Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies

Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies (2012)

** (out of 4)

Al Pereira (Antonio Mayans) is having a very bad nightmare while laying in his bed. Moments later we see a couple ladies, the alligator ladies of course, doing a sexual dance and then all sorts of weirdness follows.

This turned out to be the last completed film before director Jess Franco passed away and he certainly went out in a rather playful mood. I say this because AL PEREIRA VS. THE ALLIGATOR LADIES is quite different from the films he was making over the last two decades of his career. Visually it has a lot in common with the direct-to-video releases from One Shot but at the same time it's a lot smarter and appears to have more attention and energy from the director.

I say this because there's quite a bit going on here. However, if you're looking for some sort of plot then you're going to be disappointed and you should probably just walk away from the film. I believe everything we're seeing is a dream so it makes sense that nothing we're seeing makes much sense. We go from women doing various sexual things with one another. Then the next scene will just be a couple different women. Throughout all of this there are moments where the actors will speak directly towards the camera and in the film's highlight a woman is stripping when she stops and receives direction from Franco himself.

We see Franco in the mirror as he is directing the actress and there are several moments like this throughout the picture. During one scene Mayans is acting with two women on the bed and he stops and begins talking to Franco who throws in some direction. It's scenes like this that really stand out here and makes it a tad bit smarter and more clever than what the director had been doing at the later period of his career. There's plenty of nudity and sexuality throughout but the real key here is just getting to see Franco work his magic.

I must admit that I approached this movie with a certain sense of foreboding. I have seen a good number of films from the ultra-prolific Spanish exploitation director Jess Franco but I had not seen anything he had done since the early 80's. By that point in time he had made dozens of very low budget movies that displayed his, shall we say, unique approach to directing which could be summarised as fast, no messing and to the point. Many of these films only barely qualified as narrative movies and could only be appreciated if you were willing to accept quite a few deficiencies and rock bottom production values. But the thing is that cheap films from this era were still at least shot on film and are probably more enjoyable nowadays than they were at the time of their release because of the benefits that older films gain due to their off-their-time look and feel when viewed from the perspective of today, decades on. So, I was a little worried what one of these types of films would be like when stripped of both these retro benefits while being shot on the rather ugly digital video. It turns out my fears were unfortunately well founded as Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies must be the worst Franco movie I have yet seen and much of the reasons were more or less the ones I mentioned before.

This one is notable at least for being the last fully completed movie that Franco ever directed. He made a sequel called Revenge of the Alligator Ladies (2013) where sadly he seems to have died before production was complete. But seeing as its entire plot summary here on IMDb currently states 'Maybe you should skip this one' I get the overall feeling that, on balance, it probably isn't a film to seek out too urgently. Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies shares a common characteristic that anyone who has seen a decent number of Franco movies could attest to and that is that is that its story-line is almost insanely half-hearted. So much so that there is no point in even bothering mentioning it. It's a film which could maybe best be described as a soft-core erotic comedy. The former is made up of pretty lengthy scenes of women dancing around naked. Sadly, these weren't particularly sexy though but I can't criticise the general idea. The comedy part is covered by everything else, including the presence of a particularly annoying man with a beard who talked in a deeply moronic manner. I thought that the most interesting parts by far were the sequences where Franco himself appears as himself actually directing scenes in the film. There is no discernible reason for these moments but they did alleviate the poorly paced tedium that constituted the other events that dragged out before us on screen. These scenes definitely showed that Franco wasn't taking any of this seriously at all which was obviously a plus point. To be honest this one is so cheap that it feels more like a home movie and is about as much fun as watching one of those, essentially proceed with extreme caution I would say.