Movie Review: The Alligator People (1959)

As I said in a recent movie review, I’m now committed to rating movies just based on how much I enjoyed them, not based on quality. And that’s worth mentioning here because this isn’t a great movie by any means, but I rather enjoyed it.

The movie moves slowly, but the plot is weird and interesting enough to keep you engaged. A woman has searched for years for her husband who went missing just after their wedding, eventually finding herself in a strange house in Louisiana.

Lon Chaney, Jr. steals the show as the weird groundskeeper who hates alligators because they bit off his hand.

It’s a legitimately good performance, and he even appears to be doing a Cajun accent.

So he’s the only really good actor in the movie, but there is some awesome alligator people makeup. Until there isn’t. Eventually the alligator person just has a full-on alligator mask, and that’s fun in a schlocky way.

For most of the movie’s runtime, it’s not really a schlock movie, and that almost makes it more fun when it gets to that point, because it’s just such a big divide between the first 60 and last 10 minutes or so.

Rating: 6/10