Good ol’ Ponty is back with another B-movie review.  2023 was apparently the year of exploitation films about drug-addicted animals, with Cocaine Bear (2023) as the prime example of this bizarre subgenre.  I wonder if any desperate indie filmmakers made Fentanyl Fox or Oxy Otter or the like.

Well, somebody made Attack of the Meth Gator (2024), which demonstrates well the B-movie tendency to jump on the latest fad and churn as many bucks out of it as possible.  The Asylum made the film, which should come as no surprise—they’re the same folks behind the terrible-but-popular Sharknado franchise.

Apparently, the film is based on a joke Tweet (long since deleted) from a police department in Tennessee, warning residents not to flush their drugs, lest gators become hyper-aggressive “meth gators.”  Such a thing might not be possible, but even the remotest possibility is too terrifying and silly to contemplate for long.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of this timeless classic:

Coming up to Halloween, I usually knock out a review for a scary movie – ghosts, demons, serial killer – but this year, I’m going for what can best be described as weird, wonderful, terrible – pick your poison. It’s one of those films that you need to sit through until the end but then wonder why you did.

Decades ago, Disney asked the question, have you seen an elephant fly? That was for the classic animation, Dumbo (1941). In successive years, we’ve seen all manner of people and creatures do all sorts of things but now, in the millennium, we’re being asked, have you seen an alligator scamper? And climb? And leap? And even become a junkie? Well, now you can. Attack of the Meth Gator (2023), which doesn’t take a genius to figure out, is about an alligator that accidentally chomps down on a bag of crystal meth carelessly dropped by a drug dealer and becomes hooked on the stuff. Instantly. It makes our animal not only cranky and a little hyperactive but it allows him to grow to epic proportions and as he goes in search of more meth, a plethora of incredibly stupid people attempt to slow his roll but end up as reptile fodder instead.

There’s something about this flick that reminds me of another low budget effort, Killer Sofa (2019). When I reviewed it a few years ago, I said that the only good thing about it was the recliner and so it is with this movie; the alligator, performing feats unimaginable in the natural world, is the only reason to sit through this. The writers go through pains to give us a story but it’s wasted on horrifically bad actors and a terrible script.

Dante Williams (LaRonn Marzet) returns home after several years not only as part of a DEA investigation but to reconnect with his family and old friends. The alligator munches on the meth, all hell breaks loose and the townsfolk must come together to stop a drug fuelled monster ripping apart the community. There’s even a Murray Hamilton-esque mayor (remember the tool in Jaws?) who wants to keep word of the alligator getting out lest it upsets the town’s preparation for Memorial Day. Unlike Amity Island’s mayor, who gets off with a hard stare, this guy finds himself in the belly of the beast but let’s face it, so do half the cast.

That said, when you watch a bunch of people talking seriously about stopping an alligator before it gets its next fix, even though your imagination can stretch to accommodate bad fiction, there’s something ludicrously comic about it. I also giggled when one of the drug dealers, who thought that he’d escaped the gator – the creature had wandered into his room looking for drugs, only to saunter back through the gaping hole he barreled through in the first place – came to a grisly end when the main character’s love interest hammered on his door, the gator returning to claim his bitesize snack. Sometimes, it’s the little things that do it.

Not using chickens or the usual alligator bait to bring it in but clothes covered in meth was just bizarre but it just added to the wacky nature of this film, as did the ridiculous number of people who tried to shoot it from the same standing position with the same tiny pistols and then wondered, with shock and horror, why they were gator food.

If you can stand terrible acting and writing, I bid you watch this movie just for the creature. It’s a strange sort of recommendation, considering that if I had to rate it, I’d give it 2 from 5, but there was just enough to keep my interest on a bad B-movie night.

One last thing. I watched this immediately after viewing another of Prime’s B-movie offerings; Shark Week (2012). No amount of alcohol could prepare you for how awful that one is. If you’ve settled down for a budget movie night and see that film advertised, avoid it at all costs.