Rollergator

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.

No seriously people literally spent time out of their lives doing this.

Jeesh. Where to begin with this disaster.

Well, me and my friends love watching bad movies. We do it all the time. I think for the same reason many other people do it to; To find something of comedic value and perhaps try and get an understanding as to why the filmmakers made these movies. Sometimes this can simply be attributed to incompetence, trying to make something beyond their scope and budget and competency, or just because the filmmakers wanted to make a movie they wanted to make as a passion project. Some of these movies can be endearing for those reasons alone. But we've sat through enough terrible movies to know that Rollergator isnt one of them.

To sum up quickly for whoever is reading this; a tiny purple alligator and a woman on rollerskates perpetually run away from a skateboarding ninja hired by a carnival owner to retrieve him for their personal profits.

Thats all you really need to know, because those are the only things you can sort of puzzle together. Because for some reason i believe the movie is edited out of order. From the moment the movie starts until it ends nothing makes a lick of sense in the way its story progresses. Scenes cut and jump awkwardly, the camera work resembles that of a 13 year old making short films for youtube and the acting is nothing short from sublime (terrible). There is nothing funny about it. The only reason we got a chuckle out of it was of how distressed me and my friends were and how much we hated it. We got more enjoyment out of eachothers misery watching this than actually watching it.

Another gripe i have is that the movie is a flatout lie. I thought at least i would see a small purple alligator on rollerblades but that didnt happen. Also, the alligator claims that it can sing and rap. But only spits like 2 of the most lamest bars ive heard since "TOP 10 LAMEST FREESTYLE BARS" on youtube (which by the way is funny as hell, funnier than this movie at least). for the rest he doesnt really do much. He spends about 90 percent of the movie huddled away in a backpack.

Now, the audio is... Ooof... No Disrespect Preston Reed but the neverending droning loop of twangy guitars(Me and my friends can pretty much confirm it, maybe, honestly this movie actually made me lose memories) is the worst stuff ever. and it plays from the start till the finish. No tonal shifts, no pauses just the same guitar playing over and over and over. The audio mixing for dialogue in this movie is bad, and sometimes gets drowned out by the guitar that just keeps going and going and going... i legitimately felt dizzy because of how repetitive the audio was.

Overall. Even if you like terribad movies, this isnt worth your time. There is no comedic value in any aspect whatsoever. not in the acting or the camera work or the audio. Its all bad. Steer clear from this one for sure. It aint worth the attention.

I have only looked at the recent short from Rifftrax and, from what I saw, to give this zero-budget 'thing' any stars should be a crime; since IMDb requires a minimum of 1, that's all it could 'possibly' get.

Everyone involved with "Rollergator" must have known they were making the equivalent of 'cinematic fecal matter'. Cheap and amateurish in every imaginable aspect of film-making, this pile of celluloid dung's only two redeeming qualities were the presence of the self-loathing (I suspect) Joe Estevez who may have thought:'I know full-well what I'm getting into, but don't care because I'm expected to be in intentionally-crappy films. How awful can I be in this one?') and the not-so-bad-looking blonde actress, Sandra Shuker, although her thespian skills border on non-existent. That's really it, folks. It's that bad.

The talking (!) baby alligator puppet would have even been improved by merely sewing eyes on a sock...you'd get the same effect, really. I guess it's all an intentional joke because it looks so obviously-fake. Anyone who's heard of 'Ed the Sock' has seen this before and just as believably; only Ed's perpetual cigar was missing.

Saying, 'This is the worst (fill in the blank) I've ever seen, etc.' is asking for it. Something even more horrifically-cheap and stupid may actually be possible...a shuddering thought, considering what I saw of this thing.

Only because IMDB doesn't allow a "0" star rating does this get a star. I imagine this movie was made with the idea that it would somehow catch on as a cult classic and sell some beta max, uh, VHS copies.