Bad CGI Gator

Six thirty year old college students go on spring break to a run down isolated cabin in a swamp. Who wouldn't want that experience? They must have booked the cabin a year in advance to get such a great place. Not understanding that spring break isn't the end of the semester, these future student loan debt relief recipients toss their school laptops into the swamp. A crocodile still recovering from shock that anyone would willingly occupy that cabin gets zapped by the shorting out laptop batteries and is magically transformed in a genuinely bad CGI rendering.

The bad CGI crocodile is bad, really bad, yet miles better than the acting. It's indescribably bad. Exceeded only by the dialog. It's indescribably indescribably bad. Ten stars for the crocodile. Minus five stars for the crocodile taking so long to do the audience wants in eliminating the cast. The longest hour you will spend being "entertained". Five stars.

I am a massive fan of a 'B' movie and love finding 'Gems' within the masses released every week.

The acting is on par with most other movies of this kind but the short run time kinda made it feel like the movie ended as it just got started.

Couple of scenes give you a few laughs and the 30+ cast playing teenagers made this have a true 'B' movie feel.

Do I regret watching it? No

Would I watch it again? No

Was the CGI Bad? So bad it was amazing!

Would I watch a sequel? Definitely

Unfortunately this wasn't the 'Gem' I was looking for and only gets the 4 stars, with an extra 20 minutes run time I would have pushed to 5 stars.

Overall it's crap - but in a good way.

It's only an hour so what have you got to loose by giving it a go.

Thanks for reading... Bandit.

The makers of this movie clearly didn't have enough of a budget to make a convincing monster. But when it's a monster movie, that's kind of a problem. Even if they might have successfully hidden the bad special effects or pooh-poohed it away once or twice, that still wouldn't have been enough. So the film makers just embraced it and wrote the plot of the entire movie around it. You see, this isn't just a poorly constructed monster, it's a tiny alligator that experienced a bunch of short-circuiting school laptops and becomes... Bad CGI Gator. So the CGI is bad, the plot is winking at you bad, and the characters are bad and irredeemably stupid. That's not to say that the acting is bad. The actors do a good job of making characters who are over the top idiots, even for a horror movie, seem realistic. There's a guy who calls himself an alpha male who is just a weak bully, a woman who makes the most bland social media content (and tahini dip) ever, a couple that is sex crazed but not in a healthy way, a stereotypical nerd who acts like a creep and kind of wants to see most everyone die, and the sort-of good girl who thinks that a guy being creepy is flattering and could have saved someone from the gator but is so self-absorbed that she keeps forgetting that the other person even exists. Face it, all of these characters are bad people. There are just a few who are less bad than the others. And that -- and the ridiculousness of a gator who defies reality -- is what makes the film entertaining.

12th opus in Danny Draven´s directing career, filled with naive irony and parody/self-parody as the typically misguided B-movie spoof is, but instead of falling face first into the routinary trappings of "self-aware" comedies (that are everything but that) this one creates a schizophrenic and bland pseudo-satire of the genre with more formal considerations than usual, less malicious than Brett Kelly with his sardonic sharks, but still delivering blows to every stereotype, convention and trope of the genre. In the end, this is still a satire that lacks focus and a concrete objective that can give it a sense.

Featuring goofy and telegraphed comedy that comes out of a decidedly malnourished and elemental script done with intentional simplicity, with the nauseatingly stereotypical characters that parody the ones from the industrial horror movie formula. You can trace back the evolution of the subgenre as far back as the italian Jaws rip off Killer Crocodile (1989) with it´s lethargic anti-adventure, going through Lake Placid (1999) with winks that demolished the fourth wall and a comedic tone, but perhaps the heaviest influence is Tobe Hooper´s schlock flick Crocodile (2000), taking the concept of giving the main killer animal a richer personality than it´s human leads, while expanding upon the genre game Hooper played with by exaggerating the defects of the way of representing the animal on screen, stretching it's inverisimilitude to cartoonish levels. If Tobe made his Crocodile crash through walls then Draven made his Gator ring the doorbell. The film is filled with touches like these, such as when the Gator levitates via his special effects superpowers and eats a jock. Images that undoubtedly tickled the fancy of a master of surreal fantasy like Charles Band.

Speaking of Band, this movie finally goes after the overabundance of CGI in mainstream cinema (and why not, in productions by competing low budget companies too) he often complains about. However, it comes off as half baked, every solid attempt at creativity is dulled by a wonky pace and an off beat tone. It only slightly uses irony to satirize the state of popular cinema but one could argue that Asylum and other companies with their outlandish mockbusters are already Hollywood's biggest parody makers, making Bad CGI Gator a graceless deviation in the Full Moon catalog.

It did what it was supposed to do, it was clearly a B movie that was a parody of B movies. I thought that the lead up to the actual action was interesting, and the acting was both good and oddly bad, but it seemed to fit with the overall ambiance of the film. The terribly done CGI was actually funny, and the play on movie tropes (i.e. The lake setting, teen horror tropes, and over the top gore) was hilarious.

It was actually better than other parody films, such as sharknado, but still was able to maintain that campy feel that you'd get with Friday the 13th or Texas chainsaw massacre. I would recommend a watch if you're bored on a plane or after a few beers.