Director – Danny Draven, Screenplay – Zalman Band, Producers – Charles Band & Zalman Band, Photography – Thomas L. Callaway, Music – Jojo Draven, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dave Matherly, Makeup Effects – Ron George. Production Company – Full Moon Features.
Michael Bonini (Sam), Maddie Lane (Hope), Ben Vandermey (Chad), Rebecca Stoughton (Sarah), Cooper Drippe (Pierce), Sarah Buchanan (Paisley), Lee Fealy (Jim)
A group of six friends get away to a cabin in South Georgia. Sarah persuades them to undergo a ritual where they throw their laptops into the lake beside the cabin. This proceeds to transform an alligator into something monstrous with the power to fly. The alligator then proceeds to besiege the cabin as it tries to devour them.
Charles Band is a legendary low-budget producer with numerous works including the Ghoulies, Puppetmaster, Trancers, Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man films to his name. With Full Moon Features, the latest incarnation of Full Moon Productions, Band seems to be making films cheaply for digital release – in this case, Bad CGI Gator only runs to 58 minutes – or else offering up recycled packages of his previous hits.
Bad CGI Gator comes from Danny Draven. Draven started working principally as an editor on various films from Full Moon Productions (where his contributions were often credited under the names of Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005- ) characters). He began directing for Full Moon and others with low-budget fare such as Horrorvision (2001), Cryptz (2002), Deathbed (2002), Hell Asylum (2002), Dark Walker (2003), Ghost Month (2007), Reel Evil (2012), The Offerings (2015), Patient Seven (2016) and Weedjies: Halloweed Night (2019).
Bad CGI Gator is a riff on Bad CGI Sharks (2019) that was originally made as a Deliberately Ridiculous Title by Ron Bonk’s SRS Cinema. Since then, we have had Dustin Ferguson’s Big Bad CGI Monsters (2024), while Band has currently announced Bad CGI Werewolves!. In a way it is the ultimate bad movie homage, one where the very cheapness of the effects are announced in the film’s title.
There is an incredibly lame rationale offered to the scenario – Rebecca Stoughton suggests “Hey, why don’t we throw our laptops in the lake?” Surprisingly everybody agrees to do so – after no doubt having spent several hours before that backing their drives up and each of them being wealthy enough that they can just throw a $600-800 computer in the lake just because someone suggests it. There is the vague suggestion that doing so is a statement about the environment, but mostly they seem to do it just because … well no reason at all. It appears that this is what causes the gator to emerge from the lake and gain the ability to fly. Later, for equally baffling reasons, the gator also becomes giant-sized after devouring a Bluetooth speaker. It is finally killed because the electronics it consumed run out of power.
The film has been cheaply made – all of the action is contained to a cabin and the nearby pier that stretches onto the lake. Beyond its title, Bad CGI Gator is no more than a film like Lake Placid (1999), The Flood (2023) and Methgator (2023) with a killer crocodile/alligator amok and picking people off. The one big issue might be is that despite the title Bad CGI Gator, the CGI gator effects are actually not that bad. They are perfectly serviceable for this type of film. I have seen a lot worse – if you want bad CGI go and look at the films of Mark Polonia.
I expected that Bad CGI Gator would be in the vein of Sharknado (2013) or one of the copycats that clearly announces it is not taking itself seriously. It is labelled a Horror Comedy but that is oddly what we don’t get. There are the characters of the jocks and airhead girlfriends, which get wound up in the playing by the various actors to the point they become annoying comic caricatures. Some of the lines seem to be mocking their self-important idiocy but that’s the nearest we get to any horror comedy elements.
Trailer here