I’ve been running towards oversized monster movies since I was 8, when I saw Roger Corman’s 1957 gem Attack of the Crab Monsters on a Saturday night TV horror showcase. That’s why, when I learned that Seymour’s Strand Theater was screening 1980’s Alligator last Friday night, I laced up once again.
Directed by Lewis Teague, best known for Cujo and The Jewel of the Nile, the movie was one of a slew of homages in the wake of the huge success of Jaws. Initially, Teague was burdened with a script that was ridiculously unbelievable, in which a tiny baby alligator, dumped into a Wisconsin sewer through a bathroom toilet, grows into a 36-foot killing machine as a result of drinking the runoff from a local brewery. So, he recruited young screenwriter John Sayles to do a rewrite.
Sayles, who would become a pioneering independent filmmaker and Oscar-nominated screenwriter for his films Passion Fish and Lone Star, took the story in a more adroit satirical direction. Changing the locale to Missouri, his plot turned the beast, now named Ramon, into the victim of an illicit scientific hormonal growth project, for which the carcasses of discarded test animals are also dumped into the sewer. When Ramon is forced to feed on these corpses in order to survive, the growth hormone accumulates in his system, not only causing his size mutation but giving him an insatiable appetite.
As a result, Alligator is a well-played albeit goofy and delightfully cheesy thrill ride. Toronto’s Globe and Mail has praised it for “having enough sidelong wit and head-on scares to guarantee its revival as a cult classic long after more ambitious efforts have been forgotten.” More recently (and succinctly), Entertainment Weekly lauded it as “clever, funny and wonderfully bloody.” Though it tanked at the North American box office, Jaws helmer Stephen Spielberg was reportedly a fan.
No wonder, then, that when I arrived at the Strand a half-hour early, the line was already trailing down the block from the theater’s Main Street entrance. Though you can catch Alligator on Amazon Prime, it was a much bigger joy to share it with a large, enthusiastic audience in an old-school movie house with a bag of popcorn and an oversized Diet Coke. The projection and sound were retro, too—not exactly Sony 4K with Dolby surround—but at an admission price of $6, I considered it quite a bargain.
The screening was organized and co-presented by the local movie enthusiasts behind Connecticut Cult Classics. Eight years ago, founder Larry Dwyer decided that local horror movie nights would be a great way to promote his pet project, Connecticut HorrorFest. So he approached John Fanotto, grand knight of the local Knights of Columbus Aurora Council, which has owned the Strand since the late 1950s. Fanotto, also the Strand’s building manager, agreed to let the CCC rent the theater to screen films, and the inaugural horror movie night was such a success that the group has run Saturday night double (and even triple) horror features every other month since. (The Aug. 17 double bill, themed “Terror in the Woods,” will pair slasher flick Just Before Dawn with Sam Raimi’s classic The Evil Dead, both from 1981.)
Alligator, though, was screened as part of CCC’s newer, monthly Friday night series, “Freakout Fridays,” debuted earlier this year as a profit-sharing partnership with the Strand. Dwyer’s plan is to feature films deemed “cult classics,” even if not in the horror genre. “It’s a subjective term,” he admits, informed by the B movies he saw as a child during Friday nights at Bridgeport’s Candlelite-Pix Drive-In (and other venues) with his parents. “Those were a great education in B movies—the theater would open at sundown with Superman or Raiders of the Lost Ark, then the second feature, when I was supposed to be asleep in the back seat, would be Blood Beach or Pieces.” This month, on August 30, the “Freakout” feature will be Rudy Ray Moore’s 1975 blaxploitation crime comedy Dolemite.
Running classics and cult films has been a regular practice for the Strand since the Aurora Council took over its management roughly a decade ago. The theater now operates as a 501 (c)(3) charitable organization, with all of its profits going to local civic organizations like food banks and animal shelters. Most recently, the theater is partnering with the Watertown-based autism charity Sun, Moon & Stars to host a program of “judgment-free, sensory-friendly movies” on Sunday, August 25, at 1 p.m.
Otherwise, the Strand packs ’em in for annual screenings of The Quiet Man for St. Patrick’s Day, The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Halloween and It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas, all of which typically sell out the 270-seat theater, now in its 95th year. For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, plans are afoot to screen weekly classics like Casablanca, The Godfather and The Sound of Music from August through the end of the year. New films by local Connecticut filmmakers looking for a venue to premiere their works have been featured three or four times a year.
Live comedy shows are also in the mix, including during an annual benefit held at Thanksgiving for the Seymour Volunteer Fire Department. The Strand has even been known to host private birthday parties and post wedding proposals on its marquee. “We like to have fun with the locals,” Fanotto says, and the locals like to have fun with the Strand.
Written by Patricia Grandjean. Image 1 photographed by Patricia Grandjean. Image 2 captured from Alligator (1980)
