“She walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile.”
The Ochala brothers have gone missing. The wife and daughter of one of the brothers report them as missing persons. Detective David Hodges (Joseph Bologna) works the night shift. When he gets word of the missing men he agrees to check into it. He finds out that in the lake they were fishing in, police recovered a boot with the foot still in it. David checks with the coroner (Buckley Norris) and finds out that three derelicts have also gone missing recently. He also says the damage to the foot looks like a bite mark. David’s wife Christine (Dee Wallace) works at the university lab. She thinks it could be saliva in the wounds but she’s not ready to commit to that answer.
The local Latino population believes Vinnie Brown (Steve Railsback) is responsible. He has been trying to buy out all the real estate in the area to build a huge condominium complex. He is trying to run out the Latinos so he can take over the prime real estate around the lake. He wants to build his own empire. He has a big party planned on the weekend for the town at the lake, basically to show what a big dick he has.
When Christine sees the pictures of the bite marks she determines it is an alligator that caused the damage. David tells Mayor Anderson (Bill Daly) about the alligator and tries to get him to cancel the party. Brown basically runs the town and the mayor. He refuses to cancel. Brown calls in a professional alligator hunter to deal with the problem. The professional alligator hunter is Hawk Hawkins (Richard Lynch) a Cajun cuckoo. He drives overnight with part of his team. Hawk is the one that figures out that Brown has been dumping toxic stuff into the lake. Unfortunately he ends up losing most of his posse trying to kill the alligator. Officer Rich Harmon (Woody Brown) ends up teamed up with Dave to try to kill the beast. They have no luck either. Hawk ends up joining forces with Dave and Harmon. The three of them go down into the alligator’s lair to match wits with the killing machine.
When Police Chief Speed (Brock Peters) gets in the way of Brown’s party, Brown has him killed. The party goes on. At least until the alligator decides to crash the shindig.
“Alligator II: The Mutation” was released in 1991 and was directed by Jon Hess. The movie has been slammed six ways from Sunday. Critics tore it apart. The public wasn’t much better. There are a few that loved it but the majority was very cold about it. Sometimes it amazes me how vehement people get about a movie.
I agree that “Alligator” 1980 was a rip roarin’ fun movie. Even though many of these same critics touted it as a “Jaws” 1975 knockoff. I also agree that Alligator II is not near as good. I would have liked more alligator attacks. I also understand that the sequel was just a money grab. That’s usually why there are sequels. But “Alligator II” is not really a bad movie. It had all the components of your basic monster movie. While “Alligator” was and “A” movie, “Alligator II” is your average “B” movie. I looked at it as a movie unto itself and not as a comparison to the first movie. In that way I could just enjoy a good big ass monster in a monster movie.
There are several scenes from “Alligator” that were used as stock footage for “Alligator II”. Several noted are the view of the saliva under the microscope, the view of the alligator in the tunnel opening its eye when the hunters are in the sewer, when the alligator slips into the water at the lake party, and the scene of the alligator lumbering past the sewer tunnel columns.