The Alligator People (1959)

It's funny the films you find yourself watching in the early hours of the morning.  The other day it was The Alligator People (1959).  It's one of those films which feels as if it was part Universal's 1950s revival of their B-movie horror series, which included such entries as Creature From the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis and The Thing That Couldn't Die, all of which were 'creature focused.  Yet, in reality, it was a Twentieth Century Fox production, made to form the lower half of a double bill with Fox's Return of the Fly.  Indeed, The Alligator People has clear parallels with the Fly films, in that sees a man reluctantly transformed into a monster as the result of having his genes mixed with those of an animal.  The biggest difference being that in the case of the Fly series, the mutation is the result of the protagonists own experimentation, the main character of The Alligator People has been the subject of an experimental treatment intended to grow back limbs lost in an air crash.  (There is a certain logic here, as many reptiles do have the ability to regenerate lost body parts).  The end result, of course, is the same: a bloke wandering around with the head of an animal.  Unfortunately, a man wandering around with an alligator's head, as Richard Crane (or, more likely, his stunt double) does for the film's last few minutes, simply looks ridiculous, eliciting laughs rather than gasps.  While a man with a fly's head is equally ridiculous, it does, nonetheless, have a certain frisson.  

Still, for a B-movie The Alligator People (like the contemporaneous Universal equivalents), is a well appointed production, with that unmistakable 'studio' feel that lifts it above the poverty row B programmers put out by the likes of Astor or AIP.  Like the Fly pictures, it is even shot in Fox's Cinemascope widescreen process.  As well as B-movie regulars like Beverly Garland and Richard Crane, the cast also boasts veteran character actor George Macready as the local mad scientist (albeit a benign one) and Lon Chaney Jr.  The latter, although third billed, plays only a secondary role, portraying the drunken alligator-hating and hook handed handy man ans swamp dweller.  That said, he pulls out all the stops, delivering a suitably hammy performance and ending up electrocuted on the scientist's electrical equipment when his hook touches a live wire.  But while The Alligator People might look relatively slick for a B-movie, its plot and budget betray its true nature.  The former - with its remote mansions, bayou laboratories and grotesque swamp-dwellers - could just as easily have come from a thirties or forties B film, while the latter means that, despite the plural of the title, we only ever see one full fledged 'Alligator Person'.  (Sure, the scientist has other patients, but these are barely glimpsed and swathed in bandages, with only one sporting a scaly face).  Most interestingly, The Alligator People represented part of a late-career change of direction for director Roy Del Ruth.  Having, since the forties, specialised in comedies and musicals (mainly for Warner Brothers), in the late fifties he suddenly found himself working in exploitation, with Alligator People being sandwiched between Phantom of the Rue Morgue for Warners and crime melodrama Why Must I Die? for AIP, (his last movie).  While The Alligator People might not be great cinema, it still makes for an enjoyable late night viewing experience.