Ten Days of Terror!: Alligator

Film: Alligator
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The release of Jaws changed a lot of things in the movie world. It largely created the summer blockbuster. It simultaneously created a world where a lot of film execs didn’t realize that what made Jaws great wasn’t the shark but the direction of Spielberg and the top-tier cast. Regardless, in the years after Jaws there were a number of man vs. animal movies of varying quality. One that straddles a very interesting line is Alligator. It’s actually a pretty good movie, but it’s a direct rip-off of Spielberg’s killer shark in a lot of clear and obvious ways.

There is a legend of alligators in the New York sewers, and this is a film that is going to use that myth to good effect, although it’s going to relocate the gator in question to the sewer under Chicago. We’re going to start with getting the alligator to the Windy City by introducing us to a young girl who bring home a baby alligator from Florida as a pet. Shortly thereafter, we see her angry father flush the baby gator down the toilet and we get a “12 years later” title card. That dozen years is going to give us a big ol’ gator that is going to cause a lot of mayhem.

Here, Kitty Kitty

Film: Cat’s Eye
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Ah, the horror anthology, my old nemesis. Horror lends itself naturally to the anthology format specifically because horror specifically allows the writer to go right for the jugular and bring the scares. While it certainly helps to have characters who we care about when it comes to horror stories, often all we really need to have is someone we can relate to in any way put in danger. So, the idea of the anthology is to put folks into those situations and rush to the good parts. Ct’s Eye follows this format in a way, but does a few things differently. For starters, the screenplay was written by Stephen King, with the first two stories adapted from two of his short stories.

There are a few things that Cat’s Eye does really well. The first is that, while there is a connecting story that runs through the entire film, not a great deal of time is spent on it. All of these bits involve a cat (who also appears in the first two stories and is feature in the third) being urged on by Drew Barrymore to seek her out and save her. Second, there are only three stories here, and with a 90+ minute run time, we get a good amount of time with each one.

Ten Days of Terror!: Cujo

Film: Cujo
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

Cujo is not a film I looked forward to reviewing. This is not because it’s a bad film (it’s not) or not scary (it is) or that it doesn’t contain some good scary moments (it does). The problem is that Cujo is enough story for maybe a 30-minute film and it’s been stretched to just over 90 minutes. There’s a lot of story here that feels like it’s included specifically to pad the movie since it has nothing to do with the story being told. Or it does, but only obliquely. As a short film, it would be gripping and terrifying. Full length, it’s merely got some good moments and a lot of waiting around for the next good moment.

Cujo can be fully explained in a couple of sentences. A friendly St. Bernard is bitten by a rabid bat and becomes rabid. Through a series of events involving chance and the dog attacking and killing a couple of people, the dog traps a mother and her young son in their car for a couple of days. That’s it. Like I said, it’s not a bad premise for a short, but for a full-length movie, it requires a great deal of extra bits.