Supergator (2007)
Reconstructed dino chews many, eats none

On a Hawaiian Island, a diverse group of people have a date with disaster. They include: a group of vulcanologists, a student reporter writing a story about them, a bevy of bodacious bikini models, some cool dudes looking to get totally, like, wasted, man, a scary and mysterious hunter guy, and a bunch of tourists at a cheesy resort. All of them will soon be dead if the vulcanologists’ predictions that the local volcano is set to blow up come true.

That would be bad; it’s such a horrible way to die, to be enveloped, screaming, in a river of liquid rock flowing thickly down your throat, searing lungs, and roasting the flesh from your crackling bones. The good news is that fate might spare these people from their molten demise by allowing them to be eaten by a supergator instead.

What’s a supergator you ask? Well, it’s a 25 to 30-foot-long prehistoric alligator/komodo dragon spikey-backed allosaurus kind of thingie that has been cloned from some ancient DNA — shades of Jurassic Park! Yes, Supergator! Able to leap all plot holes in a single bound; fast enough to appear suddenly wherever the plot requires (no matter how much distance separates locations) he gallops or swims from victim to victim at a stunning pace; he’s one mighty sore megasaur, nearly insatiable in his lust for blood.

He might be satiable if he ever ate any of his victims, but he doesn’t. In his eating habits he most closely resembles a terrier with a squeaky chew toy trapped between his paws. He pins his victim down and gnaws on one side — a-munch, crunch, crunch — then switches over to the other side — Grrrrr Grrrrrr! — while his victims make a lot of shrieking squeals and heartfelt requests that he stop chewing on them. But chew he does, in spite of their pleas, before quickly departing in search of another victim.

His eating habits might help explain why the dinosaurs went extinct. Supergator comes from a time when they had the killing thing down cold, but eating hadn’t been invented yet; the dinosaurs starved to death, having killed all the food, never even realizing that it WAS food.

The effects are about what you’d expect on such a bargain basement budget. They won’t make you go “how’d they do that?” but they get the job done. Sometimes Supergator will chomp down on someone and a blood effect is superimposed over the victim that is about as convincing as one of those “Pow!” “Crunch!” cartoon labels that would be pasted over the action in the old Batman TV show. Still, like I said, for a movie like this, you have to sketch in a lot with your imagination anyway; you will be a better movie viewer by meeting the makers halfway.

Still, this is not a film that will demand your full attention. In fact, it won’t even demand all of your partial attention. I had the film playing while I was doing a crossword puzzle, and I don’t think I missed a thing. It’s not like the director ever tries to build any mood or subtext into a scene or structure the action into clever set pieces. No, the munchings proceed with metronomic regularity, one after the other, like dominos clinking along, and if the film is audacious in any degree it is that a few characters get munched that you didn’t expect, or at least they are munched before you would normally expect them to get munched. But it’s not like the unexpected munchings break new shocking ground.

As a matter of fact, about the only time the film had me watching carefully was early in the film when a bikini-clad woman was fleeing through the jungle. At one point, she hides behind some logs looking for all the world like she’s posing for a magazine cover. The actress plays the scene with a sly sense of humor, as if her character knows full-well how ridiculous she looks, but even in the face of danger she just can’t help striking pose No. 23 and looking adorably cute while she awaits her doom. I’m probably reading more into her performance than there is, but I’m betting that if you learned more about the actress it would be a classic case of the beautiful starlet who is asked to play dumb while secretly she’s working on her Ph.D. in biochemistry or something. Or it could be that I’m just a pig dog, trying to pretend that it wasn’t her grace in a pink bikini which caught my attention; I don’t know. All I’m saying is that it was during these scenes that I forgot I was working a crossword puzzle.