Ragin Cajun Redneck Gators

It is the new age of the Sci-Fi channel original. Not the Golden Age or the Silver Age or the Age of Greatness… we still hold out hope that these ages are coming… but it is the Age of the Wacky Title. The benign titles like 'Mammoth' or 'Pterodactyl' or 'Minotaur' are giving way to the Sharknados and Ghost Sharks and Robo Crocs and today's movie 'Ragin Cajun Redneck Gators'. Are these movies any good in this new age? Does that really matter? Well, maybe to some of you it does. And we're not going to hold that against you.

Young Avery Doucette (Jordan Hinson) is back in the swamp, after spending a few years in the big city, to visit her old man Lucien

Avery and Dathan, while trying to get it on in the swamp… which is kind of nasty when you think about it… saw what a giant red neck gator could do firsthand when it killed cousin Jeb. I mean this gator is large, it has a red neck, it has a spiked tail, and when pressed it can release a big chunk of this tail like a projectile with amazing accuracy. Just ask cousin Darla about this. Now at first nobody wanted to believe Avery about these crazy gators she just saw, and besides, there's a redneck gator cookout going on so crazy talk about mutated gators is falling on deaf ears. Good thing Avery is vegan though because there is something very odd happening to people eating this mutated gator meat.

Eventually though, everybody in the swamp becomes a believer, to point they actually bring in the Gator Whisperer (Victor Webster) to solve the problem. That doesn't work too good. Avery knows what has to be done, and this is that these gators need to be slaughtered. Even if they are family. It's complicated.

How was 'Redneck Cajun Gators'? Well… you know… it has its issues. Most of those issues probably stemmed from Cousin Clem and his damn banjo. I mean this dude played his cursed banjo everywhere. He couldn't speak, so instead of communicating through sign language like any respectable mute would, he spoke in banjo. Which is insane. Crazier still is that people seemed to actually understand banjo. I'm telling you, death to Cousin Clem via Redneck Gator couldn't come soon enough.

Once you get past Clem Robichaud and his banjo, the movie itself is fairly standard SyFy channel fare all crafted by a fairly standard SyFy channel movie director in Griff Furst, today going under a pseudonym of some sort. One day I'm going to have to have a sit down interview with Griff, which I think he kind of owes me considering how many movies of his I've voluntarily seen, and ask him why he took this particular route. But by typical SyFy fare, you generally know what we are talking about as we have a wacky plot centered on mutated beasts created by crazy science gone wrong, mated to some shaky CGI, along with some suspect acting framed around some seriously suspect Cajun accents, and inconsistent pacing.

But does this make 'Ragin Redneck Cajun Gators' a bad movie? In some circles it does, but here it does not. You see another thing that 'Ragin' Redneck Cajun Gators' has is a wildly inconsistent tone. On one hand you might think it's a comedy with its title, suspect accents, crazy gator talk and the introduction of the Gator Whisperer, but the movie just gets progressively darker and more violent as it goes along. This kind of works in the movies favor and actually gives it a smidgen of uniqueness. An all out wacky comedy probably wouldn't have worked all that well, and a straight out horror drama more than likely would've amounted to an abject failure. The transition from wacky to darkness actually works for this movie.

The movie is called 'Ragin Redneck Cajun Gators' so we can assume it wasn't shooting for the stars from its inception, and not surprisingly, it did not reach the stars. In fact, it probably didn't leave the atmosphere. But… and this is key… for those of us who watch these kinds of movies on a regular basis, it wasn't all that bad.