Gator King

Customer Reviews:

Chinese Alligators Versus The Jet Ski Assassin!.......2007-02-23

Antonio Fargas (better known as Huggy Bear from "Starsky and Hutch") stars as the evil Santos Lobilita, CEO of Gatorking Industries, a corporation that dabbles in diamond smuggling, serves endangered animals at their restaurant, has ties with the mob, and is a general menace. In his worst bout of corporate judgment, he even puts Joe Estevez on the Gatorking payroll.

The film opens with (and is routinely punctuated by) scenes of flying alligators around the world in a bizjet (landing at "Gatorking Compound - Florida,") ostensibly as part of a conservation project to save the endangered "Chinese alligator." It turns out that Gatorking is smuggling diamonds in plastic bags inside live alligators to get them through customs. The problem is that some of the alligators rampage and kill everyone at random intervals.

A pretty ecology writer, Maureen McCormick (no, not the Maureen McCormick, the producers just seem to be hung up on television from the 1970s,) reveals information about Gatorking on a school boating trip for precocious children during which she demonstrates how sensitive she is. She then takes evidence she's collected to the laboratory in her house and does extensive tests on specimens that she keeps in 35mm film canisters (the budget for props was tight....) If you are wondering what she's doing in her lab, you're in luck: she narrates every single thing she does, and extols some very hokey science in the process. She has figured out that there is too much testosterone in the alligator's blood, which she quickly deduces is from irritation from having plastic bags in their systems, and the resultant effects on their adrenal glands. How does she know all this? She discovered it in the alligator's "tooth scum." (I actually have a degree in biology, and I find this hypothesis somewhat difficult to adopt.)

A new character joins the ensemble in the form of a geek who wants to take her to dinner. She accepts and chooses the "Crocodile Club" run by Fargas. This seems like an unlikely choice for two reasons: one; she is an environmentalist sworn to defend the alligators, and two; these are alligators, not crocodiles. (Can't the producers of this mess even pick an appropriate name for the restaurant?) She picks the one night to dine there that a crooked senator is also in attendance. Fargas gives him a check for $250,000 and an altercation breaks out after Maureen sees a murder and a vicious alligator attack in the kitchen. Please note the size differential of the alligator in the crate (giant) and the one that eats the victim in the kitchen (inches long). Note also that they are supposed to represent the same animal.

Maureen calls the police and Sheriff Joe Estevez responds by dispatching Ranger Ronnie Dixon, coincidentally Maureen's old flame. Interestingly, Lobilita and company know that she's seen a murder and alligator attack, but they let her go, and even let her lecture the senator pompously. This seems an unlikely ploy for such a cold-blooded killer, but then again I'm not a professional screenwriter. Lobilita gets annoyed and puts a contract out on Dixon. Fortunately they send an inept idiot on a jet ski to do the dirty work: he not only completely bungles it, he gives away the whole Lobilita operation. There are many continuity problems in this film, but one oversight I wondered about is the disposition of the jet ski assassin. After he utterly fails at his mission there is no explanation given about what they did with him. We know, for instance, that they didn't hand him over to the authorities, as Estevez is on the take from Lobilita.

After a few minutes of a very bad car chase, we are treated to a use of stock footage so sublime that it actually made me give the film one star more than it was otherwise worth. At the culmination of the chase there is a great shot of the red Thunderbird (which had been pursuing Dixon's Mitsubishi) transmogrifying into a white Ford Granada from the mid-1970s as it explodes and flips over. This is one of the most ineptly matched scenes in history, and will make any B-movie fan laugh with delight. To make the film even less credible a bunch of mobsters with bad New York-Italian accents show up to deal with Lobilita. (Not to object to the stereotyping here, but did the leader's name really have to be "Guido?")

The stirring conclusion involves a fracas in which the whole cast gets to participate, and climaxes in a fiery speedboat crash and alligator feeding frenzy. With justice done and romance blooming anew between Dixon and McCormick, we move to the credits, which cap off the lameness with faux-Night Ranger music.

This film is really dreadful, but provides some unintentional comedy, mostly in the form of Fargas trying to act with great brashness, even when unnecessary to further the plot. The acting is terrible, the script is half-baked, and everything has been done before. I laughed out loud at McCormick's laboratory dialogue, and also found the presence of the geeky would-be suitor to be an amusing diversion. Only viewers interested in seeing a truly bottom-of-the-barrel B-movie should even consider this one, and even then only if fairly experienced in the pleasures of hideous filmmaking: all others beware.

Nary A Fresh Idea On Hand To Dilute Bad Taste........2007-01-22

Typical of most Rhino Home Video releases, this resolutely uninteresting work provides only an occasional snippet of skill as its patterned plot advances towards a predictable climax. At Santos Lobilita's mid-Florida restaurant, the Crocodile Club, freshly slaughtered alligator meat and innards are the principal theme items upon the establishment's menu, the animals being captured and transported under heavy sedation from a reserve in mainland China to the United States, where Lobilita has them imprisoned, although he steadfastly claims that his main purpose is cross breeding, to restore what has become an endangered species, with a stateside phylum. An environmental activist, Maureen McCormick (Shannon K. Foley) comes upon a site where Lobilita is abandoning the slain animals and, in spite of opposition from a senator and from the local corrupt sheriff (Joe Estevez), Maureen refreshes her long-standing campaign against Santos whose treatment of the alligators is cruel and blatantly self-serving. Her efforts are abetted by a former boyfriend, wildlife Ranger Ron (Jay Richardson), whose attempts at apprehending Santos while a member of the sheriff's department were dashed by his supervisor, but who has continued looking for a means of bringing the self-styled "Gator King" to justice. While Ron and Maureen are rekindling their love affair, trouble awaits them due to the resolve of evil Lobilita to allow no interference in his plans to become a highly successful saurian specialized restaurateur. The film is shabbily composed, the direction tepid, with a screenplay so weakly constructed that a rather less than accomplished cast must fend for itself within sequences that are generally underwritten, as the players' ad libbing serves merely to suggest a need for a stronger hand at the helm. Antonio Fargas performs unsuccessfully as Gator King, his acting limitations prominent amid the surfeit of chaos that the plotline becomes, with only Richardson, a veteran of similar substandard fare, actually managing to create his part. Looping and synching are not done well, although the post-production sound efforts show improvement as the film advances; however, the same cannot be said of the editing, choppy throughout this drab affair wherein a shortfall of scenario logic is exacerbated by poor production values. A Rhino DVD package is of uneven quality that includes a very rough skipping segment, while offering no extras for a movie that simply follows a recipe that is obviously pointed towards the provision of mindless entertainment, yet does not manage to do even that.

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