A week before its 50th annual Alligator Festival, the Louisiana town of Thibodeaux is suddenly plagued with gator attacks. Lest more citizens be chomped to chum, Sheriff Mitch pleads with city officials to call off the festivities. They don’t.

If that sounds like Jaws, it’s intentional, as Paul Dale’s Sewer Gators is a gentle, purposely toothless parody. Opening credits like “DON’T WORRY THE FILM WILL START SOON” make that as transparent as Claude Rains.

The reptiles’ raids start in the unlikeliest of places: in the butt, Bob. A redneck is obliterated as his bowels do the same, with all but one very fake foot yanked down the toilet. Over the course of the flick, the gators surface thrice through a porcelain stool, twice through a bathtub drain and once through a washing machine, Jacuzzi and everything including the kitchen sink. Hell, not even a cup of ramen noodles is safe. Is nothing sacred?

Only an attractive zoologist (Manon Pages, Purgatory Road) proves any help to aspirin-guzzling Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau, Dale’s Fast Food & Cigarettes), because Thibodeaux’s good-ol’-boy mayor (Sean Phelan, Dale’s Silent but Deadly) is all about the almighty dollar.

Phelan and Dale himself (as obnoxious TV reporter Brock Peterson, whose “mustache reeks of corn chips”) are often hysterical. As Sheriff Mitch’s right-hand woman, Gladyis, Sophia Brazda shines in a droll cluelessness, not unlike Aubrey Plaza. Consider her delivering the news on the first victim:

Gladyis: “Reggie says he got ate.”
Sheriff: “Ate what?”
Gladyis (after long pause): “Up?”

Gleefully stupid and nearly as amiable, Sewer Gators is smart enough to know to scram before it’s asked to leave. The fun concludes at the 52-minute mark, followed by nearly 10 minutes of the slowest end-credits crawl you’ll ever see, with each name’s rise from bottom to top taking a good 120 seconds. Not even the most desperate Lake Placid sequel would dare pull that time-stuffing trick; however, since Sewer Gators is scads more entertaining than any Lake Placid sequel, who cares?

When it hits, ketchup-packet effects and all, Dale’s goof of a spoof is reminiscent of the $6K wonder Bad CGI Sharks. And when it doesn’t, I’m reminded of my own bored, preteen days of camcorder buffoonery. But I can sanction that. —Rod Lott

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You may not find it in your version of the Bible, but on the eighth day, God created Mamie Van Doren. And He saw that she was good — very, very good.

So to me, it kinda makes sense to have her play the world’s first woman in Albert Zugsmith’s first sex comedy, The Private Lives of Adam & Eve. After all, it makes perfect sense to cast Mickey Rooney as Satan, a fancy way to say “himself.”

The film begins in black and white in present-day Paradise, Nevada, population 7. Van Doren’s Evie and husband Ad (Martin Milner, 1960’s 13 Ghosts) are among eight passengers on a bus headed for Reno. Also aboard is Rooney, resplendent in Col. Sanders regalia as a casino owner. All’s well until the 27-minute mark, when stock footage of flash floods and landslides forces them to take cover in a church. Ad and Evie pass the time with a shared dream, kicking the flick into “SpectaColor,” a fancy way to say “color.”

Cue the meat on Private Lives’ calcium-starved bones: a wacky take on the Book of Genesis. Ad, now Adam, frolics with animals as he runs around in his little Tarzan pants. Among his harem of sexy sinners named after days of the week — The Bellboy and the Playgirls’ June Wilkinson among them as Saturday — Rooney’s devil sends cat-eyed Lilith (foxy Fay Spain, 1957’s Dragstrip Girl) to seduce Adam over to the dark side. Tempting … until Adam gets a load of Evie — er, Eve — despite her long hair prodigiously pasted over her bosom.

An entire decade and a half have passed since my two-year stint teaching Sunday school, so I assume all of the above remains biblically accurate. Still, Zugsmith skirts the fact that Adam and Eve’s all-fruit diet would lead turn the Garden of Eden into one of chronic diarrhea.

If you can turn yourself away from trying to catch glue failing, you’ll note Van Doren’s adorable breathy lines: “Maybe next time we can have apples. Big … red … apples.” When Adam finally takes a bite, so does the movie, reverting to B&W and an ending that makes one wonder the point of the entire exercise.

As chaste as it is overly cast (with Tuesday Weld, Mel Torme and Paul Anka also taking part), The Private Lives of Adam & Eve is light of heart and dryer-lint disposable. Zugsmith and Van Doren reunited twice that year for the far more fun College Confidential and Sex Kittens Go to College. —Rod Lott

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Professedly a remake of 1960’s Where the Boys Are, Hy Averback’s final film as director, Where the Boys Are ’84, does retain the simple premise: Four college girls drive to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Whereas the original was a bubbly comedy with a serious streak of date rape painted across its middle, ’84 dumps that paint on the floor — and flings it on the walls and ceiling — as an all-out, balls-out, R-rated parrrrrtyyyyy!

So why isn’t it any fun?

The short answer may boil down to a combo of “producer Allan Carr” and “cocaine,” but hey, you’re here already, so let’s talk.

Among our four leading ladies, top-billed Lisa Hartman (then on TV’s Knots Landing) is such a pure cypher as the studious one, she may as well be invisible. A lemon-mouthed Lorna Luft doesn’t stray far from her Grease 2 role, while For Your Eyes Only’s Lynn-Holly Johnson runs hornier than the loot from an Africa safari. Finally, in her first movie since 1977’s Record City, Wendy Schaal plays the stuffy straight arrow. Only one of the women exudes true sex appeal, and here’s a hint: It’s Schaal.

Individually and/or collectively, their characters pounce from man to man while bouncing from party to party. One is arrested for driving drunk. Drugs are taken. A gigolo is bedded. A “hot bod” contest entails suggestive motions with a sizable cucumber. And in a scene that actually provoked mild controversy at the time, the girls take a moment of respite to take turns engaging in foreplay with a blow-up doll.

With debauchery but no discernible fun, Where the Boys Are ’84 hovers just above zero. Averback (Chamber of Horrors) doesn’t quite build a story as much he does stack scenes atop one another until all the songs needed for a soundtrack album had found a home. Due to that — and especially T&A abounding from anonymous actresses — Carr’s final comeback attempt post-Can’t Stop the Music finishes as little more than a massively overfunded Hardbodies. —Rod Lott

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Crash Course, NBC’s teen-dream melding of Moving Violations and Summer School, pulls in with the shakiest of premises: Hamilton High School’s sports program is endangered due to tanking grades in driver’s education. The principal (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) gives the class’ blithering, scaredy-cat teacher (Charles Robinson, TV’s Night Court) six weeks to steer it into shape, with hired muscle (and sass) from Jackée Harry (TV’s 227): “This is supposed to be driver’s ed, not a Bananarama audition!”

The crazy classroom comes culled almost exclusively from hit sitcoms of the time, including:
• Mr. Belvedere’s Rob Stone as an Ivy League-bound senior, if only he can pass the class;
• soap star Brian Bloom and his eyebrows as a juvenile delinquent with two failed tries;
• Who’s the Boss?’s Alyssa Milano as a transfer student enrolling against her mother’s wishes;
• Family Ties’ Tina Yothers as the not-so-great Santini, daughter of a cement truck driver;
• The Wonder Years’ Olivia d’Abo as the token hot foreign exchange student;
• and eventual Jurassic Park employee BD Wong as the token Asian who raps.

Somehow, every one of these otherwise functional young humans treats the automobile as alien and Gordian as performing open-heart surgery using a construction backhoe while on the nose of the Space Shuttle at launch. Accelerator versus brake, curb versus street, left versus right — never before has a movie contained so many scenes of motorists letting go of the wheel and shrieking “AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” in the face of opposing traffic, fire hydrants and fruit stands. To quote Bloom’s tough-talkin’ Riko, “There’s a lot you don’t know, diaper head.”

Bustin’ Loose helmer Oz Scott navigates this flat, vanilla-pudding mayhem with all the story intricacies of a Trapper Keeper. In place of jokes are a Wang Chung shout-out, a clumsy Chariots of Fire bit and Dick Butkus in a chicken suit. Harvey Korman (Munchies) says it all when his sabotage-minded faculty member yells at himself in frustration, “Why do you do things like this? Why me?”

Because a paycheck’s a paycheck, I guess. Movie drinking games are stupid, but if you were to do one during Crash Course, you’d have a Cadillac-sized liver for imbibing at each rap number, mention of “symbiosis” and usage of a rubber-plunger dart gun. You might even experience the tremors before the big closing song, “We Be Drivin’.” I not be kiddin’. —Rod Lott

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With sales of Beaver Bras sagging, ad man Albert Zack (Chris Lemmon, Wishmaster) is tasked with front-loading the next campaign with five famous curvaceous ladies to model the goods: a chart-topping singer, a Swiss countess, an Olympic wrestler, a sex-kitten actress and the daughter of the President of the United States. With that mission set, the meat of C.O.D. is watching Zack humiliate himself to make contact for contracts by donning a variety of disguises, because what else screams “zany”?

For example, the actress (Corinne Alphen, Amazon Women on the Moon) is shooting a Doctor Butcher M.D.-style horror film, so Zack dresses as a zombie to crash the set. For the singer (Marilyn Joi, Black Samurai), he dons his discotheque best. For the POTUS offspring, it’s cringingly offensive Fu Manchu garb. Hey, it was the ’80s.

One of pornographer Chuck Vincent’s earliest efforts to go legit, the PG-rated C.O.D. plays remarkably tame, even with its big-busted premise. Nudity is light enough to be near-nonexistent, and the most risqué gag requires literacy; as Zack — in a Santa Claus outfit — realizes he’s followed the countess (Carole Davis, Piranha II: The Spawning) to a Madison Cawthorn-style orgy, she chases him around a room lit with Christmas lights and a neon sign reading “THE FUCK IS ON.”

If you didn’t already know C.O.D.’s leading man fell from the same Lemmon tree as his legendary father, nothing here would shed that light. But let’s give the lesser Lemmon this: As the straight man opposite five shapely women, he’s easily likable, whereas had he played it any differently, he’d be alienating. Almost all the laughs come from first-timer Teresa Ganzel (The Toy), genuinely funny as the prez’s daughter. If she didn’t improvise much of her scene after ditching Secret Service, color me amazed. Either way, one wishes her co-stars — not to mention her writer/director — worked as hard. —Rod Lott

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