Alligator (1980), directed by Lewis Teague, Shout! Factory 4k remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, original theatrical stereo, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080354

Video encoded in two-pass 13.5 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

Text subtitles converted to SRT.

Note : Creature features got popular in the second half of the 70s, spurred on by the phenomental success of Jaws, but most of them are pretty forgettable. This one, though, is a bit self-aware, has some decent practical effects and some kind of gruesome kills, and a strong leading man in Robert Forster. It's also directed by Lewis Teague, a very solid director of genre films who never quite broke through to the mainstream, Cujo notwithstanding. If you're looking for a tense, claustrophobic monster film, you can do a lot worse than this.

As urban legends reliably tell us, pet alligators are regularly flushed down the toilet and live on in the sewers, and that's exactly what happens here, except the creature is also exposed to an experimental growth hormone from animal carcasses discarded in the sewers, which makes the alligator both giant and very, very hungry, and it starts eating sewer workers and others who stumble into its domain. In the opposite corner, David Madison, a down on his luck cop with a reputation of bad luck, since all his partners seem to die, and indeed, when he takes a young officer into the sewers, he returns alone, the other section of the thin blue line having been turned into a faint red smear by way of alligator teeth. In the mix are also a scientist, a tabloid reporter, and the industrial tycoon who's responsible for the hormone contamination, and there'll be a lot of chomping before the explosive climax.

This 4k remaster is quite nice looking, not overly grainy, nicely sharp, contrasty with deep blacks and punchy color. Stereo track sounds good, commentary track is pretty entertaining too.

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