B Movie Bonanza

Alligator (1980) is the movie for this Sunday's "monsterdon" watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!

• Just start watching that movie this Sunday, November 16 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT which is 2am Monday UTC
• and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live text commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
• I usually open two web browser windows side-by-side on a computer. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something.

How to watch the movie:

• tubi (availability varies by country): https://tubitv.com/movies/100006257/alligator
• youtube (has some blurring and bleeping?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cublv_ELVp4
• uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox should work for those tubi and youtube links
• dailymotion (3 minutes shorter?) : https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9gz9v6
• dailymotion (3 minutes shorter?): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x96dway
• dailymotion (3 minutes shorter?): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9b49fo
• archive (3 minutes shorter?): https://archive.org/details/alligator-1980
• someone usually streams it on https://miru.miyaku.media/ at that time.
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://nobraincellsleft.github.io/JustWatch-Search/title/tm100016 or here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/alligator

Set in Chicago, the film follows a police officer and a reptile expert who track an enormous, ravenous man-eating alligator flushed down the toilet years earlier, that is attacking residents after escaping from the city's sewers.

...

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it holds an 87% approval rating based on 30 reviews, with an average of 6.8/10.[20] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100 based on 10 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[21]

Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave the film a mostly positive review, writing that its "suspense is frequently as genuine as its wit and its fond awareness of the clichés [it uses]".[22] The staff of Variety concluded: "Dumb as it is, director Lewis Teague brings some plusses to the pic. Robert Forster, as a detective, and Riker are amiable leads, never taking the film too seriously. Tech credits are cheap but serviceable."[23] Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film one out of four stars, suggesting that it would be best to "flush this movie down the toilet to see if it also grows into something big and fearsome."[24]

In 2000, Kim Newman of Empire praised the perceived wit of the film's script, as well as the "solid performances, effective effects", and "spirited B-level direction".[25] In 2007, Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty called the film "Clever, funny, and wonderfully bloody," and wrote that "[this] B movie deserves an... 'A-'".[26] In 2013, Jim Knipfel of Den of Geek awarded the film four-and-a-half out of five stars, calling it "intelligent and stylish".[27] Film historian Leonard Maltin gave the film a score of three out of four stars, and wrote: "If you've got to make a film about a giant alligator that's terrorizing Chicago, this is the way to do it—with a sense of fun to balance the expected violence and genuine scares."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_(film)