The Film Needs to Be Released on DVD in the US

Yeah the Anchor Bay UK DVD from 2003 kicks; It's a 2 disc set with ALLIGATOR 2: THE MUTATION and I was hard pressed to notice any cuts, though sadly it's a fullframe presentation. Then again since there is a significantly different "TV version" it's quite possible the film was an open mat 4:3 shoot which would then have been shown with a mask over the top & bottom of the frame to fit a theater screen. And if so that was a rare example of AB not cropping their DVDs to pimp them as "letterboxed". We did not get a chance to check out A2:TM but there's plenty of beer left at the supermarket for next weekend.

My favorite thing in the movie was Henry Silva, who has made a career out of appearing in bad movies and rising above the dreck with another excellent Henry Silva performance -- He has a presence that doesn't really involve a lot of "acting", he just behaves like Henry Silva & it's usually one of the best things that the consistently miserable productions he took part in after about 1978 or so. But this is a fun movie and has been unfairly trashed as being a lame brained creature feature JAWS ripoff, though I will admit that the stretches of logic that allowed the alligator to be in several parts of NYC at any given time according to the needs of the script got a little silly. Roger Ebert wrote a great bomb review of the film back in the day and pointed out how NYC is actually pretty crowded once you get down to it, somebody would notice a 40 foot alligator commuting back & forth from Jersey to eat kids in their swimming pools. Gotta love it though: I'd rather watch this again than that stupid KING KONG cartoon by Mr. Jackson. The miniature/model shots are priceless.

Now as for the GREAT ALLIGATOR RIVER and other low-budget Italian/Spanish knockoffs (there are even a couple from Asia) those are genre films made as B entertainment that is of a different variety than American schlock creature feature gross-out horror, which is what I'd pin ALLIGATOR as. The Italian productions especially are more showcases for the musical scores, guest or cameo roles by familiar faces from the Euro cult scene, and the alligators meant to evoke hilarity more than horror: Check out KILLER CROCODILE and KILLER CROCODILE 2 for a couple of the better examples, but yeah: GREAT ALLIGATOR RIVER or whatever it's called is pretty weak, though the musical score is hard to beat. You know your movie is in trouble when the musical score is more interesting than the 40 foot long rampaging monster alligator.

One curious note: why *ISN'T* this movie available anymore outside of Germany? Even the Anchor Bay DVD was discontinued, somebody offered me a chunk of change for it a couple years back and thank my lucky stars that I declined because you can't find them now for love or money. Is it the rights to the musical score?