See You Later...ALLIGATOR (1980)
So, take the motheaten UL about there being alligators in the sewers of major metropolitan areas, hand it to someone like John Sayles and what you get is a schlocky fun creature feature called Alligator.
As per the legend, a little girl vacationing in Florida gets a baby alligator to take home as a souvenir, which Dad shortly thereafter flushes down the toilet. The gator, Ramon, lives fairly well in his new habitat for twelve years and might well have gone unnoticed forever. However, a local pharmaceutical company starts using the sewers as a dumping ground for their illegal obtained lab animals. The bodies are usually saturated with various enhanced hormones. Ramon dines on the discards and suddenly body parts start to show up in the settling ponds.
Enter Robert Forster as stalwart cop David Madison. David is a transplant from the big city who is shunned by his coworkers because he lost a partner during a shoot-out. He's called in when an unidentified arm is discovered in a settling pond at the local sewage treatment facility. When he loses a cocky young patrol officer to Ramon when they tour the sewers looking for clues, his reputation and his credibility both go, well, down the sewer.
It doesn't help that the country's leading expert on reptiles, Dr. Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker), pooh-poohs the idea that a gator could every get as big as the one David claims to have seen. Have you guessed Dr. Kendall is the former owner of the rampaging reptile?
Fortunately for our hero, Ramon's next snack is a cocky reporter who with amazing dedication to journalism continues to snap photos as he slides down the alligator's gullet. The resulting prints verify David's story--and the hunt is on.
What moves this otherwise standard mutant-critter fare beyond the average is that writer Sayles permeates it with black humor that nonetheless never crosses the line into camp. Director Lewis Teague (Cujo, The Jewel of the Nile) knows just how far to go with his material, with the result that the finished product is full of little needles at all sorts of sacred cows. A pet shop owner steals dogs and sells them to the lab. When the lab is done with them, they give them back, and he uses a supermarket shopping cart to haul them into the sewer. In a delightful example of poetic justice, he falls victim to Ramon.
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