Those Dirty, Stinkin', Slimy Gators! 🎃 🧟

 

Joyce Webster(Beverly Garland)wants to know where her husband vanished off to when he unboarded their honeymoon train trip after receiving a seemingly distressing telegram. Her search takes Joyce to a plantation in the middle of a godforsaken swampland in Louisiana where the female owner, Mrs. Lavinia Hawthorne(Frieda Inescort)wants her gone as soon as possible. Lavinia confides in a scientist, Dr. Mark Sinclair(George Macready), about a series of mysterious experiments involving alligators and soon Joyce discovers they concern her beau, Paul(Richard Crane). Interesting decision by director Roy Del Ruth and screenwriter Orville H Hampton to use a wraparound device in Joyce's narrating this tale under hypnosis by her psychiatrist who is concerned for her form of amnesiac suppression of such horrifying details from the past, conferring with a fellow colleague of the profession on the direction to take in regards to telling her or not. The finale, while tragic and sad, is also really bizarre as a gamma ray experiment using Cobalt 60 and X-ray technology turns the patient(voluntary guinea pig)into a two legged, walking Alligator Man! Lon Chaney Jr is cast against type as a completely loathsome plantation hand who lost his hand to a gator(which encourages his passionate hatred for the reptiles, so much we see in one instance where he runs an alligator over with his truck!)and attempts to rape Joyce after knocking her out with a punch to the chops. THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE falls in line with many movies from this decade in regards to the mixture of science fiction and creature feature, how a man of science attempts to help those with broken and mangled bodies by using hormones extracted from reptiles, the result horrific for those experimented on(we see how humans under this scientific procedure begin to grow scales on their bodies a year after the hormone process had supposedly cured them). One thing's for certain, Joyce loves her man, even chasing after him during a rain storm into the swamp forest, tripping over alligators and undeterred by the obvious danger. Garland(of MY THREE SONS fame)is quite a looker, yummy curves and all. - November 2010

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ThIs has been on rotation on Fox Movie Channel's Retro. Typically the channel has a block of sci-fi and horror, among other classics of the 50s and 60s. The Alligator People (1959) is a quick programmer where very attractive Garland must brave a swamp with snakes and gators (and, worst of all, Chaney, looking like a gruff, boozing deckhand-turned pirate) to find her husband, no longer recognizable since the x-ray radiation experiment was interrupted by growly Chaney, still sore when his attempted sexual assault of Garland was disrupted by Crane. Chaney shooting a gun at those damned gators -- even running over one (!!!), completely drunk and practically unhinged -- is quite sight. So is Garland -- a sight for sore eyes. The alligator head and costume for Paul will probably be considered campy by today's standards. October 13th, 2021