Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Bayou’ on Hulu, a depressingly generic chompfest about methed-up alligators

Now that Shark Six-to-Eight Weeks is (mostly) over, we can shift our attention to alligators what be chomp-happy, specifically, The Bayou (now streaming on Hulu), a doodledy-squat-brained bloodsoaked thriller that used to be called Gator Creek and purports the question, What if your plane crashed in a swamp full of methed-up megalizards? And of course the answer is, It would suck! For the poor folk who have to try to slosh their way home, at least. But for us firing up a movie hoping for some cheep thrillz? Well. Let’s just say the Jurassic Worlds of the world aren’t going to feel much competitive heat. 

THE BAYOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Somewhere in the Louisiana swamp, crooks be cookin’. Drugs, to be precise. Meth, probably, but I’m no expert. It’s some brand of toxic chemical purple slop and when the DEA raids the joint the bad guys dump barrels of the stuff into the water and before you know it you’re watching stock footage of alligators smeared with purple post-production CGI smudgery. This far-from-ideal development results in lots of headlines about gator attacks and gator eggs selling for $10,000 for unstated reasons that we’ll just assume boil down to “late capitalism.” 

Now we meet Kyle Finalgirl (Athena Strates), a college student answering the biology prof’s questions about apex predators in her Foreshadowing 101 class. Her brother is dead, and at this point, her entire personality is defined by her sadness about that, as well as her knowledge about large carnivores – like, say, alligators – and the movie plot requires nothing more from her. The plan is for Kyle, her bestie Alice LeIdiot (Madalena Aragao), Sam Nopersonality (Mohammed Mansaray) and deeply unpleasant person Malika Gatorfood (Elisha Applebaum) to venture to the Florida Keys to spread the guy’s ashes. Ms. LeIdiot’s first smooth move is to hire a not-entirely-legit “charter” flight piloted by a weaselly guy, Frank Weasellyguy (Andonis Anthony), who promptly turns the plane into wreckage and his passengers into survivors, in an area far from cell phone service but close to a bunch of methed-up alligators. Whoopsies.

So our four protags, the pilot and a clutch of supporting lizardfood characters get to tromping through the swamp. While Malika acts like a total rhymes-with-glitch and Kyle spouts hard truth-facts about big things that eat smaller things with their big teeth, Ms. LeIdiot finds a clutch of gator eggs and secretly loads them into her backpack, dollar signs over her eyes. We’re hereby subject to a series of all-too-familiar scenes, e.g., The Fatal Pissing, when a male character wanders away from camp to evacuate his bladder and ends up down a gator gullet, and The Noble Sacrifice, when a mortally wounded character volunteers to be Kibbles ‘n Gator Bits in order to save the others. Who will manage to survive this stop-chomp-and-deathroll scourge? NO SPOILERS, Holmes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Bayou is Crawl or Alligator crossed with a slasher movie (I’ll pick a good recent one: In a Violent Nature is awful fun) with some silly shit that brought to mind that J-Lo classic, Anaconda. There’s also more than a little twinge of Cocaine Bear here, too.

Performance Worth Watching: (coughs into microphone)

Memorable Dialogue: Sample bit of diction from our poet of a lousy-ass pilot guy: “It’s late, and it’s hotter than a post-chili shit out here.”

Sex and Skin: No time for nookie.

Our Take: And even then, The Bayou makes Anaconda look like L’Avventura. Directed by Taneli Mustonen and Brad Watson, making the most of their coupla-rolls-of-nickels budget, this gator flick is an all-fronts snooze, predictable and chock-full of uninspired kills. By the time the survivors use vines to lash together an Aguirre the Wrath of God raft and therefore render themselves a floating Ponderosa Steakhouse buffet, you’re likely to lapse into a drooling coma. The gators are rendered with a blend of CG and practical effects that are laughable, yet not laughable enough to be fun to ridicule. 

That’s an apt metaphor for a movie aiming to be competent instead of nutty or interesting – the death knell for a Z-grade genre mosh featuring a cast of Euro actors pretending that the Philippines is Louisiana and doing their damnedest to squash their accents while reciting dialogue phonetically, saying things like “checkings account” and “drugs bust.” When the action fails to stir us from a nice nappy-poo, Watson and Mustonen just turn up the volume on the score, hoping to jolt us awake for the next burst of depressingly unmemorable gore. 

The plot consists of a series of intelligence-challenged characters making questionable decisions. There really ain’t diddly-poo for gator action in the first act, the second act consists almost wholly of bickering and the third act is mostly a long… slow… walk… through… an abandoned… drug den, inspired by many long… slow… walks… through haunted houses we’ve seen in countless wearisome, cliched horror films. Like Cocaine Bear before it, The Bayou fails to exploit the novelty of its concept. They shoulda called it Methigator, but that title implies base-level escapist entertainment that the film never achieves.

Our Call: Is it too easy to call it The Bay-poo? Yes. Yes it is. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.