We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
ALLIGATOR (1980)
Producer Charles Band wasn’t seeing any money from his distribution deal with Group 1 Films, so after working with the company on a few movies – Mansion of the Doomed, Crash!, and Cinderella – he walked away from Group 1 and found better deals elsewhere. His frequent collaborator Frank Ray Perilli, however, extended his business with Group 1 beyond the movies he made with Band. Perilli, who wrote several of Band’s early productions, crafted the story for the 1980 Group 1 project Alligator, drawing inspiration from a popular urban legend that there were alligators living in the sewers of New York City. Legend has it that this alligators started out as exotic pets, eventually got flushed down toilets, but continued to thrive in the sewer.
Lewis Teague – who had studied under the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill, and Roger Corman before making his feature directorial debut with the gangster movie The Lady in Red – was hired to direct the film, and brought in his Lady in Red writer John Sayles to rewrite the script. Sayles already had “killer animal movie” experience, having written Piranha, and he brought the same quirky sense of humor Piranha had over to this one as well.
The film begins with a flashback to 1968, when a teenage girl buys a baby alligator during a family trip to Florida. They took the alligator, which the girl named Ramon, back home to Missouri – but while she was out one day, her hateful father flushed the animal down the toilet. Jump ahead 12 years and that alligator is still living in the sewer system – and it has grown to an unbelievable size. You see, a local lab has been experimenting on dogs (acquired for them by a sleazy pet shop owner played by Sydney Lassick) while attempting to develop synthetic hormones, and not only do these experiments cause the dogs to grow rapidly, it also causes the lab to end up with a lot of dog corpses on their hands. The pet shop owner has been dumping those corpses in the sewer, the alligator has been eating them, and the growth hormones have made it huge. And insatiably hungry.
So the alligator sets out on a man-eating rampage. At first, the only person who’s aware of the threat is disgraced detective David Madison (Robert Forster), but it doesn’t take long for the rest of the city to become aware of what’s happening. Big game hunter Colonel Brock (Henry Silva) is called in to help with the problem, Madison butts heads with his superior (Michael V. Gazzo, sporting some really impressive eyebrows) and pharmaceutical reps (the lab is headed up by Dean Jagger), and while the city tries to rid themselves of their alligator problem, Madison is also brought into contact with herpetologist Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker)... who happens to be the alligator’s former owner, all grown up. In between scenes of the alligator munching people, Madison and Marisa start to fall for each other.
Alligator is a movie I had attempted to watch more than once when I was younger, but wasn’t able to get into. While horror fans often talk this one up, I thought it was a disappointment... until now. A recent attempt to watch Alligator was a success; I finally saw what so many of my fellow horror fans see in it, and ended up really enjoying the movie. I liked it so much, in fact, that I gladly watched it with friends a second time just one week later after that viewing.
My younger self found Alligator to be dull, not eventful enough. Now I find that it moves along a decent pace and features plenty of chomping action – and even when the alligator isn’t on the screen, the characters are interesting to watch, with the cast turning in strong performances. (Robert Forster is always awesome.) So I’m an Alligator fan now, and there will be a lot more viewings of this movie in my future.
OBSESSION (2025)
As of this writing, Curry Barker has 1.48 million subscribers on YouTube channel That’s a Bad Idea, which primarily consists of comedy skits. I’m not one of those subscribers. In fact, I had never even heard of Barker until his horror movie Obsession started drawing a lot of positive attention at film festivals. I even missed his first movie, a found footage horror movie called Milk & Serial, which he released for free on YouTube... but now that I’ve watched Obsession, I will definitely be paying attention to Barker’s film career. (Especially since he has been hired to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.)
Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a music store employee who has a major crush on his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette)... but just can’t bring himself to tell her how he feels about her. He’s planning to tell her, he even buys her a gift from a crystal shop – a "One Wish Willow", a novelty item that claims to grant a person one wish when they snap it like a wishbone. But when the time comes to make his confession, Bear blows the moment in epic fashion. He doesn’t even give Nikki the One Wish Willow. As she walks away from his car after their disastrous interaction, he snaps the One Wish Willow himself and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world.
The wish instantly comes true. But that’s not Bear’s happily ever after, otherwise this would be a short film instead of one that runs for 109 minutes but probably could have been a little shorter. The wish makes Nikki obsessed with Bear to a disturbing degree – and it soon becomes clear that it didn’t make Nikki fall in love with him. The real Nikki is buried somewhere inside her, struggling and screaming to get out, while a replacement Nikki dedicates her life to Bear and displays some very bizarre behavior.
Made on a budget of $750,000, Obsession has earned over $403 million at the global box office, which indicates that people who enjoyed it aren’t just recommending it to others, they’re also going back to watch it multiple times. I absolutely recommend that horror fans watch this movie, but it’s not one I’ll be able to watch frequently. There has to be a stronger “fun” side for me to watch a movie over and over, and I didn’t find sitting through Obsession to be a very fun experience. It’s dark, intense, and uncomfortable – which makes it a good horror movie, but not one that will be part of my regular rotation. I will definitely be watching it again, but I’m going to need some time between viewings.
The greatest selling point for this movie is the acting. Johnston does a great job playing his freaked-out, milquetoast character, who is forced to deal with some life and death issues as the story plays out, while Navarrette is absolutely amazing as Nikki. Obsession is a hell of a showcase for her, and it looks like it has deservedly launched her onto the A list.
TRUCKS (1997)
In the pages of a 1973 issue of Cavalier magazine, Stephen King brought the world a short story called Trucks (which was later part of his 1978 short story collection Night Shift), which was set in an isolated truck stop that ends up being surrounded by trucks, from semi trucks to pickup trucks (and there’s even a bulldozer in the mix), that have become sentient, driving themselves and mowing people down. Fuelled by a mixture of beer and cocaine, King brought that story to the screen himself with the 1986 film Maximum Overdrive, his sole directorial effort. That movie takes viewers on a uniquely wild ride packed with ridiculous moments and over-the-top characters – and in that adaptation, King made everything that ran with engines or electricity a source of danger. Not only do trucks attack people, but so do lawnmowers, remote controlled toys, a soda dispenser, arcade games, an electric carving knife, etc.
Eleven years later, director Chris Thomson and writer Brian Taggert teamed up to bring a more grounded adaptation of King’s story to the TV channel USA Network. Their movie even has the same name as the source material, Trucks. This one moves the setting to a small Nevada town called Lunar, which is a minor tourist destination due to it sits on a spot where a meteorite hit long ago and some claim they have spotted UFOs in the area. The events of Maximum Overdrive took place because Earth was passing through the tail of a comet, so this otherworldly element was clearly a nod to that, even if Trucks doesn’t make a direct connection between those things and the fact that trucks start driving themselves into people in and around Lunar.
Trucks wasn’t very well received, and I disliked it for decades, but going back to it now, I found that it’s actually a decent “killer vehicle” movie for the most part. Its greatest weakness is that the characters are, in a complete turn-around from Maximum Overdrive, very low-key, dull people. There’s Brenda Bakke as Hope Gladstone, who heads up the local tourist activities; Timothy Busfield as Ray Porter, a widower mechanic who runs a gas station; Brendan Fletcher as Ray’s teen son Logan, and a variety of supporting characters, including a trio of tourists and some truck drivers. Despite an attempt to give the characters some emotional depth, viewers will be hard pressed to care about them – but at least we get to watch some killer trucks drive around.
Trucks also takes a couple of missteps along the way. The worst moments are when the movie breaks its own rules. It’s established that only trucks are coming to life – and while it’s okay that the movie ends with a helicopter flying on its own because the short story ended with the narrator wondering if planes flying overhead had pilots, that still comes off as slightly questionable. Just not as questionable as the tacked-on scene where a mailman is attacked by a toy truck, or the mind-boggling moment where HAZMAT workers are attacked by an inflated, axe-wielding HAZMAT. The “killer HAZMAT suit” makes so little sense, it has, unfortunately, become the scene this movie is most remembered for. It’s pretty stupid, but it’s a shame that one idiotic scene drags down the reputation of the entire “not too bad” movie around it.
I also have to mention that I really enjoyed the fact that one of the prominent killer trucks in the movie was a Western Star. My father was a truck driver and Western Star was always his truck manufacturer of choice, so it was heartwarming to see the company represented in Trucks.
ENOLA HOLMES 2 (2022)
Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective, in 1887 – and in 2006, author Nancy Springer decided to expand the Sherlock universe by giving the character a sister named Enola, twenty years his junior. Springer has written multiple books about Enola Holmes over the years, and in 2020 the character made her screen debut in a movie that was released through the Netflix streaming service and stars Millie Bobby Brown. The film was successful enough to get a sequel... but while developing the sequel, the creative team made an odd decision: even though they had multiple books to work from as source material, they decided to craft an entirely original story for Enola Holmes 2. Brown would reprise the role of Springer’s character, but this time Enola makes her way through a story that did not come from the mind of Springer.
Instead of adapting another Springer story for the screen, director Harry Bradbeer and screenwriter Jack Thorne built their story around a real-life event, the 1888 matchgirls' strike, when the young women working at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, London, England went on strike. They also decided to include a real person in the mix: labour activist Sarah Chapman, who was one of the leaders of that strike. So they certainly did their research and had smart ideas, it just never sits well with me when a movie or series that’s based on the works of an author doesn’t stick to the source material.
In this film, Enola is running her own detective agency, but is having trouble getting people to take her seriously. Then a young factory worker named Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) shows up asking her to find Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd), who has gone missing. As the mystery plays out, Enola Holmes 2 proves to be surprisingly dark and mature. Although there are laughs and moments of action, Bradbeer and Thorne were not talking down to their target audience (primarily teenage girl), which is admirable.
While Enola searches for Sarah and tries to figure out why she has gone missing - an endeavor that brings her back into contact with Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), a character from the previous film, and requires some help from her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) - her brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) drifts back into her life, drunk and disappointed because he’s struggling to solve a case involving the blackmail of government officials. We get to watching him dig into this mystery in a subplot, as he discovers that the mastermind behind the blackmail scheme is Moriarty, his archenemy.
This part of the story is the main reason why I didn’t enjoy Enola Holmes 2 as much as the first, because it completely reimagines the character of Moriarty. So not only have they drifted away from the works of Nancy Springer, but they also alter a Doyle character in a bigger way than giving Sherlock a sister. Just stick to the source material!
Oh well. It had issues with some of its elements, I think decisions were made that shouldn't have been made, but Enola Holmes 2 still manages to be an entertaining mystery movie. I found that it was a step down from its predecessor, but it’s not too bad... unless you find the lack of connection to source material to be too irritating to overlook.
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