects wise, well, it is a low budget affair, so expect plenty of shots from the POV of the ‘gator itself, or from a camera riding on the back of a big plastic alligator head, in comedy fashion. Indeed, this is to Crocodylia movies what Jaws was to Carcharodon ones, and the beast here is no more, nor no less convincing than Spielberg’s big rubber fish.
Climaxing in a ten minute munch-a-thon, as the be-toothed behemoth gate crashes an outdoor party, if silliness, character development, and an unconvincing mutant animal/monster sounds like the kind of thing to float your boat, you’d be pretty well advised to check this one out.
Far, far better than it has any logical right to be.