Sean Parker
Twenty-six years ago, Hollywood stars Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, and Brendan Gleeson jumped into a lake in Maine to hunt a crocodile. With a Jaws formula, creepy nesting locations, and good direction, Steve Miner’s Lake Placid scared up some summer fun back in the summer of 1999. Though gators and crocs have slight differences, I was hoping for a lot of the same when I read the synopsis for Gator Lake (aka Lake Jesup: Bonecrusher’s Revenge). I heard some good initial buzz about the movie and hoped for the same breezy, laidback monster-sized man-eating creature feature that stretches the limits of believability for gore, guts, and a good time. But what I expected and what I got were very different.
From the poster of the film, advertising the gator as a “big summbitch” and showing a woman wading in the water nearby, there’s a real feeling that audiences are about to tread similar ground to Crawl or The Shallows. Nothing could be further from the truth. The film concerns the somewhat true story of alligator displacement due to the overdevelopment of Florida swampland. As developers started building on the swamps, gators began moving into the lakes. Lake Jesup, which is also the film’s original title, is known for its high alligator population, as the creatures were relocated there throughout the 1980s and ’90s while Central Florida was being developed. So, with many avenues to pursue, dealing with greedy developers and the monstrous results of their environmental gentrification, it was easy to assume I was in for a diverting hour and a half of cheering for a gator serving up some Floridia Man justice was on the horizon.
Instead, Gator Lake is just messy. After the initial cold open, where two gator hunters get what’s coming to them, the film begins introducing its characters. First, there’s Bonecrusher, the giant alligator causing the uproar. Angus Sullivan (Jeff Benninghofen) is the owner of Gator Galaxy, an alligator ranch, and damn near everything else in the county. Mayor Neuhauser (Michael Houston King), who wants the problem taken care of yesterday, hires Bubba Coggins (Derek Russo), an ex-Gator Galaxy wrangler and ex-con, to hunt Bonecrusher in exchange for a pardon. Coggins is desperate for a pardon so he can take care of his estranged daughter’s son when the army redeploys her. This sets off a chain reaction of never-ending exposition and convoluted plot points. At first, it’s offset with an occasional victim getting chomped on, but there’s a long stretch of the movie that is absent of the creature altogether as a plot of further land development bursts forth.
Russo, who action fans may recognize as one of the main baddies in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, offers an intense and brooding presence in the role of Coggins. The Atlanta native fits well into this Florida Man adventure, channeling the type of tough-as-nails Snake Plissken energy as a felon hired to do a job for a pardon. Coggins has vendettas with the locals, but a pardon could clear up everything. He’s also considering the inside information that Sullivan may have created this whole scenario in a very Lake Placid-type plot, feeding the creature, allowing it to become territorial, and possibly manipulating it into doing his bidding.
Writer-director Michael Houston King’s first foray into the action-horror world reveals a hell of a lot of differences between the directing style he’s accustomed to and what is necessary to succeed with a horror picture like Gator Lake. The film has major limitations due to budget constraints for the creature, often relying on a not-so-alive gator head for out-of-frame shots and quick cuts amidst stock footage of living gators to manufacture tension. However, there’s a difference between what you can get away with and what simply looks hokey. Though this could be forgiven through riveting storytelling, that’s not really on the table either. We see the body count rise quickly, but the film quickly turns into a more dramatic affair of big-business monopolization and revenge than that of environmental attrition.
While there are some smart moments within the film, Gator Lake could benefit from a complete overhaul. The film’s themes of power and toxicity are well done, even if they’re buried deep within a movie that feels a bit all over the place. I think there’s a movie here, but it’s really buried within a cavalcade of tangled plot points, poor pacing, and a bunch of unnecessary characters. It feels like a poorly stitched-together Roger Corman picture, who was known to take two half-done features and Frankenstein them together.
If you were looking for a fun movie about gators to give you your beachside summertime a jolt, I’m afraid Gator Lake is too caught up in the people on land to offer you anything remotely satisfying.
Gator Lake is now available on PVOD on Prime Video, AppleTV+, and other retailers.
