Alligator (1980) on Netflix
A baby alligator named Ramon is flushed down a toilet and grows into a thirty-six-foot monster in the sewers beneath the city. Detective David Madison and herpetologist Marisa Kendall hunt it.
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- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.1/1018,758 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1968 a teenage girl on a Florida vacation buys a baby alligator and names it Ramon. Her father, who dislikes animals, flushes it down the toilet after the family gets home, and the reptile ends up in the city's sewers. There it feeds on the carcasses of pet dogs discarded from illegal experiments with a growth formula meant to increase livestock meat production. The abandoned formula also raised the animals' metabolism, and over twelve years Ramon has grown into a ravenous thirty-six-foot predator with an almost impenetrable hide. When sewer workers begin to disappear, police detective David Madison, whose botched case in St. Louis left him with a reputation for being bad luck to his partners, takes the case. His boss, Chief Clark, brings in herpetologist Marisa Kendall to help.
Cast
- Robert Doyleas Bill
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alligator (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bryan Cranston worked as a special-effects assistant on Alligator, making and rigging "the alligator guts" for the finale; Cranston later wrote that his good rapport with Robert Forster led to Forster's role in season 5 of Breaking Bad 30 years later.
- Director Lewis Teague said he intended to make Alligator scary but changed course just before shooting, after the rubber alligator got laughter instead of screams at a test; he then leaned into the witty, joke-filled script John Sayles had written.
- The 36-foot alligator was a rubber body over an aluminum frame with articulated legs; two especially strong men got inside, one with his legs at the front and one at the rear, and walked it along.
- Quentin Tarantino said Robert Forster's Alligator character, detective David Madison, inspired Max Cherry, the part Forster went on to play in Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown.
- Producer Brandon Chase said he was inspired by the urban legend of alligators living in sewers, particularly accounts of alligators found in New York City.
- Screenwriter John Sayles said whole subplots he wrote were never shot because the mechanical alligator could not do what it was supposed to, including going into the water.
