Customer Reviews

The Alligator People

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I will not delve to much into the movie itself as it has been pretty well covered here. While i do not see a comparison to The Fly as one contributor did, i do think this may have been a precursor to Swamp Thing, as regeneration of body tissue and limbs is the idea of the mad scientist. Gator genes used on humans? You know its gonna go bad. And Lon Chaney Jr., although in a lesser role is a real treat. The DVD qulaity is spectacular and the Widescreen presentation is truly widescreen aspect, no anamorphic deception on this one as on so many of these old classics. If you like the old sci-fi/horror of the 50's this is a pretty decent movie and as said, a very nice print.

"The Alligator People" is a typical, 50s, low-budget horror film that provides some fun for fans of the genre ( fans like me ! ). It would be an understatement to say that special effects and make-up have made a quantum leap in movies since 1959, the year that this film was released theatrically. Today, many viewers will find the title creatures more amusing than horrific.

At the same time, "The Alligator People" does benefit from a couple of good performances and a wonderfully creepy atmosphere. Beverly Garland stars as a young nurse who marries a handsome pilot, only to have him disappear on their honeymoon.
Her search for the missing groom eventaully leads her to a forbidding old mansion in the middle of a Louisiana swamp. The local residents are far from welcoming, not to mention various alligators and snakes that infest the area. She does indeed find her errant husband, very much a "changed" man thanks to the efforts of a mad scientist. The whole saga is told in flashbacks, as Ms. Garland relates her amazing story, under hypnosis, to her psychiatrist.

Beverly Garland is terrific in the lead, an attractive actress who deserved better projects than Grade B horror flicks. I must admit though that she has one quality that is compulsory for this type of movie--she sure knows how to scream ! Richard Crane is the unfortunate husband, spending much of the film looking like he has the rash from hell ! Veteran heavy George Macready is the "mad doctor", although his performance lacks the maniacal spark that would have added to the fun. Horror film icon, Lon Chaney, is "worth the price of admission" with his super, over-the-top role as a demented, alcoholic swamp denizen, who "hates dem gators"--it seems that one of them chomped his hand off! His scenes with Ms. Garland are classic--his intentions for her totally dishonourable. For Chaney fans, this title is a "must".

The movie has plenty of atmosphere, whether the scene takes place in the swamp with "dem gators", snakes and deadly quicksand, or the spooky old mansion where medical experiments are backfiring in the worst possible way.

"The Alligator People" was a black and white, Cinemascope production, and the DVD captures all of its widescreen "glory". Except for the occasional line, I found the picture quality to be excellent--the sound what you would expect. Several trailers for this film, and other Fox thrillers are included.

Yes "The Alligator People" has "quickie, exploitation flick" stamped all over it, and the title monster is undeniably goofy. However, for fans of old horror/sci fi movies, there is more than enough here to keep you entertained. Besides--look at the title--were you really expecting "Citizen Kane" ? !

A very sad footnote--Ms. Beverly Garland passed away on 5 December 2008. While most of her films were of the "B" variety, she went on to a long and successful career in television. She guest-starred on an astonishing number of TV programs, a tribute to her popularity and versatility. Ms. Garland will be missed.

A doctor uses a serum on his nurse, Jane (Beverly Garland) to get her to re-live a trauma she has no memory of. A very strange tale emerges: When her husband Paul disappears on their honeymoon, Jane traces him to a Louisiana plantation deep in the swamps where no one will tell her what happened to him. She insists on staying and discovers Paul is around but can't find him. Why? Because mad doctor George Macready is performing bizarre experiments with alligators (and people) and Paul is turning into an alligator! Lon Chaney Jr. co-stars as a hook-handed assistant with a hatred for "gaters" because one bit off his hand and Frieda Inescourt ("Return of the Vampire") is the mistress of the plantation trying to cover up the awful horrors as Garland gets more and more inquisitive. There's Deep South atmosphere to spare and creepy crawlies in the swamp as Garland runs around screaming. She's good as Jane and really put through the mill here. Obviously, this is no classic but it's a fun 50's creature feature for collectors with laughable make-up effects and a fun turn by Chaney Jr. with that hook-hand. No wonder Jane developed amnesia after this experience...when you see the "alligator-man" you'll know why. Gotta love it.

don't ya love enthusiastically semi-shabby and politically incorrect old B movies ? you get to see all kinds of cool stuff like water jeeps and whisky fueled performances by elders from the golden age of horror . the appliance our poor titular character (BRUCE BENNETT) has to wear toward the end of this very engaging knee slapper is genuinely one of a kind . cool house . pretty darn good performance by BEVERLY GARLAND . fantastically fun performance by LON CHANEY JR. . always good to see old reliable faces like GEORGE MACREADY being all earnest and driven' that water jeep and whatnot . the swamp is super fun to see and is bona fide atmospheric . here , take my hand and step back in time to 1959 . see how they did it . you won't be sorry . promise .

Lon Chaney jr. hates alligators. One of the horrible reptiles ate one of his hands (now replaced by a nifty hook), and Lon's held a grudge ever since! Enter Jane (Beverly Garland), searching for her runaway groom. She ends up in the swamplands of gator-country, where a mad scientist is injecting war vets with alligator serum. Uh-oh! His patients are getting mighty scaly! Jane must face the awful truth about her husband and his involvement in these hideous experiments! She must also face Lon jr! Watch out for that hook! ALLIGATOR PEOPLE is every bit as good as it's title implies. Worth a quick peek on a sleepless night...

The Alligator People is more of a mild hoot, than a horror film. One of the grade C-flicks, not good enough to be a B-Drive In film! Still, it's a delight to people who love old B&W horror films. This film must be loaded with more phobias and prejudices per square inch than any other horror film of the period, yet instead of insulting people (too much, lol) it all gels into one great time.

Two doctors are talking at the start of the film, and one is telling he has just heard a story under hypnosis that he can scarcely credit. Jane (Beverly Garland), his receptionist, recounts the tale, which the doctor plays for his colleague. Jane had married a man from the Southern US, and while on their honeymoon, they were sitting on a train. He receives a frantic telegram, gets off at the station to place a telephone call, only to have the train pull off with his waiting Bride. The Bride gets off at the next stop and tries to find her groom, but he has vanished.

After years of searching, she finally tracks down the ancestral home of his family. His domineering mother does not welcome Jane, but Jane won't go away without answers to her questions. At times, as Jane prowls the bayous the movie is quite hauntingly lensed. However, dialog is stilted, frustrating, rushed, the acting is OTT or so understated it borders on laconic, and the special effects, well, as I said are grade C. Toss in the great Lon Chaney as a drunken lecherous redneck swamp-rat, a perfect bizarre touch to one strange film that seems to succeed in spite of itself!

Great fun for a cold rainy autumn night.

Based on a true story (okay, it's not), The Alligator People (1959), often confused with the film The Crocodile People (okay, there's no such film), relates a completely fantastic tale (well, maybe not fantastic, but pretty darn good) of what happens when a scientist tries to utilize the regenerative properties inherent within the genetic make-up of reptiles on humans, with unexpected results (the title of this film should give you a hint).

The Alligator People was directed by Roy Del Ruth, a man who's forte was tense crime dramas for Warner Brothers in the 30's, then lavish musicals for MGM after that, and was also responsible for what many consider to be the worst biography made yet in The Babe Ruth Story (1948), yeah, the one with William Bendix, but I digress...the film stars the very attractive and highly prolific Beverly Garland (remember her role in the definitive 1979 film Roller Boogie) as Joyce Webster, a recently married woman whose husband Paul, played by Richard `Rocky Jones, Space Ranger' Crane, ran off during their honeymoon, after receiving a mysterious telegram (boy, talk about your cold feet, although you're suppose to run off BEFORE you get hitched, fool)...anyway, not one to take a fairly obvious hint, Joyce begins a long and fruitless search for her beloved, one that finally leads her to some lovely swampland somewhere in the south, Louisiana, I believe. It's here where she discovers Paul is holed up on a plantation of sorts, participating in some weird and wacky experiments conducted by scientist Dr. Eric Lorimer (played by Bruce Bennett, who's appeared in some 120 plus features throughout the 30's well into the 60's, but I recall him from the films The Cosmic Man and Fiend of Dope Island). On the `mad scientist' scale, Dr. Lorimer rates pretty low as he's not really mad or suffers from a god complex, but his experimentation, while appearing successful early on, has recently begun to exhibit serious scaly side effects (say that three times fast) on his human test subjects, and now he's remorseful and working to fix the problem. Lessons learned, I suppose...finally we have Lon Chaney Jr., appearing as Manon, a caretaker/handyman (of sorts) who works on the plantation, but spends most all of his time either drinking his homemade hooch and/or tormenting gators. I suspect his hatred of alligators has something to do with the hook for a hand (ahh, a classic case of CHS, short for Captain Hook Syndrome), and I was right...at least he's still got that one good hand for shooting his gun at gators, and that hook comes in handy for those pesky itches and handling sides of beef...what awful secrets does Joyce uncover about her husband, his murky past, and the inhuman experiments being performed deep in the alligator and snake infested swampy morass they call home? Whatever they maybe be, you'll never get them from me...but you can probably figure it out for yourself, unless you've been into Manon's bathtub booze...yick...

I thought The Alligator People was really good, in terms of a B movie. The title pretty much gives the plot away, in my opinion, as the story offers little in the way of shocks or surprises. Beverly Garland was quite good, basically supporting the entire film on her shoulders, and I got a kick out of seeing her running through some fairly nasty and dangerous swampy pools with live alligators. She's got more guts than I...she's also very easy on the eyes, which certainly helps. Richard Crane did okay, but I thought his gravelly croc/man voice was pretty funny (along with his varying degrees of make-up and costumes). As far as the character of Dr. Lorimer, I prefer my B movie scientists to be a bit more mad...he sure talked the talk, spewing technical mumbo jumbo at a pretty constant rate, "The oscillating jiggy-ma-bob produces an equivalent of one billion kilovolts of energy!" He did drive a rather cool swamp buggy, and managed to get his hands on a good amount of radioactive material (maybe the stuff wasn't that closely regulated back then), so I give him a bit of credit. Lon Cheney Jr's character of Manon was a lot of fun to watch, but doesn't have a lot of screen time. What he did have, he made the most of, playing the dirty, drunken, lecherous, gator hating, inbred, cayenne pepper snortin', backwoods Cajun hillbilly to the hilt. One thing was for sure, he sure hated them gators...as I've said, the plot is pretty predictable (and silly), offering few, if any surprises, but it does move along fairly well (the film runs approximately 74 minutes), and stays on track. The direction of the film was professionally done, handled by someone who knows his business, but lacked a hard to define quality I look for in good science fiction (I know, I know, the film is billed as a horror flick, but I felt it leaned more towards sci-fi). The special effects were pretty low budget, especially the rubbery alligator suit donned by Clark (as mentioned by another reviewer). I really wasn't expecting much in this area, and that's exactly what I got...all in all, a well-done cheapie film that's fun as long as you don't look at it too hard. I will say, even though the plot was middling at best, I did find interesting the part at the very beginning, and at the very end, as the middle is presented in flashback form, providing a nice little twist.

The wide screen transfer provided on this DVD is exceptionally good-looking, and nearly flawless. Added to that is two separate audio tracks, one mono and one stereo. Special features include an original theatrical trailer, and trailers for other Fox releases, including The Fly, (1958), The Fly (1986), The Omen (1976), and Phantom Of The Paradise (1974). Also, the cover artwork is really cool...look at it...go ahead...you know you want to...

Cookieman108

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If you are a 1950's horror movie buff, The Alligator People is a great flick.

On her wedding night, a woman's husband abandons her. She goes out on a search for him and finds herself in the bayou. Once there she finds hubby, but he's not the man he used to be.....HE'S ONE OF THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE!! Seems a scientist has found a new miracle cure for folks who have suffered severe physical trauma. It takes that old fact of a lizard growing back it's tail after losing it, and tries to apply it humans. By injecting folks with Hydrocortisone from alligators, they can reconstruct any damaged by tissue, including missing limbs. Hubby was in a bad plane crash a year earlier and underwent the treatment. The catch is that a year after treatment, patients literally start turning into alligators. This explains why he abruptly ditched his wife. He waits around the lab for his chance to try the scientist's new solution that involves gamma rays. Also creeping around is Lon Chaney as an alligator hating Cajun with a hook for a hand. He's a bit like a demented version of Carl Weathers from Happy Gilmore, only he's white, doesn't play golf, is a Cajun and didn't star in Action Jackson. The whole thing makes me think of the Cajun alligator villain, Leatherhead, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. I love that guy!
It all adds up to another fun "science gone awry" horror flick of the 50s. Dig in if it's your kinda thang.

"The Alligator People" begins with a rather interesting framing device for the story. Jane Marvin (Beverly Garland) is a nurse at a sanitarium who agrees to be hypnotized. But when she is under she says her real name is Joyce Webster and proceeds to tell a shocking story. Well, a weird one at any rate. It seems Joyce married a war veteran named Paul Webster (Richard Crane) who received a telegram when the couple were on their honeymoon and disappeared. Not one to take such things lying down, Joyce tracks her husband down to an old mansion in the Louisiana swamps. After a bit of traditional gothic horror, she discovers that a scientist (George Macready) has being doing experiments to help war veterans regenerate lost limbs (good idea) using injections of alligator serum (bad plan). Of course, this noble experiment goes horrible wrong and the title probably gives away the horrible truth of what is happening to poor Paul.

"The Alligator People" is a modest example of a B-movie and if you stop and think about it the plot is pretty much the same as "The Fly," which was released the year before. However, this film loses a star just for the alligator suit (although makeup artist Dick Smith would later go on to do "The Exorcist" and "Amadeus," so he can be forgiven for being a novice back in 1959). As long as we are talking pedigree, director Roy Del Ruth directed "The Maltese Falcon" (No, not that one, the 1931 version). The best sequence in the film is when the creepy handyman with the hook (Lon Chaney, Jr. in a wasted sterotype character) chases poor Joyce through the swamp, past all those snakes and alligators, in the rain someone reminiscent of the climax of Todd Browning's "Freaks." Unfortunately, that is not the climax of the film, which smacks too much of traditional melodrama.

The big question is whether this 1959 film inspired Stan Lee to create the villain "The Lizard" in issue #6 of "The Amazing Spider-Man." Dr. Curt Connors lost his right arm during the war and was experimenting with a serum made from lizards blood which certainly hints at a connection. Was this film the inspiration for the Lizard? My guess would be "Yes." Does circle get the square, Stan?