The scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten in “Jaws” is one of the most thrilling moments in movie history. After all of Steven Spielberg’s virtuoso framing and cool ’70s Hitchcock scare tactics, the shark’s big-mouthed consumption of a man who fully deserves to be eaten had a shockingly raw “Look, there it is!” exploitation-film brazenness. (One not inaccurate way to describe “Jaws” would be as the greatest B-movie ever made.) “The Flood,” an alligator-attack movie that’s also a violent prison-break thriller, takes its cue from that scene. Set in a backwater Louisiana police station during a hurricane, the film isn’t shy about serving up its big, nasty human-torso-meets-jaws moments. It’s basically a slasher movie with teeth.
The alligator thriller, of course, was always a bargain-basement knockoff of “Jaws” — literally, since the alligators are inevitably slithering out of some basement somewhere. But it was launched with an ironic sliver of cachet, because “Alligator” (1980), the first entry in the genre to win attention, was written by John Sayles, who’d released his seminal independent drama “Return of the Secaucus 7” the same year. The Sayles connection signified that “Alligator” was at once a meat-grinder monster thriller and a knowing campy gloss on meat-grinder monster thrillers. The genre had actually begun in 1976 with “Eaten Alive,” the very bad movie that Tobe Hooper made directly after “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” It now includes a vast catalogue of such titles as “Lake Placid” (1999), “Dark Age” (1987), “Black Water” (2007), and, more recently, the logy and overpraised “Crawl” (2019), a waterlogged thriller that trapped you in a house along with a father and daughter and two gators.
“The Flood” is both schlockier and livelier. It lets you know where it’s coming from in the opening sequence, as a couple of deadbeat strangers take refuge from the storm in an abandoned house. A gator on the loose shows up at the front door in about three minutes (no slow build here), chowing down on one of the deadbeats. The other one tries to fight off the gator with a stick, but she becomes mincemeat as well. The film is telling us that its body-munch scenes are going to be served up like porn. The alligators are (mostly) digital, and quite convincing, though the innovation here is that their eating of heads and torsos is rendered with a gruesome wash of digital blood spatter.
Four of the gigantic 500-pound beasts have climbed in through the roof ducts of the Lutree Sheriff’s Department, a concrete bunker of a building in which most of the movie is set. Inconveniently, the place is playing host to half a dozen burly grizzled stone-sociopath killers who are being moved from one prison to another. The bus they were on had to stop because of the storm, and several of the prisoners’ comrades have ambushed the place to bust them out. This is a set-up that the John Carpenter of “Assault on Precinct 13” would approve of, and it mostly carries you along, since even an alligator movie can’t be all alligators. (That was the trouble with “Crawl.”) “The Flood” has two sets of predators, one a bit less human than the other.
The staging, by director Brandon Slagle (“House of Manson”), is basic in a competent potboiler way, and the cast is pretty good. Nicky Whelan, as the sheriff, is like a prole Angelina Jolie, and the hulking actors who play the prisoners, like Mike Ferguson and Randall J. Bacon, turn them into convincing hardened sinners. Casper Van Dien, from “Starship Troopers,” plays the inmate who isn’t as bad as they are (he’s a cop killer who Had His Reasons), and his romantic flirtation with the sheriff is the corny glue that tries to hold the movie together. But what’s really holding it together is the promise of alligators doing that thing they do. Stalk, slither, chomp, repeat.
