Verdict
Summary
The movie certainly needed more chomping from the alligator (which is never convincing, but so what?), but it delivers more or less what you expect from a movie with jungle hoodoo, a cursed fashion shoot, and a reptilian predator. Severin pulls out all the stops with their transfer and with tons of bonus interviews.
Plot:
A fashion shoot in Sri Lanka goes horribly wrong when a giant alligator starts eating people.
Review:
A small European fashion team travels to Sri Lanka for a magazine spread, highlighting the latest fashions amidst the local native activity, which is intended to provide some flavor and spice for the magazine spread. The photographer is Daniel (Claudio Cassinelli) who immediately casts his trained eye on an anthropologist staying at the resort next to the river, a beautiful woman named Alice (Barbara Bach) who knows the local customs and traditions. The locals worship a massive alligator, which they consider a god, and when one of the natives goes out frolicking with the European model, they both are eaten alive by the behemoth. It spooks the natives, who believe that the Europeans have awakened the beast’s wrath and so they threaten the European interlopers (there are lots of tourists in the resort hotel as well) with spears to get the hell out before the monster comes after them too. When the alligator (which appears in different sizes due to the production’s relatively low budget) comes out to feed, no one is safe, and sacrifices must be made to the god below or the entire resort will be meat for the beast!
From Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino, who has made some of my all-time favorite exploitation movies (2020: After the Fall of New York, for example), The Great Alligator follows on the riptides of the great Jaws, and while it certainly could’ve been a lot worse for a rip off like the junker Crocodile (also from 1979), it does a fairly admirable job in maintaining our interest by casting the film well and developing the relationships a little bit before the chaos begins. Bach, who was between her best films The Spy Who Loved Me and Caveman, is really fun to watch here, and she’s a good sport for scenes where she gets tied up as bait for the monster, and she doesn’t look the least bit worse for wear while shooting a film in the sweltering Sri Lanka jungles. The movie certainly needed more chomping from the alligator (which is never convincing, but so what?), but it delivers more or less what you expect from a movie with jungle hoodoo, a cursed fashion shoot, and a reptilian predator.
Severin pulls out all the stops for their deluxe 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray combo pack of The Great Alligator with a truly magnificent transfer that sparkles and shines, and they’ve loaded the Blu-ray with a ton of bonus features, including welcome interviews, video essays, production drawings, and trailers.
Special Features
- Down By The River – Interview With Director Sergio Martino
- Minou – Interview With Actress Silvia Collatina
- Beware Of The Gator – Interview With Camera Operator Claudio Morabito
- Later Alligator – Interview With Production Designer Antonello Geleng
- Underwater – Interview With Underwater Camera Operator Gianlorenzo Battaglia
- 3 Friends And An Alligator – Discussion With Cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando, Production Designer Antonello Geleng And Special Effects Supervisor Paolo Ricci
- Paradise House: Christianity And The Natural World In THE GREAT ALLIGATOR – Video Essay By Lee Gambin, Author Of Massacred By Mother Nature
- Alligator Land – Antonello Geleng Shares Original Production Drawings
- Trailer
