Written by: Jim Wynorski and Mike MacLean
Directed by: Jim Wynorski
Starring: David Carradine, James C. Burns, and John Callahan
Reviewed by: Brett G.
"You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. As a matter of fact, there is one thing you could do to make yourself even more beautiful."
"Yeah? What's that?"
"Get me a beer!"
"Yeah? What's that?"
"Get me a beer!"
Just when you thought Saturday nights were safe, SyFy and Roger Corman have returned with yet another crappy creature feature; at this point, these abominations are basically the horror fans’ equivalent to being slammed with monthly bills. Try as you might to ignore them, you feel obligated to address them. This time out, Corman has dragged fellow bad-movie maker Jim Wynorski along for Dinocroc vs. Supergator. I can only assume that the addition of the guy who brought us such classics as Ghoulies IV and Return of Swamp Thing indicates an extreme willingness to somehow make something that’s even worse than the previous efforts have been.
Obviously, creatures don’t become Dinocrocs or Supergators naturally; they’re the result of a genetic experiment gone terribly wrong (not that they can ever go any other way). It turns out a shady businessman (David Carradine) has been funneling government money into a project to breed these things for an army or something; anyway, they get loose, people get eaten, and some government agents, a local conservation officer, and a cajun gator hunter (among many more) enlist to wrangle the creatures up.
It goes without saying that Dinocroc vs. Supergator is terrible, and it’s terrible for all the same reasons its predecessors were terrible. Barely scraping by with the minimal effort required to be loosely considered a movie, it’s a pretty lazy piece of film-making that solely exists to turn its cast into gator and croc bait. And believe me, there’s approximately 27 “characters” (term used very loosely) in this movie. Seriously, I started to lose count about 20 minutes in; at one point, the film proved it wasn’t going to rip off Jaws. Instead, it decides to rip off Predator for about four minutes by introducing a group of ineffectual marines (who sadly don’t tell awesome jokes like Shane Black) for about four minutes before moving on to another batch of idiots.
The film eventually settles on focusing on about a half dozen of these people, not that you’ll particularly care for any of them. Even more disconcerting is its unwillingness to dispatch of all these fools in glorious fashion; save for one somewhat gorific (yet CGI-riddled) scene, the movie basically consists of the actors being gulped down by the cartoonish title characters in laughable fashion (they just kind of disappear as either the croc or the gator lunge at them). So it doesn’t even have that going for it, unlike stuff like Sharktopus and Dinoshark, which were wise enough to splatter body parts all over the place. This one does have the showdown promised by its title, even though it amounts to about 4 seconds of the two creatures thrashing about at each other.
These things always come with a requisite name actor, and this one boasts the late, great David Carradine. I guess he was going to cash in his late career Kill Bill fame to take up the family business of popping up in any and every film he could; like his dad before him, though, he does give it his all, even if he has little to do besides chomp on cigars and scenery. He also shares the screen with Jack Daniels more than he does most of the main cast, so don’t expect to see a whole lot of him. Not that there’s a whole lot he could have done to rescue this movie from its own dullness. I’m sure everyone involved knew they were making yet another trashy, z-grade movie, but even Wynorski (who should really know better) doesn’t even bother to make things completely ridiculous. It’s almost as if everyone agreed that the ridiculous title and concept were enough and forgot that it still takes effort to make it entertaining.
Oddly enough, there’s this part in the movie where a jackass movie director boasts about how he’s finished part six of his horror series that’ll be released in October, at which point he’ll begin writing another one. This is an obvious riff on Saw and the assembly-line nature of horror flicks, which is only funny here because Dinocroc vs. Supergator has no legs to stand on for such lampooning. I can’t help but wonder if this one suffers even more because of fatigue; it’s saying a lot when even I’m getting tired of this shit. Maybe there is too much of a good thing, especially when that “good” thing is actually horrible. At any rate, like the previous films in this “series,” this debuted on TV some time back and is just now making its way to home video. Anchor Bay does the (dis)honors but does a pretty solid job on the DVD presentation; you’ll have few complaints about the transfer and soundtrack, plus they’ve thrown in a commentary with Wynorski and Corman. I really want to give Dinocroc vs. Supergator the benefit of the doubt--surely it can’t be that much worse than other films like this that I’ve recommended, but I’m gonna go with my gut and tell you to avoid this one. Trash it!
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