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It begins where Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams ends, a viscous reptilian eye gazing back at the jaded audience. Gator-wrestlin' in Chicago sets up the easygoing joke, urban rot and unease illuminated by a girl's pint-sized pet that's flushed down to the subterranean bowels where it grows mighty and ravenous. Dead pooches dumped into the sewers and severed human limbs fished out of drainage sludge, a circle of life to mystify the police detective (Robert Forster). Dog-snatchers, tabloid crusaders and police rookies turn up dismembered in the lower depths, where a synthesizer riff on the Jaws theme heralds a gargantuan pink maw. (He Walked by Night is Lewis Teague's model, with snapping mandibles added to compositions of dark streams and undulating searchlights.) A "synthetic form of testosterone" is the mutant MacGuffin, the previous owner is a scientist (Robin Riker) who now prefers snakes. Bring on the SWAT team and the big-game hunter (Henry Silva), who hits on a reporter by imitating an alligator's mating call. "If I couldn't get killed chasing it, what fun would it be?" John Sayles' screenplay is a rough-draft for his later environmental ensembles, knowingly referencing Freudian "illicit desires" and Ramón Santiago paintings when the homegrown Godzilla isn't poking its snout through the pavement. Subversive mayhem hits some sort of peak when City Hall (Jack Carter) and Big Pharma (Dean Jagger) get together for an al fresco wedding, only to have their limousine pummeled by the scaly animatronic. A dynamite purgation segues into a nod to The Third Man, thus an update of The Giant Gila Monster for a new decade in sore need of one. With Michael V. Gazzo, Sydney Lassick, Perry Lang, Bart Braverman, Angel Tompkins, and Sue Lyon.
--- Fernando F. Croce |