"Il fiume del grande caimano" (1979) d/ Sergio Martino

What kind of Woptober would it be if we didn't examine an Italian Jaws rip-off , only with a giant alligator instead of a monster shark? Sergio Martino's Il fiume del grande caimano, also known as Big Alligator River, and The Great Alligator, seems like a pretty good fit for us tonight, with a cast that includes the late Claudio Cassinelli, Barbara Bach, Mel Ferrer, Richard Johnson, and even precious little Silvia Collatina of "House By the Cemetery aka/ Quella villa accanto al cimitero" fame. I should also mention that the titular great alligator doesn't look all that great. If that was the only problem this movie had, it'd almost be excusable.


"That's what I like about you. You don't look particularly scared of breakin' 'em..." notes Joshua's foreman (Bobby Rhodes).
A high falootin' fashion photographer (Claudio Cassanelli) and his favorite female model (Mrs. Ringo Starr herself, Barbara Bach) get flown in to a jungle resort for a publicity shoot; that the hotel is owned by an unscrupulous paleface developer named Joshua (Mel Ferrer) who exploits the natives for cheap labor is only half of the problem, as the hotel itself just so happens to be built on land that the tribesmen hold most sacred, indeed. I'm no great karmic proponent by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems like that cultural faux pas is only gonna come back and bite him in his ass, proverbially and literally. Meanwhile, lascivious locals paddle off to a nearby shore for some discreet pum pum only to get chomped up like a couple of human Doritos by the resident island god, Kroona, who's chosen to materialize before his humble subjects demanding bloody retribution, in the form of a pathetic, fake-looking prop alligator,  for some inexplicable reason. The photographer, after hearing the nearby cries of distress, assumes the position of "that guy who knows", while the developer instantly becomes Mayor Larry Vaughn, poo pooing the impending death and destruction in favor of prestige and profit, of course.


"He is not here just to suck your mother's breasts... I also expect him to thumb my cinnamon ring like a fucking champeen!"
Cue: Bloody war cry of suddenly furious indigenous island peoples that coincides with the increased frequency of ineffective stiff prop alligator attacks against mildly annoying tourists, while our heroes stumble upon an unhinged, old cave-dwelling coot (Richard 'Zombi 2' Johnson himself) who handily supplies the alligator's prior circumstances for any theatergoers that haven't walked out in disbelief yet. An unfazed Joshua launches a mammoth party barge full of snobbish snackery in defiance of the snapping saurid, whose size fluctuates from barely capable of swallowing human prey to vastly dwarfing a full-sized van, familiar waters for Italian filmmakers who never flinched at the concept of cutting budgetary corners in the name of exploitation cinema, Martino included. It all wraps up as confusingly as you might expect.


Get tied, spreadeagle to a bamboo raft often, baby?
For as much as Martino enjoyed ripping off Spielberg's 1975 box office smash, he also apparently felt that King Kong (1976) could afford to be borrowed from, generously. The script was co-written by the Anthropophagus beast himself, Luigi Montefiori aka/ George Eastman, and there are some great dialog exchanges here that have to be heard to be believed, especially between the single mom ineffectively sneaking around her skeptical offspring. Outrageous.  For lovers of bad genre cinema, Big Alligator is a trashy treasure trove of rotten special effects, putrid acting performances, molasses pacing...so it's not a great revelation that the movie is so much fun to sit through with your buddies, every once in awhile.On the scale though, one Wop sounds like a perfect fit for this one, and thus,  that's exactly what I'm forced to lay on it. Worth a look for hardcore genre nuts.


"Nomnomnom..."

"Cocodrilo asesino" (1989) d/ Fabrizio De Angelis

Some Italian genre directors, like Fabrizio De Angelis (under his favorite pseudonym Larry Ludman,  here) fully realize that inanimate-looking prop sharks and grainy stock footage aren't the only homicidal animals they can sculpt a horrendous Jaws rip-off around, as the international title of tonight's review, Killer Crocodile (Murder Alligator, too, I shit you not), would lead you to believe. To fabricate Fabrizio's raucous rampaging reptile, none other than the gore FX maestro, Giannetto De Rossi, was called upon, and you can see what the results looked like for yourselves, below. Not quite as jaw-dropping as his work on Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) or Zombi 2 (1979), but the croc's signature wheeze (Go easy on the 'Ports, big fella?) sounds an awful lot like one of De Rossi's flesh-eating ghouls from the latter film, to me.


"Questo ragazzo sapore come pollo!"
It all kicks off when two night fishermen are interrupted by a legendary killer crocodile. How do we know this? It must be the dramatic titles hastily slapped over a freeze frame of the attacking beast, around one minute in. No tension-packed slow build to a shocking final reel reveal here,  no sir.  Enter a vanilla assembly of would be environmentalists, as led by Richard Crenna's son, who unwittingly stumble upon several fifty-five gallon hand-painted drums of toxic waste sloppily dumped along the river's edge, then lean on a very sweaty and very irritable local judge (Van Johnson) to, you know, clean it all up, maaaaaan. Only he's pals with a cat named Foley (Bill Wohrman) who can't wait to dump his next big shipment of waste in the river. The group's token black girl, Conchita, gets chewed up and spit out first, leading her mourning friends to, you know, side with the croc, maaaaan, instead of the local croc hunting son of a bitch, a scarred up adventurer in a panama hat named Joe (Ennio Girolami), who shares a roomy shack of corrugated cardboard and plywood with his pet snake. "C'monnn Joe. You aren't afraid of a...killer crocodile, are you?", one of the kids actually asks him at one point. Seriously.


How could we have guessed she wasn't gonna be the "final girl".
It seems that Foley's careless dumping of toxic waste has mutated the prop-odile into monstrous (and varying, depending on the shot) proportions, and after comically terrorizing a little girl on a sinking chunk of pier, it starts picking off our young peaceniks, who camp out on the shore of the river in a show of support for the misunderstood monster, who's gotta endure being harpooned and ridden like a surfboard by the relentless Joe. Once their male buddies become the croc's dinner (and not the black girl with two lines, and her dog), the formerly environmentally conscious survivors naturally declare war on the amphibious beast and team up with Joe, who's prone to carrying his shotgun everywhere he goes, and also dramatically admiring his scarred reflection in the mirror in his shack. Foley reassures the judge that he can handle the animal himself, and by "handle", he means "get his arm chewed off after leaving the sweaty adjudicator to drown in a dastardly double cross". Sound ridiculous? Just wait until a bloodied and battered Joe miraculously pops out of the trees and throws one of the boys his cheesy hat, no doubt inspiring the young man to blow the beast up by chucking an outboard motor into its open yap. He repeatedly screams, "Yeah! Yeah!! YEAHHH!!" like a fanatical maniac, while being showered in raining blood. I had to laugh, and you might, too.


"I was in 'The Caine Mutiny' with Bogart, and now I'm doing fucking 'Murder Alligator'...", laments Van Johnson.
Even maestro Riz Ortolani, how can I put this... borrows generously from John Williams' groundbreaking 1975 score in creating one that befits such an unapologetic low budget rip-off of the Spielberg film. De Rossi's animatronic crocodile, on the other hand, almost looks too impressive for the cheap affair, or at least, it might have, if they didn't show so much of it and so damned often. De Rossi himself would direct the sequel, Killer Crocodile 2,  which happened to be shot at the exact same time as it's predecessor, using the same cast. While the gore here is ample and of passable quality, the (non-)acting, editing, and script are all unintentionally laughable, dragging the whole scareless, tension-free production into single Wop territory, as one might have expected.


Joe, the crocodile hunting son of a bitch-1, Quint-0.

"Sangue negli abisi" (1990) d/ Raf Donato, Joe D'Amato

When you're dealing with Italian Jaws rip offs, things usually go one of two ways: a) The movie is laughably terrible and thus, a fucking blast to behold. b) The movie is Sangue negli abisi, or Deep Blood, an awful, sloppy, boring mess fumbled through for the most part, by Raf Donato, and completed by Roman porn king Joe D'Amato, our focus tonight as we kick off a month long selection of genre movies from Italy here at the Wop. As rotten as this thing is, and trust me, it's as rotten as the meat dumpster behind the slaughterhouse during a Texas heatwave, Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei still somehow borrowed footage from it for his own pathetic Jaws rip-off, Fauci Crudelli/Cruel Jaws (1995).


"What's the big idea...dumping your Strawberry Quik in here!"
So, we've got these four young boys roasting weenies over a fire on the beach in broad daylight, when they're suddenly interrupted by what looks to be the town drunk vaguely garbed to resemble some sort of Indian. He lays a tribal legend about a monster from the sea on them, and gives them some ornate piece of wood to bury in the loose sand, but only after they've taken a blood oath to be there for each other, you know, for always. Fast forward several years, and our boyhood chums have now matured into young preppie non-actors, each with their own clunky exposition and flair for flubbing dialog. One's the son of a mayor, who shouts his lines and wears his slacks just south of his nipples, the other's the son of a fisherman who no longer fishes, content to bang a hammer against a wooden coop in the garage rather than fish. He doesn't even clearly explain why he doesn't fish anymore, he just doesn't. The third gets eaten while researching spearfishing locales (I think he does, anyway, if splashing around in strawberry-colored water before disappearing with the edit constitutes a shark attack here) with the fourth, a pouty kid with an annoying accent who's always telling the sweaty sheriff, who later exclaims, "How many sharks could there be out there!",  how to do his job.


"Of course I'm a shark expert. Can't you see me running water over these shark jaws in the sink?", queries Rob Reiner.
Loads of inappropriate synth instrumental, action dialog from a stationary helicopter,  footage of a dead shark being chain-dragged onto a pier by the mouth, a digested waitress, and one consumed mom on a pool float later (her mulleted little boy takes her passing like a champ, btw), the boys convince the fisherman to take them out to hunt the stock footage beast responsible for the deaths. The shark snaps the bait line and scares him into returning to land. Not much of an angler, this guy. Anyway, there's a rotten dramatic exchange between Pouty and his dad, and before you know it, the boys are joined by an eighties-tastic douchebag smartass who has a last second change of heart, they dig up the wooden artifact (and pocket knives, can't forget those), and set out to blow up the shark with crate upon crate of wooden planks painted to look like dynamite. Hell, they even recruit one of their mallrat pals to whip up an electronic shark attractor just for the occasion. Because sharks find yellow metal boxes with flashing lights on top irresistible, apparently. More synth, more stock footage, endless shots of nautical preppies wrapping wood together with electrical tape, and then there's the dollar store underwater explosion we've all been waiting for. Finally over.


"This doesn't look like enough dynamite. I know where we can score a tactical nuke."
I'm not one hundred percent sure about the Florida locals claiming to be actors here, but if I was to make an educated guess, I'd say none of them ever made that same mistake again, save for credit as an extra in a crowd scene, maybe. For some of these mooks, even that'd be a fucking stretch. If any of the shark footage looks familiar to you, it's probably because it was purchased by D'Amato from National Geographic, and packs nearly as much tense thrills and excitement as one of their television specials. There's no nudity, there's no gore, no suspense, hell, there's barely even a shark to speak of, beyond an artificial dorsal fin that wobbles repeatedly as it cuts awkwardly through the surf. One wop is probably me at my most generous here, as there's hardly anything that would merit such a rating in this thing. If you haven't seen this one, you really aren't missing much.


"Yaaaaaahhh! It's a Great White Stock (footage)!!!"

"Shark:Rosso nell'oceano"(1984)d/Lamberto Bava

There's really no mistaking the difference between a film by maestro Mario Bava and one directed by his son, Lamberto.I think you know where I'm going here.Tonight we'll be looking at one of the latter(we'll never run out of movies to review here at the Wop, never, you hear me?!!), and not one of Lamberto's crowning cinematic achievements, either.Known alternately as "Monster Shark" and "Devil Fish", tonight's muddled-but-ambitious aqua-giallo, partially penned by Luigi Cozzi(and Dardano Sacchetti and Sergio Martino and Lamberto Bava and...), as evidenced by the inclusion of his obligatory 'Stella' character, predates the SyFy 'original', "Sharktopus", by twenty-six years, for those of you out there that happen to be keeping score on this sort of thing.In the end, though, it's just another Italian Jaws rip-off afterall, made more laughably rotten by a Velveeta-laden soundtrack as realized by Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis, a corrugated cardboard cutout creature created by Ovidio Taito, and a second unit director named Mattei(yeah, him).Still, you might be able to make it all the way through this one if, like me, boobs, blood, bad acting, and an extra hokey ratiocination are what you oftimes groove upon, as there are plenty of all of those to keep it entertaining throughout.

"Arggggh! That thing is making off with my new Bruno Magli's!!!"
A couple enjoying a leisurely cruise(in a toy boat launched in an aquarium in certain establishing shots, mind you) at sunset is interrupted by the rubbery suction cups of a tentacle arm that vigorously smashes their boat and kills them off-camera.Dr. Stella Dickens(Valentine Monnier) feeds dolphins and researches them scientifically, as evidenced by her clipboard and pencil she's carrying around.Uhhh, "do tricks for fish", check.At the same time, the Coast Guard helicopter has spotted the pre-credit boat wreck, sending screeching rescue divers to rummage for survivors.Meanwhile, Dr. Hogan(Lawrence Morgant), a marine biologist who never met a pop top can of beer he didn't like, is picking up strange sounds from a sonar buoy he's towing behind the "Seaquarium", his not-so-cleverly-named research ship.The divers pull a legless corpse from the murky water via rescue harness, as Hogan's boat is suddenly attacked, with Dickens' dolphins schitzing out at the exact same moment.The autopsy of ol' legless proves inconclusive, as the sheriff(Gianni Garko) tells his 'roid-ripped deputy to photograph the body.Hogan later tells Dickens that the sound he captured on his equipment during the boat attack resembled a voice, and then, a "terrifying sound filled with hate"(he must've recorded the sound of my first stretch of the morning).Enter Peter(Michael Sopkiw), the resident electrician who's about to vacation in New York with "three beautiful women"(Electricians get all the pussy) when Stella pulls up on her motorcycle and flirtingly begs him to build a Santa's Naughty or Nice-sized list of electronic equipment instead, to the chagrin of his sensual mulatto/terrone-esque assistant/lover, Sandra, who's watching in the wings.Wow, a lot of shit's going down in this one, too bad, none of it is any good...

Washed up on the beach...sorta like Pamela Anderson these days.
Let the makin' out commence(cue:Mad Magazine flexi-disc, you know you've still got yours...).At West Ocean International, named after Professor West(William Berger), of course, Dr. Davis indiscreetly makes out with West's wife Sonja while elsewhere, Peter goes the tonguey route with Sandra, only to get roughed up by some henchmen who smash the hi-tech equipment he'd been burning the midnight oils to finish for Stella."They smashed the converter...You work all night and they smash it to bits!", he says.Meanwhile, a scuba diver who's just been harrassed by stock footage of various different shark species gets chewed up but good in the prehistoric yap of our titular monster shark, while a W.O.I. lab assistant has also mysteriously turned her toes up.The sheriff decides that its a murder alright, investigation notwithstanding.Another body is discovered on the pier, and some highly detailed plaster casts are made from the bite wounds that reveal one mutha of a toofus.Peter, Stella, Bob, his beer cans, and Sandra set off on a sonar-heavy boat to search for the monster, and after Bob chucks his empty into the ocean(kind of odd behaviour for a marine biologist, eh?)and the creature plays chicken with the bottom of the ship, appearing as a glorious eight-bit graphic on Peter's scope, Bob throws more cans into the water, and the crew celebrates capturing the monster's noises on their equipment.The lone survivor to this point flatlines at the hospital, causing the doctor to defibrillate him eleven times in rapid succession before stating that "fear" killed him(yeah, that or the 165 thousand volts you just sent through him...).Cutting through a bible's worth of banal dialogue and sub-plots that go nowhere fast, the creature is, to quote Dr. Davis, "A marine monster, almost indestructible*. And whose genetic characteristics are as fearsome as the white shark's. A gigantic octopus with the intelligence of a dolphin, and as monstrous as a prehistoric creature." *(unless there's an electrician with flame throwers around)

"Now that you're all gathered around, and I've delivered my last words, I can die dramatically."
Bava, who's credited as "John Old, Jr." here, followed this uncomprehensible garbage up with the ever-popular cult classic Demoni(1985), then Midnight Killer, and Demoni 2 the following year.Sopkiw was a mid-eighties staple in Italian genre films, appearing in Sergio Martino's 2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York(1983), Bava's Blastfighter(1984), Nudo e selvaggio(Massacre in Dinosaur Valley)(1985), and of course, this mutt.Berger, who worked with Bava's father on 5 bambole per la luna d'agosto(1970), enjoyed a long career in genre films, appearing in everything from Sabata(1969) and Keoma(1976) to Franco's Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun(1977) and Porco Mondo(1978), before passing away in 1993.I shouldn't have to say too much more about this one, you know what you're in for, and whether or not you're going to enjoy it at all.Technically speaking, on the scale, it's a One Wopper, all the way.

Let's hear you say "mutated proto-dunkleosteus tentacles" five times fast.

"Fauci Crudeli aka/Cruel Jaws"(1995)d/Bruno Mattei

In the midst of a spell of hermitdom that would see New York's "Mayor of Cold River City" bow in the wake of mine own introversion,I've been lining up genre classics for examination all the while maintaining a healthy personal level of shittiness on the party front.Needless to say,I found myself venturing out on a much needed caffeine supply run at five in the morning(in Mountain Dew pajamas and Vans,mind you)as the zoot of the night before began to finally subside after spending the midnight hour carousing the thought provocative,less-wordy(which is always a good thing after a liberal dose of the Wop),extremely tit website,If It Makes Me Happy It May Make You Sad (which I've added to the blog list at the bottom of the page for those goobers too lazy to click the hyperlink I threw in just now.)maintained by Carole,an uber-rad chick on ALL fronts,indeed.It'll quickly become one of your favorites,too,if you're anything like me(Gods help you).Oh yeah,so I've decided to start the "Say No to November" movement,as being a choice vessel of Mediterranean blood I have to say,this cold weather is for the fucking birds.Onward.
Almost two years have passed since we last took a look at an Italian Jaws ripoff,when Castellari's embarrassing L'ultimo Squalo(1981) floated to the surface of the cinematic shitter like the inept turd it is.Fourteen years later,never to be out-stunk himself,Italian crapmaster Bruno Mattei under the pseudonym William Snyder(though there's little mistaking one of Bruno's deuces),finally got off the pot himself,adding his own preposterous pile of shit to the shittiest cine-shark sweepstakes,and it certainly places as number one or two,depending who you talk to,in said competition.With a storyline(and entire scenes) ripped off equally from Jaws(1975)and Jaws 2(1979),typical over the top Mattei dialogue delivered by actors with the screen presence of a dead flounder over ice,gloriously hokey icthyology,embarrasingly bad day for night shots,and the signature stock footage Bruno delights in pasting into his trainwreck movies(and even footage unbelievably cut right out of Squalo,to boot),it's hard to go lower on the limbo stick of bad movies than tonight's review.According to my mate Nige(who runs the excellent Italian Film Review site,and knows a thing or three about good bluebeat forty-fives from the sixties,as well),it'd make a killer double bill with Squalo.Yeah.If you hated yourself that much.

It is my scientific analysis that this man was mutilated by a locomotive with butcher's knives for teeth.
In the Sunshine State of Florida(where thick New York accents are abound),a Hulk Hogan lookalike(with less acting chops) named Dag Snerensen(Richard Dew)runs a Sea Worldesque aqua-zoo/water park where his invalid daughter,Heartstrings...err,ummm Susy,plays with the dolphins all day.Dag's young oceanographer pal Matt Hoo-ummm,Billy(Gregg Hood)and his selfish cunt girlfriend Vanessa(the always alliterative Norma Neisheim)pay him a visit just in time for the autopsy of a nasty bit of beachkill,which after a once over by the fish specialist,yields the following:"There's only one shark that could have done this."Huh?Tiger shark?What the fuck about the other three maneaters?Bull,Oceanic Whitetip,Great White?I'm only saying,due to the abnormally large amount of Great White stock footage we've been subjected to thus far,and zero Tigers.The mayor,with the assistance of super capitalist Sam Lewis(who Dag owes back rent to,who the mafia is putting the squeeze on,and whose daughter is romantically tied to Dag's son Bob,mind you),influences the coroner to change the death to boat propeller accident to avoid a panicked populace with the upcoming regatta scheduled(sound familiar?).Then there's the sheriff,who can leap a minor handrail in a single awkward bound with extremely dated eighties muzak piped into the background.Let's see Chief Brody pull that off.When the sheriff asks Billy what sharks are,he delivers the following classic professional evaluation:"They're locomotives with butcher's knives for teeth that swim,eat,and make baby sharks."Wait,it gets worse.

Cue the Miami Sound Machine soundalike,we're shooting the handrail stunt!
Lewis' son Ronnie,who's pissed that his sister is involved with Bob,ratpacks the guy with his two Italian new wave buddies,then has the nerve to try and poison Dag's dolphins,who thrash the water with their tails afterwards,calling Dag to come running to the scene of the crime,where he picks up a fish,smells it,and automatically knows it's poisoned.Once the mayor finally caves and puts a bounty on the killer rogue's head,Lewis's son and Vanessa eat cartillagenous streamlined death,spurring the sheriff on to fish for the shark from a helicopter dangling a hunk of hooked meat on a winch rope over the water.You know,exactly like in L'ultimo Squalo.Guess what happens.Billy then ties the shark to a nearby Navy wreckage,surmising out of the blue that the shark was captive-bred and trained to attack the enemy.The mafia henchmen go fishing for the beast themselves and get chewed up like Courtney Love's pussy.Finally,Billy,Dag and Bob(What,no Quint?) embark on the voyage to plant dynamite around the wreckage that,according to the icthyologist's "territoriality" theory,the shark calls home.While the boys dive to plant the charges,Dag stays aboard the ship,randomly firing a pump shotgun at stock footage of great whites and culled clips from Jaws.In the end,they blow the menace sky high(more direct shots from Jaws),Dag wins the reward money,gets to keep his water park,and everyone laughs as a seal pushes Lewis into the pool.All's well that ends well.

With a well-placed fish sniff that day/night,Hulk Hogan surmises that someone's poisoning the dolphins.
It must've taken Bruno ten years to release this gem,as I swear the soundtrack music is comprised of dated generic eighties pop that would make Gloria Estefan blush.Footage from Spielberg's Jaws series,Castellari's L'ultimo Squalo,and Massaccesi's Deep Blood blatantly re-appears here with no apologies given for the theft.I could understand ripping off Spielberg,but Massaccesi??Claudio "Up 'n Down" Fragasso provided the over emoted screenplay full of golden dialogue like "Dick brain! Dick brain! Dick brain!","Be careful!That shark was trained by the navy!""That's alright,I was a marine.",and "You're staying up here UNTIL! THIS! THING! IS! OVER!".Not nearly as piss-yer-pants funny as Castellari's movie,but still impressively rotten,just the same.It boggles my mind that a director could be so lazy as to shoot scenes into a film just so he could incorporate footage stolen from other movies.But that's Bruno Mattei for you.Hunt down a bootleg or pal dvd and see for yourselves.One terrible-good Wop.

Hey Bruno,Enzo called,he says he wants his hokey footage back.