Director – Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, Screenplay – Lauren Pritchard & Joe Roche, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Thomas Hennessy, Music – Christopher Cano, Mikel Shane Prather & Chris Ridenhour, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Chad Garrett. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Laronn Marzett (Dante Williams), Vanessa Tamayo (Anna Grady), Ray Acevedo (Bithlo), Bruce Peoples (Sheriff Williams), Patrick Labyorteaux (Mayor Jensen), Wade Hunt Williams (Grady), Robbie Rist (Trig), Gus Langley (Tucker), Stuart Maxheimer (Deputy Farme), Benjamin L. Newmark (Shane), Arlene Lagos (Skylar)
Plot
On a small island in the Florida Everglades, Sheriff Williams leads a raid on a meth lab – only for a giant crocodile to appear and devour the packets of meth. Williams’ son Dante, a DEA agent, arrives on the island as part of his mission to stamp out meth labs. He soon becomes embroiled in the fight to stop the giant alligator as it rampages across the island, killing all in its way as it seeks another meth fix.
The Asylum is a low-budget US company I have written about before here on numerous occasions. Since the early 2000s, The Asylum have maintained a regular output of low-budget disaster movies, monster movies and killer shark films – they will always be remembered for the Sharknado (2013) phenomenon and the Mockbuster – low-budget films that are released around the same time as big-budget counterparts with a near-identical title designed to catch the attention of those who don’t look too closely on video shelves.
Cocaine Bear (2033), based on the true-life story about a bear that ingested a haul of cocaine, was a modest mainstream release. In reality, the cocaine killed the bear with no recorded incident of it going amok but the film had fun with the idea of a bear on a drug-fuelled rampage. And naturally filmmakers down the low-budget end of the market have flocked to that success and made their own spate of copycat films about drug-addicted animals on the rampage where Methgator joins Mark Polonia’s Cocaine Shark (2023) and upcoming Cocaine Werewolf (2024), while Dustin Ferguson made Cocaine Cougar (2023).
The Asylum’s in-house visual effects team have been getting more professional with each film to the point that their effects are on a par with theatrical product. As a result, the CGI gator looks fairly menacing and impressive once it is unleashed. On the other hand, Methgator lacks the tongue-in-cheek absurdity of The Asylum’s Sharknado and sequels – I didn’t want it to be that silly, but the level of something like the previous Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray film Mega Shark vs Kolossus (2015) would have worked well. However, there are only occasional moments when the film gets there. The most entertainingly ridiculous of the scenes is a scene with the methgator climbing a cellphone tower. Although the more absurd scene is one where Laronn Marzett is thrown into the midst of a backwoods face-slapping competition!
The giant drug-addicted alligator
The script also has The Asylum’s resident mad scientist Joe Roche on board. Roche has delivered scripts for the likes of Collision Earth (2020), Meteor Moon (2020), Alien Conquest (2021), Devil’s Triangle (2021), Robotapocalypse (2021), Planet Dune (2021), Battle for Pandora (2022), 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse (2022), Moon Crash (2022) and Doomsday Meteor (2023). In his scripts, Roche has an amazing ability to come up almost believable-sounding scientific explanations for the most far-fetched ideas. Methgator is somewhat lacking in terms of what you expect from one of Roche’s scripts and is no more than one of their formula Monster Movies. The Roche hand does emerge in the odd scene, particularly one where explanations are given why the gator is addicted to meth and is coming for another fix.
Methgator has an okay cast, including one or two recognisable names including assorted 1980s teen stars such as Patrick Labyorteaux, probably best known as a child actor who was a regular in Little House on the Prairie (1974-83), who plays the mayor, and Robbie Rist known for The Brady Bunch (1969-74) and Galactica 1980 (1980) as a drug dealer. Laronn Marzett plays with a certainty and authority, the only complaint would be that he speaks too fast.
Director Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray is the son of prolific exploitation director Fred Olen Ray. After debuting as an assistant director on his father’s films, Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray has produced a number of films for The Asylum and directed Reptisaurus (2009), Megaconda (2010), Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurs (2010), Almighty Thor (2011), Shark Week (2012), 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012), Asteroid vs. Earth (2014), A House is Not a Home (2015), Mega Shark vs Kolossus (2015), 3 Headed Shark Attack (2015), Circus Kane (2017) and Minutes to Midnight (2018).
