RollerGator tells the story of a small, wisecracking purple alligator who with the help of a cute but fairly nondescript teenage girl on rollerblades flees a shady carnival promoter and a skateboarding ninja, so that he can be reunited with his old friend the swamp farmer. That old story. So yeah, with a plot like that you know you're in for a lousy movie, but you can barely begin to imagine how lousy.
Every single thing about this movie is breathtakingly cheap and incompetent. The whole thing looks like it was shot on a hand held camcorder. The really cheap kind. By people who have no idea how to frame a shot or get an actor's best angles. Obviously, they never bothered to hire a cinematographer, and I have serious doubts as to whether an editor was involved either.
RollerGator also features the most incompetent sound work I've ever heard. Half the dialog is unintelligible. Do they even know how a microphone works? Do they understand that the actors have to be facing in the general direction of the sound equipment? Or maybe it's because the same blasted series of acoustic guitar chords keeps looping over the entire movie, even when the actors are talking. It just never stops!
The dialog you can hear isn't much better, generally matching that of an elementary school play. And the jokes are the kind that only a very small child could ever find funny. Anyone else will just want to slap the writer. I mean seriously, how many bad jokes can they make about hot dogs? There is one brilliant line in this movie though. "I had to hose down the clowns. They were stealing taffy." Now why didn't they put that scene in the movie? The only other decent line in this movie is "I hate fresh foods! Almost as much as I hate gators!"
The acting isn't any better. Honestly, I'm not sure most of it can really be described as acting, given the utter lack of emotion shown by most of the people on screen, and the difficulty they have delivering their lines towards the camera. Although that may go back to the utterly incompetent camera work. Aside from "How did this travesty get made?" or "What have we done to deserve this?" the biggest question this movie raises is "Where did they find the money to pay Joe Estevez?" What is he even doing in this movie? Was he really that hard up for roles? Couldn't he have been doing something more dignified, like an insurance commercial, or a guest appearance on a soap opera? He spends most of the movie sitting behind a desk or aimlessly wandering around a carnival, muttering to himself and occasionally breaking down and crying. I would too if I was in this movie.
Nor are the characters any better that the actors playing them. The writers never bothered to develop any of them beyond one or two easily recognizable traits, like having an obsession with hot dogs, or being a karate instructor, or a skateboarding ninja. This is a kid's movie from the nineties, so of course the ninja has to be on a skateboard. And because they were running out of ideas, there's a second nondescript teenage girl who rides everywhere on rollerblades and helps the little gator escape from the bad guy. You can tell her from the main protagonist because she carries a slingshot everywhere and shoots people with it, hence her name, Slingshot. Yes, that's the level of thinking that went into this project.
Estevez's character is given no real attributes beyond being really slimy and yelling a lot. Every time he's on screen you just feel kind of uncomfortable. But the most loathsome character by far is the titular gator, portrayed by an incredibly obvious hand puppet. This little guy is worse than Poochy the Rockin' Dog. The filmmaker's must have thought that the best way to make it appealing to children was to give it the personality of a particularly smart mouthed twelve-year-old. They were wrong, very wrong.
Its annoyingly high-pitched voice, constant wisecracks, and general in-your-face! attitude make you want to punch it in its stupid little face. You genuinely want the bad guys to catch him, just so you never have to look at him again. And that's before it starts rapping. That's right, the alligator raps, and it's the worst thing in the history of music. He does not skate anywhere however, because they didn't know how to do that with a hand puppet. In fact, whenever he's not partially hidden behind something, his mouth doesn't even move when he talks. They're not even trying.
I was not at all surprised to learn that writer/director/producer Donald G. Jackson is a proponent of so called "Zen filmmaking" in which no script is used and you basically shoot whatever feels right at the moment. This certainly explains why most of the dialogue seems to be ad-libbed, why so many of the scenes feel formless and dragged out beyond all reason, and why they didn't bother re-shooting any of the parts where the actors flub their lines or the puppeteer's hand is partially visible. And it is the only possible explanation for the frog headed knight who appears in one scene and is never mentioned again.
Bottom line, everything in this movie is boring and stupid and terrible. It's worse than Manos. Really, it's that bad. If there's any redeeming value to this pathetic, misbegotten excuse for a movie, it's that the lead actress is moderately pretty, and appears in a bikini in one early scene. It's nothing you wouldn't see at your nearest public beach, and it does kind of make you suspect this movie was written by two 13-year old boys, but hey, at least it's something. Oh, one last thing. This movie has a mid-credits sequence, and it is a complete acid trip.
Every single thing about this movie is breathtakingly cheap and incompetent. The whole thing looks like it was shot on a hand held camcorder. The really cheap kind. By people who have no idea how to frame a shot or get an actor's best angles. Obviously, they never bothered to hire a cinematographer, and I have serious doubts as to whether an editor was involved either.
RollerGator also features the most incompetent sound work I've ever heard. Half the dialog is unintelligible. Do they even know how a microphone works? Do they understand that the actors have to be facing in the general direction of the sound equipment? Or maybe it's because the same blasted series of acoustic guitar chords keeps looping over the entire movie, even when the actors are talking. It just never stops!
The dialog you can hear isn't much better, generally matching that of an elementary school play. And the jokes are the kind that only a very small child could ever find funny. Anyone else will just want to slap the writer. I mean seriously, how many bad jokes can they make about hot dogs? There is one brilliant line in this movie though. "I had to hose down the clowns. They were stealing taffy." Now why didn't they put that scene in the movie? The only other decent line in this movie is "I hate fresh foods! Almost as much as I hate gators!"
The acting isn't any better. Honestly, I'm not sure most of it can really be described as acting, given the utter lack of emotion shown by most of the people on screen, and the difficulty they have delivering their lines towards the camera. Although that may go back to the utterly incompetent camera work. Aside from "How did this travesty get made?" or "What have we done to deserve this?" the biggest question this movie raises is "Where did they find the money to pay Joe Estevez?" What is he even doing in this movie? Was he really that hard up for roles? Couldn't he have been doing something more dignified, like an insurance commercial, or a guest appearance on a soap opera? He spends most of the movie sitting behind a desk or aimlessly wandering around a carnival, muttering to himself and occasionally breaking down and crying. I would too if I was in this movie.
Nor are the characters any better that the actors playing them. The writers never bothered to develop any of them beyond one or two easily recognizable traits, like having an obsession with hot dogs, or being a karate instructor, or a skateboarding ninja. This is a kid's movie from the nineties, so of course the ninja has to be on a skateboard. And because they were running out of ideas, there's a second nondescript teenage girl who rides everywhere on rollerblades and helps the little gator escape from the bad guy. You can tell her from the main protagonist because she carries a slingshot everywhere and shoots people with it, hence her name, Slingshot. Yes, that's the level of thinking that went into this project.
Estevez's character is given no real attributes beyond being really slimy and yelling a lot. Every time he's on screen you just feel kind of uncomfortable. But the most loathsome character by far is the titular gator, portrayed by an incredibly obvious hand puppet. This little guy is worse than Poochy the Rockin' Dog. The filmmaker's must have thought that the best way to make it appealing to children was to give it the personality of a particularly smart mouthed twelve-year-old. They were wrong, very wrong.
Its annoyingly high-pitched voice, constant wisecracks, and general in-your-face! attitude make you want to punch it in its stupid little face. You genuinely want the bad guys to catch him, just so you never have to look at him again. And that's before it starts rapping. That's right, the alligator raps, and it's the worst thing in the history of music. He does not skate anywhere however, because they didn't know how to do that with a hand puppet. In fact, whenever he's not partially hidden behind something, his mouth doesn't even move when he talks. They're not even trying.
I was not at all surprised to learn that writer/director/producer Donald G. Jackson is a proponent of so called "Zen filmmaking" in which no script is used and you basically shoot whatever feels right at the moment. This certainly explains why most of the dialogue seems to be ad-libbed, why so many of the scenes feel formless and dragged out beyond all reason, and why they didn't bother re-shooting any of the parts where the actors flub their lines or the puppeteer's hand is partially visible. And it is the only possible explanation for the frog headed knight who appears in one scene and is never mentioned again.
Bottom line, everything in this movie is boring and stupid and terrible. It's worse than Manos. Really, it's that bad. If there's any redeeming value to this pathetic, misbegotten excuse for a movie, it's that the lead actress is moderately pretty, and appears in a bikini in one early scene. It's nothing you wouldn't see at your nearest public beach, and it does kind of make you suspect this movie was written by two 13-year old boys, but hey, at least it's something. Oh, one last thing. This movie has a mid-credits sequence, and it is a complete acid trip.