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The Alligator People (1959)



When her husband disappears off a train, his wife searches for him and ends up in an old mansion in the middle of a swamp where scientific experiments are being conducted.

Beverly Garland plays Joyce, newly married to Paul Webster, a man she barely knows, including the fact that he was severely injured during the war, although not a trace of his scars are evident. She is at her wit's end by the time she tracks down his mother in their ancestral home in the bayou, but is abruptly rebuffed and told to leave.

Garland earned every penny of her paycheck in this movie, whether stumbling through the swamp dodging alligators or dashing around an old shack dodging a drunken Lon Chaney (probably for real).

Chaney sports a hook for a hand that was taken off by a 'gator and mostly lumbers around the set shooting every reptile in sight. That is, when he is not trying to rape Garland, who spends a good part of the movie screaming like a banshee in a blender at nearly every turn of events.

Undaunted, Joyce eventually discovers that Paul is the subject/victim of Dr. Mark Sinclair, a humanitarian who thought he had discovered a scientific way to replace missing limbs of war amputees with a combination of radiation and a serum derived from alligator glands. Too late, he and Paul discover that the treatments are turning his subjects into reptiles.

Richard Crane (of Rocky Jones fame) is Paul, and he is excellent in the role of a man poised half way between being human and becoming a reptile. The make-up at this point in the film is exceptionally well done, and Crane wrings a great deal of poignancy out of the character with a gruff, almost strangled vocal delivery shaded with genuine pathos.

George Macready's appearance as Dr. Sinclair, who is feverishly attempting to correct the unintended consequences of his experiment, is the most surprising casting in the film. Macready had a long career as a dependable character actor careening between A-level classics (Paths of Glory), action movies (Tarzan's Peril) and dozens of television episodes. If he seems an odd choice to show up in a horror film with a sensational title, he certainly could have done far worse, like Ray Milland in The Thing With Two Heads.

The film unwinds like a detective thriller with horrific overtones for three quarters of the way through and the hothouse atmosphere and choice of two women adversaries (Joyce and Paul's domineering mother) works very well.

Unfortunately, after he is strapped to the table for a final attempt to cure him of his affliction, the movie implodes, as Crane stalks around the set in a laughable human-alligator suit.

It's a major disappointment, especially after so much of the movie has successfully created the proper atmosphere of dread. The ridiculous costume makes you long for some of the great, iconic monsters of the fifties (Creature From The Black Lagoon, Metaluna monster). With a little care and bit more money and imagination, The Alligator People could have gone out with a cheer instead of derisive laughter.

As is, however, it certainly deserves a bit more attention for what it accomplished on a meager budget with fine actors and a better than average script that reads like something written by Tennessee Williams on Acid.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)