Leofwine_draca
One of the lowest-budgeted thrillers I've ever sat through, GATOR KING has deservedly been consigned to the forgotten corner of bargain-basement history. It's a would-be environmental thriller about a dastardly villain who imports alligators from China in order to slaughter them for their meat in the US, and the efforts of an environmental activist to bring him to book.That plot has some potential as plots go, but unfortunately GATOR KING is so cheap as to be laughable. It looks like it has no more budget than a shot-on-video horror flick of the 1990s. The production values are laughable, and the direction consists of a static camera being dumped in the corner of the room while no second takes are ever made when the authors flub their lines.The performances here are especially poor, particularly from the stock British henchman who really got on my nerves. Antonio Fargas (STARSKY & HUTCH) looks permanently peed off and who can blame him? Michael Berryman is probably the most fun but only has a couple of scenes as a mad scientist type. Joe Estevez remains the most obscure actor in his family. The would-be exciting climax is particularly incongruous given this film's aspirations; did nobody know they were making a dog when they shot this?
rsoonsa
Typical of most Rhino Home Video releases, this resolutely uninteresting work provides only an occasional snippet of skill as its patterned plot advances towards a predictable climax. At Santos Lobilita's mid-Florida restaurant, the Crocodile Club, freshly slaughtered alligator meat and innards are the principal theme items upon the establishment's menu, the animals being captured and transported under heavy sedation from a reserve in mainland China to the United States, where Lobilita has them imprisoned, although he steadfastly claims that his main purpose is cross breeding, to restore what has become an endangered species, with a stateside phylum. An environmental activist, Maureen McCormick (Shannon K. Foley) comes upon a site where Lobilita is abandoning the slain animals and, in spite of opposition from a senator and from the local corrupt sheriff (Joe Estevez), Maureen refreshes her long-standing campaign against Santos whose treatment of the alligators is cruel and blatantly self-serving. Her efforts are abetted by a former boyfriend, wildlife Ranger Ron (Jay Richardson), whose attempts at apprehending Santos while a member of the sheriff's department were dashed by his supervisor, but who has continued looking for a means of bringing the self-styled "Gator King" to justice. While Ron and Maureen are rekindling their love affair, trouble awaits them due to the resolve of evil Lobilita to allow no interference in his plans to become a highly successful saurian specialized restaurateur. The film is shabbily composed, the direction tepid, with a screenplay so weakly constructed that a rather less than accomplished cast must fend for itself within sequences that are generally underwritten, as the players' ad libbing serves merely to suggest a need for a stronger hand at the helm. Antonio Fargas performs unsuccessfully as Gator King, his acting limitations prominent amid the surfeit of chaos that the plot line becomes, with only Richardson, a veteran of similar substandard fare, actually managing to create his part. Looping and syncing are not done well, although the post-production sound efforts show improvement as the film advances; however, the same cannot be said of the editing, choppy throughout this drab affair wherein a shortfall of scenario logic is exacerbated by poor production values. A Rhino DVD package is of uneven quality that includes a very rough skipping segment, while offering no extras for a movie that simply follows a recipe that is obviously pointed towards the provision of mindless entertainment, yet does not manage to do even that.
