I came into this movie expecting to have fun. I mean, the cover art is cool. The back side art looks pretty cool too. And the taglines...well, they're amazing! Unfortunately, about fifteen minutes into the movie, I discovered the horrible truth. This movie is flat out boring. The strange part is, that's the only thing that's really wrong with it. The acting was good, the premise was good, the pacing, the editing and pretty much everything about it was just fine, except for the fact that it was insanely boring. I haven't had this difficult a time getting through a movie since I reviewed It's Alive a while back. At least that movie had a monster that looked like William Hung. This movie didn't even have that going for it.

So this left me in a dilemma. A bee rating just didn't seem to suit it, and I couldn't give it a bat because it really wasn't a bad movie. The only choice I really had was to alter the ratings system that has served me well for the last two and a half years, and add a new rating for movies like this one. You can read about it in my updated ratings page, but the long and the short of it is that films that receive the newly created Snoozer rating are pretty much guaranteed to put you to sleep if you watch them at bed time. They're generally good movies, but the one common factor with the Snoozers is that they're all really boring. Not bad, just boring.

Now with that said, let's move on to the plot, such as it is. There's this woman named Joyce Webster. At least she used to be named Joyce Webster. Now she's going by the name Jane Marvin because she's living with delusional amnesia, which was a side effect of the horrible experience she went through in this movie. Hell, I should have it as well from the horrible experience I had with this movie, but that's another story, so let's move on. Anyway, Joyce was a newlywed, and she and her new husband Paul were on a train headed off on the grand railway of love. Unfortunately, at one of their stops, they received a bunch of telegrams congratulating them on their nuptials. One telegram however, wasn't of a congratulatory nature. It was in fact a telegram from Paul's doctor. The same doctor that miraculously healed him after his horribly disfiguring plane crash. Paul read the telegram and then hopped off the train at a mail stop leaving behind his highly confused and upset wife long before they ever got to enjoy the fun part of the honeymoon.

Joyce went on a mission to find her missing husband, and through some school records of Paul's that she discovered, she finally ended up at a place called The Cypresses, which was a plantation somewhere down in the swamps of Louisiana. There she found a man with a hook for a hand, lots of gators, a crabby old woman, a scientist, and her husband Paul who was slowly turning into an alligator because of the treatment he received from the doctor. See, the doctor had devised a serum based on some hormones he extracted from alligators that allowed the human body to regenerate completely. When the serum was given to horribly disfigured people, it made them whole again. Unfortunately, there was a little sidecar hormone in the serum that the doctor didn't know about until it was too late, and it started turning all of his patients into alligators. So Paul went back home to the plantation where his mother had set the doctor up in his own research lab so that he might find a cure for these poor people. Eventually Joyce finds out the truth of it all and sticks by Paul as the doctor tries to restore him to his old self.

As I said above, this actually was a good movie in most respects. There were some amazing scenes with alligators that I'm still trying to figure out. I mean, in one scene, Joyce basically steps over one, and in several others, we see people from the plantation grabbing them and putting them on tables and what not. The alligators never seemed all that aggressive, and I've been wondering why that is. The only thing I can figure is that it was at least one of three things. They were either hand raised by trainers, stuffed to the begeezers before they shot each scene so they weren't hungry going into it, or they were drugged. In any case, they actually did use live gators where most films would have used fake ones, so they get some kudos for that. They also used a live snake in one scene that Manon picked up with his hook and tossed aside. I have to commend Beverly Garland for the way she handled herself around the creepy crawlies. She did a marvelous job and was a professional all the way.

Lon Chaney Jr. is actually billed on the case as one of the stars of this movie, but in truth he's little more than a supporting character who has a key role in how the movie ends. Still, he played the role of the boozy plantation hand quite well and delivered the performance you'd expect from a legend like him. All the performances in this movie were quite good, but Lon Chaney's portrayal of Manon stood out as being by far the best.

Something else that I have to mention here is the transfer quality of this DVD. It's absolutely gorgeous. It's extremely rare to find a transfer of a classic film that's been done this cleanly or with so much care. The sound is great and the picture quality is simply amazing. When you consider that this film was made in 1959, that really tells you something about the quality of the film reels they used and how much time and effort they put into making a beautiful transfer.

All in all, The Alligator people really is a decent movie, but it spent far too much time dwelling on Joyce's search for the truth, and not enough time dealing with the alligator people themselves or the doctor's quest to find a cure. The ending, which I won't spoil here, is absolutely ridiculous and will probably just leave you shaking you head in disbelief at how they could have spent all that time making a movie with such a huge amount of star power in it, and then let it end in such an inane fashion. Because of the fact that even the great actors and superb performances in this film couldn't save it from being a total bore, I'm forced to give it my newly created rating of...