Rollergator

Only because IMDB doesn't allow a "0" star rating does this get a star. I imagine this movie was made with the idea that it would somehow catch on as a cult classic and sell some beta max, uh, VHS copies.

No seriously people literally spent time out of their lives doing this.

RollerGator tells the story of a small, wisecracking purple alligator who with the help of a cute but fairly nondescript teenage girl on rollerblades flees a shady carnival promoter and a skateboarding ninja, so that he can be reunited with his old friend the swamp farmer. That old story. So yeah, with a plot like that you know you're in for a lousy movie, but you can barely begin to imagine how lousy.

Every single thing about this movie is breathtakingly cheap and incompetent. The whole thing looks like it was shot on a hand held camcorder. The really cheap kind. By people who have no idea how to frame a shot or get an actor's best angles. Obviously, they never bothered to hire a cinematographer, and I have serious doubts as to whether an editor was involved either.

RollerGator also features the most incompetent sound work I've ever heard. Half the dialog is unintelligible. Do they even know how a microphone works? Do they understand that the actors have to be facing in the general direction of the sound equipment? Or maybe it's because the same blasted series of acoustic guitar chords keeps looping over the entire movie, even when the actors are talking. It just never stops!

The dialog you can hear isn't much better, generally matching that of an elementary school play. And the jokes are the kind that only a very small child could ever find funny. Anyone else will just want to slap the writer. I mean seriously, how many bad jokes can they make about hot dogs? There is one brilliant line in this movie though. "I had to hose down the clowns. They were stealing taffy." Now why didn't they put that scene in the movie? The only other decent line in this movie is "I hate fresh foods! Almost as much as I hate gators!"

The acting isn't any better. Honestly, I'm not sure most of it can really be described as acting, given the utter lack of emotion shown by most of the people on screen, and the difficulty they have delivering their lines towards the camera. Although that may go back to the utterly incompetent camera work. Aside from "How did this travesty get made?" or "What have we done to deserve this?" the biggest question this movie raises is "Where did they find the money to pay Joe Estevez?" What is he even doing in this movie? Was he really that hard up for roles? Couldn't he have been doing something more dignified, like an insurance commercial, or a guest appearance on a soap opera? He spends most of the movie sitting behind a desk or aimlessly wandering around a carnival, muttering to himself and occasionally breaking down and crying. I would too if I was in this movie.

Nor are the characters any better that the actors playing them. The writers never bothered to develop any of them beyond one or two easily recognizable traits, like having an obsession with hot dogs, or being a karate instructor, or a skateboarding ninja. This is a kid's movie from the nineties, so of course the ninja has to be on a skateboard. And because they were running out of ideas, there's a second nondescript teenage girl who rides everywhere on rollerblades and helps the little gator escape from the bad guy. You can tell her from the main protagonist because she carries a slingshot everywhere and shoots people with it, hence her name, Slingshot. Yes, that's the level of thinking that went into this project.

Estevez's character is given no real attributes beyond being really slimy and yelling a lot. Every time he's on screen you just feel kind of uncomfortable. But the most loathsome character by far is the titular gator, portrayed by an incredibly obvious hand puppet. This little guy is worse than Poochy the Rockin' Dog. The filmmaker's must have thought that the best way to make it appealing to children was to give it the personality of a particularly smart mouthed twelve-year-old. They were wrong, very wrong.

Its annoyingly high-pitched voice, constant wisecracks, and general in-your-face! attitude make you want to punch it in its stupid little face. You genuinely want the bad guys to catch him, just so you never have to look at him again. And that's before it starts rapping. That's right, the alligator raps, and it's the worst thing in the history of music. He does not skate anywhere however, because they didn't know how to do that with a hand puppet. In fact, whenever he's not partially hidden behind something, his mouth doesn't even move when he talks. They're not even trying.

I was not at all surprised to learn that writer/director/producer Donald G. Jackson is a proponent of so called "Zen filmmaking" in which no script is used and you basically shoot whatever feels right at the moment. This certainly explains why most of the dialogue seems to be ad-libbed, why so many of the scenes feel formless and dragged out beyond all reason, and why they didn't bother re-shooting any of the parts where the actors flub their lines or the puppeteer's hand is partially visible. And it is the only possible explanation for the frog headed knight who appears in one scene and is never mentioned again.

Bottom line, everything in this movie is boring and stupid and terrible. It's worse than Manos. Really, it's that bad. If there's any redeeming value to this pathetic, misbegotten excuse for a movie, it's that the lead actress is moderately pretty, and appears in a bikini in one early scene. It's nothing you wouldn't see at your nearest public beach, and it does kind of make you suspect this movie was written by two 13-year old boys, but hey, at least it's something. Oh, one last thing. This movie has a mid-credits sequence, and it is a complete acid trip.

I have only looked at the recent short from Rifftrax and, from what I saw, to give this zero-budget 'thing' any stars should be a crime; since IMDb requires a minimum of 1, that's all it could 'possibly' get.

Everyone involved with "Rollergator" must have known they were making the equivalent of 'cinematic fecal matter'. Cheap and amateurish in every imaginable aspect of film-making, this pile of celluloid dung's only two redeeming qualities were the presence of the self-loathing (I suspect) Joe Estevez who may have thought:'I know full-well what I'm getting into, but don't care because I'm expected to be in intentionally-crappy films. How awful can I be in this one?') and the not-so-bad-looking blonde actress, Sandra Shuker, although her thespian skills border on non-existent. That's really it, folks. It's that bad.

The talking (!) baby alligator puppet would have even been improved by merely sewing eyes on a sock...you'd get the same effect, really. I guess it's all an intentional joke because it looks so obviously-fake. Anyone who's heard of 'Ed the Sock' has seen this before and just as believably; only Ed's perpetual cigar was missing.

Saying, 'This is the worst (fill in the blank) I've ever seen, etc.' is asking for it. Something even more horrifically-cheap and stupid may actually be possible...a shuddering thought, considering what I saw of this thing.

Dire Ineptitude!!!!!!! For fans of bad movies only. The Rifftrax version is the recommended way to see this wretched movie.

As stated above, this movie is the worst I've ever seen (dethroning the previous worst: 1964's "The Creeping Terror") being an avid fan of MST3K and Rifftrax for the past 15 years, I like to think I know something about bad movies. And let me say when the question of "what's the worst movie ever" arises, generic, ubiquitous choices like "Plan 9 from Outer Space" DO NOT hold a candle to ROLLERGATOR. When you dissect these movies element by element, those being casting, script, acting, dialogue, sound recording, editing, music, pacing, special effects, costumes, etc. ROLLERGATOR is thee absolute ultimate in terms of overall badness. Easily.

Starring Charlie Sheen's uncle, also known as Joe Estevez, he's the star-power of the movie, the other "actors" are total no-names, that the casting agent probably found at a local community theater (or a laundro-mat). As you can glean from the cover, along with Charlie Sheen's uncle, there's a small purple alligator (that talks!) featured in the movie; it's limply brought to life by a very lame and simplistic hand-puppet, whose tiny hands appear to be permanently fused to it's chest, as there is no arm movement what-so-ever.

The basic characters are a young blonde chick on rollerblades who befriends the alligator and its with the help of her skates that it becomes the: ROLLERGATOR! Estevez plays a carnival owner, along with him comes a henchman to do his dirty work, a karate instructor, a "dark ninja" and yet another even younger blonde girl on rollerblades named "Slingshot", plus near the end there's some portly, bumbling, old biologist whose been attempting to find the alligator.

Throughout the movie, almost non-stop, there is aimless "playing" of an acoustic guitar, which will have to do as far as the soundtrack goes; occasional organ tracks appear and briefly add variety, but then back come the pointless guitar wanking.

As far as the dialogue goes, it often sounds improvised and shows little flow or logic and is often unintelligible.

Blah, blah, blah, the portly old biologist who's looking for the alligator eventually finds the alligator, who by then of course, is a Rollergator. End of movie. The worst movie ever.

(Hey all, any word on whether there's to be a 20th anniversary Blu-ray edition issued in 2016???)