Cody checks out the latest from Full Moon.
There are a whole lot of “nature run amok” movies out there that feature rampaging creatures brought to the screen with subpar CGI effects, and while I have written about the Anaconda and Lake Placid sequels, which are examples of the sort of movies I’m talking about, I’m not generally a fan of those bad CGI creature features. I am, however, a longtime fan of Charles Band’s company Full Moon – and I was hyped when I heard that Full Moon was getting in on the bad CGI creature feature action by making a parody movie that would have subpar CGI on purpose. It’s right there in the title: Bad CGI Gator.
Directed by Danny Draven from a script by Band’s son Zalman Band, Bad CGI Gator takes place somewhere in Georgia and centers on six college kids - most of whom are extremely annoying, so of course there is one named Chad - who decide to spend their spring break at a cabin in the swamp. It’s an odd choice of a place to stay, and the characters are so off-putting and rowdy it can be difficult to get a grasp on what the set-up is, but apparently this cabin belongs to an uncle of one of the guys. It doesn’t really matter, because the event we’re watching the movie for happens soon enough. In an effort to make a viral video, the dimwits decide to dump their school laptops into the swamp. The laptops go into the water at the 16 minute point. A baby alligator swims up to one of them and gets zapped with an electrical surge that transforms it into the Bad CGI Gator!
It’s all fun from that point on, as the cheaply rendered creature proceeds to stalk the property and munch on these characters that were purposely written to be over-the-top morons. We want to see them taken out... and while I wouldn’t like to see characters like this in an average movie, they’re very fitting for a nature run amok parody where they get munched on by a totally unconvincing alligator. Ben VanderMey, Cooper Drippe, Rebecca Stoughton, and Sarah Buchanan do fine work playing their idiotic characters, while Michael Bonini and Maddie Lane stand out as our potential heroes due to the fact that they have more brain cells than their traveling companions and have a potential romance brewing.
While the idea of Bad CGI Gator is amusing to begin with, the execution is made more entertaining by the fact that being poorly rendered also gives the alligator the ability to do things a regular gator wouldn’t be able to do – like climb onto the roof of the cabin or even float through the air. I didn’t expect the movie to go in that direction, but I’m glad it did. A floating bad CGI gator is even better than one that just sticks to waddling around on the ground.
You can tell from the title that Bad CGI Gator is aiming to be some goofy, nonsensical fun, and that’s exactly what Draven and the Bands deliver over the movie’s short (58 minutes) running time. I would much rather watch this movie again than make another attempt at sitting through some of the popular bad CGI creature features from the last decade or so. I enjoyed seeing Full Moon dip a toe into this sub-genre. Now we’ll see, will they be able to resist making a habit of it, or will we be getting Bad CGI Gator vs. Pixelated Piranha?
On second thought, maybe I should pitch that idea to Full Moon...
Bad CGI Gator is set to begin streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video and FullMoonFeatures.com on November 24th.
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