Am I dating myself by opening this review with a mention of the movie Screamers? Maybe so (and it’s not like you didn’t think I was an old fart before this), but it’s relevant, so hang in there. Anyway, I saw a DVD-R of Screamers on ebay recently, and the price was right, so I picked it up. Do you remember Screamers? It was an Italian horror movie released here by New World in the early ‘80s – the one-sheet featured an illustration of what looked like the old Invisible Man model kit on the rampage, and a killer tagline – “They’re men turned inside out! And worse… they’re still alive!” Total bullshit, of course, because the movie itself, originally titled Island of the Fishmen, is a period jungle adventure/horror movie with mad scientist Joseph Cotton creating mutant fish people on his remote island. No one gets turned inside out, alive or otherwise, even in the ridiculous opening sequence with Cameron Mitchell and Mel Ferrer wandering around Bronson Cavern that New World tacked on. But it really doesn’t matter, because the movie itself, while stoopid as all get out, is pretty entertaining – you’ve got fishmen, you’ve got natives, you’ve got Richard Johnson (Dr. Menard from Zombie) as an evil guy in spats, and Barbara Bach takes a bath in one scene – all in all, a lot more entertaining than Cry Wolf or whatever else they call horror movies these days. If you wanna check out the movie, drop the fine folks at Plan 9 Productions a line at plan9productions@aol.com, and they’ll send you a nice looking DVD that features not only Screamers, but the original version as well and even the sequel, The Fish Men and Their Queen. Bang for your buck? Why, yes it is.

So what’s all this got to do with The Big Alligator River? Simple – NoShame, a new and very promising Euro-exploitation DVD company, sent me their disc of the film a few weeks ago, and Alligator has almost the same cast and crew as Screamers – Sergio Martino directed, and there’s Barbara Bach and Richard Johnson and Claudio Cassinelli again, and hey, even Mel Ferrer. And we’re back in the jungle again, with plenty of natives on the loose, only this time, it’s Sri Lanka instead of the Caribbean. And the fish men, they’re off duty this time, and in their place, there’s the Great God Kroona, a giant alligator who’s ticked off at wealthy whiteguy developer Ferrer for building a hotel on his stomping grounds, and starts eating his staff and a few guests to boot. Yeah, it’s basically Jaws in Sri Lanka, with Claudio Casinelli in the Roy Scheider role as a photographer who wants Ferrer to close his hotel before more people get Kroona’d, and Barbara Bach… well, she’s not exactly the Richard Dreyfuss of the movie, because she’s mostly there to look great (which she does without any effort) and get offered up as a sacrifice to Kroona by the natives. Richard Johnson isn’t the Robert Shaw/Quint role, either – he’s a crazy missionary in a cave who’s carving a huge idol of Kroona. So there really isn’t a Quint, but that doesn’t matter, because this movie’s all about Kroona and how many actors he can eat before Casinelli and Barbara do away with him. If you wanna know the tally, you’ll have to pick up Big Alligator River, but let’s just say that Martino does an excellent job of stocking the supporting cast with the most egregiously unlikable characters possible, and then piles them all onto a rickety raft in the middle of Kroona’s lake for the climax. You can do the addition (or rather, subtraction), I think.