Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Danny Draven.
Films like Scream and its ilk are self-referential in a coy way that employs a major wink of the eye towards the audience. They’re cute and bashful about their oblique references to horror films of the 1970s and 80s. When a film names itself Bad CGI Gator it’s anything but coy and instead opts for brash aesthetic that screams “I DON’T REALLY CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE TITLE OF MY FILM!”
Bad CGI Gator, produced by proud bottom dwellers Full Moon Productions, is about as brash as they come. Wild, silly, hyper-stereotypical, bosomy, and, believe it or not, pretty darn fun.
CGI, or computer-generated imagery, has been around for decades. In fact, the first feature film to use CGI was appropriately enough from horror director Alfred Hitchcock in 1958’s Vertigo. It wouldn’t be until 1973 when Westworld mixed CGI with live-action. The point is people were willing to live with crappy CGI for the last 60 years, and it turns out they still are.
Look elsewhere if you’re looking for elevated horror and an equally elevated plot. Bad CGI Gator involves a gaggle of Tik-Tok-obsessed college students who head to a remote Georgia cabin for sex, shots, and selfies.
Each college student is a perfect cardboard cut out of their boilerplate existence — dumb jock (Ben VanderMey), dumb blonde (Rebecca Stoughton), dumb jock friend (Cooper Drippe), dumb floozy (Sarah Buchanan), meek and moderately likable tag-a-long (Michael Bonini), and angry goth-ish stepsister (Maddie Lane).
Amazingly, all the performances are well delivered and really enjoyable. There’s not a bad apple in this bunch of grade-D actors. The comedic timing, well-executed dialogue, hysterical high fives, fist bumps, and alpha male gesticulations will definitely put a smile on your face.
The story is, sort of, ripped from Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. For those that haven’t made it to Part VIII in the Friday the 13th universe, Jason’s body, which is buried in the bottom of a lake, is shocked back to life when a boat’s anchor drags a faulty power line over his listless body. Much like Jason, the CGI gator is enlarged to a gargantuan size when the college kids decide to collectively toss their laptops in a lake as a part of a TikTok statement of “YOLO” solidarity.
The laptops fizz, fuzz, and fester with electrical juice and the CGI gator ferociously sucks it up. As the gator grows, the perfectly oblivious kids take more shots and stumble through meaningless rounds of beer pong.
The bad CGI eventually comes but in a wild and magical way. There’s a handful of legs getting chomped, but it’s not until the gator starts floating and flying that things get weird. Yes, the gator floats through the air. It’s insane looking, but fully within the realm of bad CGI.
Everything unfolds as you’d expect, but this bottom-of-the-barrel production, is not quite as bottom-of-the-barrel as you’d expect. Great performances, a weird gator, and an incredibly short run time (58 minutes) make Bad CGI Gator time well spent!
Bad CGI Gator is probably Rated R and is available for streaming at Full Moon.