Movies in the Parx - Meth Gator

Every movie reviewer or critic has that one friend.

You know who they are.

They’re your own personal Jerry Springer: bringing to light things that you didn’t know of and had secretly hoped didn’t exist.

They find ‘em.

They watch ‘em.

And then…they want to pass the pain onto you.

I have a friend like that. One that made me watch some of the worst train wrecks ever put to streaming. It’s the friend that you wonder if somehow, someway, they might secretly hate you. Well, after the amount of pain that’s been doled out, it’s time she gets her own segment here at the Cat.

Welcome to Movies in the Parx.

And yes, alcohol is REQUIRED.

What happens when you mix the plots of Jaws and Cocaine Bear, add meth, a heaping helping of PlayStation 3-level graphics for special effects, incoherent dialog, unfathomable geography and a dash of that Asylum secret sauce? Then have it helmed by the son of one of the most prolific creators of low budget movies from the 80s to today?

You get Meth Gator…or Attack of the Meth Gator…directed by Christopher Douglas Olen Ray, son of Fred Olen Ray.

And within the first five minutes, you know EXACTLY what you’re in for. Okay, actually as soon as you see the logo for The Asylum you know exactly what you’re in for…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look at what I think is going on in this movie:

Memorial Day is coming to the small island of Sweetwater in the Florida Everglades. When a drug bust goes bad, an unlikely series of events puts citizens and tourists, holiday revelers all, at the mercy of a methed-up gator on the search for its next fix. Only a DEA agent, the local sheriff, a gator hunter and a couple of well-armed innkeepers are all that stands between a veritable human buffet and a supply of meth to make this gator invincible!

Look, this one is exactly what it advertises on the tin, as the old saying goes: The Asylum’s usual ‘panache’ for Z-grade creature features brought to you by the progeny of one of true masters of the 3-Bs (Blood, Breasts and Beasts for those of you who haven’t taken the Drive-In Oath…and shame on you for not doing that!). But there are some things here that make this movie special.

And I’m talking “short-bus special” here.

But you know what…before we do that, let’s actually do some positives first. Right off the bat, as it turns out, just like Cocaine Bear there is indeed just the slightest bit of truth to this story. To quote from Wikipedia:

Meth Gator is loosely inspired by reports from 2019 that a Tennessee police

department publicly discouraged the flushing of methamphetamine down toilets

due to the possibility that alligators could ingest the drug, creating hyper-

aggressive “meth gators”.

So how about that, eh? Now, sure, an alligator biologist at the University of Florida called this conjecture to be “a ridiculous notion”…but at the same time, someone in Florida calling a hypothesis from Tennessee ridiculous feels a lot like the pot calling the kettle black…don’t you think? Okay, intellectual snobbery aside (and let’s face it, since I bellied up to watch this cinematic opus, it’s not like I’m in any position to pass judgement), I will also say in the movie’s defense that it delivers exactly what you’d expect it to. There’s no story to get in the way of the plot…it’s just a gator on meth in search of his next hit all the while munchin’ and crunchin’ on any fleshbags that get in his way. And while I tend to turn up my nose at digital gore…it’s done about as well as you could do it here. Lastly, the sheer ridiculousness of the film works to its advantage. You’re too busy laughing at the concept of an alligator not only leaping up onto a cell tower to devour its next meal to question the fact that this gator then proceeds to knock over said tower due to its sheer weight alone.

So if that last sentence already has you looking where to stream this, nothing I’m going to say next will dissuade you…and heck, to be honest, while they’re negatives in a filmmaking sense, the utter confusion that arises from the following criticisms is just going to make you want two things: more kills…and more booze/weed/intoxicant of choice to grease the wheels of the dull stretches in between.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone only to come to the conclusion that while they know English words, the apparently have no idea how to put those words together in any meaningful way? In essence…a sentence or a paragraph that you can sense is trying really hard to tell you something but is only success full in making brain cells want to report to the nearest suicide booth? The entire movie can be described this way. The dialog ranges from stilted to circular to wondering whether or not the screenwriters have actually heard people talk before. The acting…well, it’s The Asylum…you weren’t really expecting that here, were you? The character backgrounds had to be the result of random dartboard throws. A sheriff who adopts or has an interracial son who works out of the Tampa DEA…that somehow isn’t able to claim jurisdiction over what would TOTALLY be a DEA matter? An innkeeper who’s a veteran with probably a little brain damage who also adopted a daughter (our DEA agent’s love interest…as is so CLEARLY telegraphed) that was orphaned when her drug-dealing father was killed by…you guessed it, the DEA? Oh…and said daughter was the best in her class at Police Academy (oddly enough, this premise does in fact seem like it would belong in that long-dead 80s franchise) but then dropped out for…reasons? What about the Mayor that on one hand has totally stolen his schtick and fashion sense from the mayor in Jaws…all the while taking kickbacks from whoever is running some mega-meth-lab the Sheriff we started off with has been trying to find for years? To say nothing of assorted meth-heads, dealers, makers and a random slap-fighting contest? With moonshine??? Oh, I almost forgot the zip-line that somehow, when very clearly cut, the second half stays up in what I can only assume is a rare example of cartoon physics in the real world.

Insert Scanners head-exploding gif here.

But the thing that nearly short circuited my entire cerebellum was how this film utterly fails at geography. Now, if we function on the information this movie provides us at the very beginning, this should be a fairly small island…right? And maybe it is. Yet somehow, this island has to be a tesseract or inside a TARDIS or…I dunno…but I for damn sure know that additional dimensions are needed. We’re shown scenes where the swamp is supposed to be pretty close to downtown…and yet in the swamp scene that’s supposed to be adjacent to the parade marching down main street…there’s not a goddamn sign of civilization anywhere. The super-duper-ultra meth lab I mentioned earlier? It’s somehow underground in a geological position where that would be utterly impossible unless you plan on wearing scuba gear to cook your drugs. Speaking of drug labs, there’s another one that’s clearly along a canal running through at the very least a pretty populated housing community. Where in the hell would that be??? What about the random woods where the also-random slap-fight party takes place? Is there even room on this island for something like the aforementioned zip-line??? Why does my brain hurt? Where’s my booze??? WHY DID I GO INTO THIS SOBER????

One final critique…but this is a big one, because this is about family honor. No, not involving any of the schmucks in the movie, I’m talking about the director. How does any progeny of Fred Olen Ray make a movie with ZERO breast count??? The oeuvre of the elder Olen Ray consisted of such goldmines as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Scream Queen Hot Tub, numerous 90’s erotic thrillers (including the last of the Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films, The Unliving, with the late great Paul Naschy) and the Bikini series/parodies of the 2000’s…so surely the younger had to aware of how to bring the goods simply via genetics or osmosis. But nope. And remember kids, on your Drive-In scorecard, no boobs is an automatic one-half star deduction.

As is the case for the films we look at in this segment, if I were trying a serious critique, this would totally be an F-. But, we do things a little different here in the Parx. The fact the movie totally delivers on its premise, unlike the bait and switch that was Cocaine Shark, already earns it a Happy Cat rating. BUT BE WARNED…do not even REMOTELY think while you’re watching this. If you do…well, I’d say permanent brain damage isn’t only likely…it’s deserved!