10 Best Films Based On Urban Legends

John Sayles is probably best known as a playwrite and screenwriter/director of such strong works as 8 Men Out and Return of the Secaucus 7 - a mature version of The Big Chill. His highly praised work overshadows the fact that he got his start as a script doctor for Roger Corman films. Joe Dante's first major release, the Jaws parody Piranha, was co-penned by Sayles and he was still having fun in the early 80s when he wrote Lewis Teague's Alligator.

Everyone has heard the legend - pet baby alligators were flushed down toilets like dead fish and, after surviving the trip into the sewers, grew large and albino due to the darkness of their new lair. Stories from New York to Florida about sewer gators had been making headlines as early as the 1920s. Many of these stories were cautionary tales not about wandering sewers, but of poor utility maintenance. The 1959 book entitled The World Beneath the City verified that sewer walkers did spot some gators beneath Manhattan Island and began an extermination process that was completed by 1937. Since then, there have been no verifiable reports.

That didn't stop Sayles from transporting the action to Chicago, where a gator feeds off the corpses of animals that were being dumped due to illegal growth experimentation. It's up to the late, great Robert Forster - a Chicago P.D. officer - to put the animal down. But not before it runs amok after breaking free, terrorizing lakes and wedding parties.

Sayles' script is plenty of fun, with plenty of cinematic in-jokes and just the right amount of gore and mayhem.