See here’s my problem with “Bad CGI Gator.” It’s not that it takes a short coming and tries to turn it in to some kind of schlocky B movie element. It’s that the movie is only fifty eight minutes and it’s called “Bad CGI Gator.” And said Bad CGI Gator doesn’t make an appearance until at least seventeen minutes in to the movie. If you have only sixty minutes to work with, and your movie is called “Bad CGI Gator,” and you’re promising a Bad CGI Gator, I would think one would try to plaster the titular Bad CGI Gator on every frame as much as humanly possible.
Six college grads on Spring Break get a cabin in the swamplands of Georgia. Once there, they decide to throw their school laptops in a backyard lake in an act of youthful defiance, which unknowingly turns a lurking alligator into the dreaded and insatiable Bad CGI Gator.
The Cocaine Bear appeared for a majority of its own movie. The piranhas appeared a lot throughout their various movies. Even the awful birds made multiple appearances in “Birdemic.” So you can’t really hand us an hour long film and not give us what we came for in full force. For all intents and purposes the Bad CGI Gator is perfectly acceptable–for a syndicated late nineties television movie. I don’t know if Full Moon just didn’t want to try or didn’t have a ton of resources available to them, but the leaning in to the Bad CGI Gator misses the mark.
Even the tongue in cheek ribs at Gen Z fall flat, sadly. Also was the gator a normal gator and became a Bad CGI Gator? Or was it always a Bad CGI Gator and transformed in to a huge Bad CGI Gator? If anything the respective cast is charming in their usual horror movie tropes, right down the adrenaline addicted meat head (Ben Vandermey is hilarious). With “Bad CGI Gator,” you’ll either click in and accept it, or just count down the minutes until it ends.
I was counting down.
Premieres on Amazon Prime Video and FullMoonfeatures.com November 24th.