Adventures in 'Sploitation: ''Gator Bait'

It's almost embarrassing how much real estate of my adolescent mind the VHS box covers of 'Gator Bait and 'Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice ' occupied. It was the pre-Internet days, and you needed to get visual stimulation where you could. Albeit the cover for 'Gator Bait II appealed more to my budding melon felon sensibilities.

Back in the medieval times, when video stores had actual VHS tapes, there were a few illicit titles you could find no matter the store. From Blockbuster to regional chains like Movie Gallery to mom-and-pop stores, there were a handful of familiar titles. I’m not talking about the classics or the hottest new releases, either. 

I’m talking about the VHS boxes with images that sparked youthful overactive imaginations. Cover art that left you bug-eyed, made your pulse race, and very often, wrote checks they could never hope to cash. These boxes were misleading as all hell, meant to sell tickets and little else. But oddly, we never held that much of a grudge. How could we? Deep down, we knew we were being conned, but appreciated the effort.

One of these hallowed artifacts was the 1973 exploitation classic ‘Gator Bait. A title that plays on numerous dirty phrases, married with the simple image of a barefoot, barely clad, Playmate of the Year, Claudia Jennings staring out from the cover. It's so simple and yet I never fail to stare in awe at the audacity. Her unruly red curls and sweat-soaked flesh were more than enough to stoke the fires of curious adolescents.

However, far from being a sleazy exploitation flick, ‘Gator Bait is a scrappy, z-budget movie held together with grit, spit, and duct tape. Peppered with street-level stunts amid a pulpy psychological thriller that feels torn out of Tennessee Williams’s notebook. It's not an undiscovered classic, mind you, but it’s better than a movie called ‘Gator Bait has a right to be.

Jennings proves herself to have a real presence, amidst some real nuts and bolts craftsmanship. The role of Desiree Thibodeau ( a name right out of a Fanny Flagg novel) was created specifically for Jennings. A frequent collaborator and friend of the husband and wife filmmaking duo Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, she had asked for a role that barely had any lines.

The result is a testament to Jennings's capabilities. A near-silent role is, in many ways, harder than a role with dialogue. An actor has to convey more without the aid of dialogue to flesh out the character. Jennings does a remarkable job as Desiree, embodying a cocktail of emotions, using her flashing emerald greens, along with the way she holds herself, to immense effect.

Written and directed by Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, a husband-and-wife team whose movies were a staple of drive-in movie theaters, ‘Gator Bait is a revenge flick more interested in the scars of the past and how we too often pick at the scabs and never let the wound heal. If that sounds a little highfalutin’ for a movie called ‘Gator Bait that stars a Playmate of the Year, then shows what you know. 

The Sebastians make the kind of movies with budgets that make Roger Corman movies seem like Michael Bay films. Except, to the Sebastian's credit, you’d never really notice it. This is partially because they shoot on location. ‘Gator Bait is filled with gorgeous and lush footage of the Louisiana swamps, all while utilizing a script with the bare essentials. 

It's safe to say Jennings is rife with BTE. A barefoot, red-headed, almost feral poacher, Jennings is introduced wearing a literal burlap sack and making it look as sexy as anything worn by Daisy Duke and without the fucking confederate flag to boot.

‘Gator Bait is filled with recognizable faces to fans of B-films. The biggest being Bill Thurman as Sheriff Joe Bob. He comes off like Big Daddy, loud, temperamental, believing he’s in charge, and yet unaware of his facile grip on authority. Thurman almost steals the show, if not for Jennings, and adds a layer of pathos to the film.

Despite what the ads and the title might suggest, the crux of the story has little to do with Jennings's Desiree. If anything, she's an inciting incident. While out poaching gators, she comes upon Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura), the sheriff's son, and Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian). The two chase her down and try to "arrest" her, only for Desiree to outsmart them, causing Billy Boy to accidentally shoot and kill Ben. Billy Boy lies and tells his father that Desiree killed Ben.

This sets off a chain of events, causing years of repressed feuds and desires to come to a head. The Brackens, led by the snarling, bearded T.J. (Sam Gilman). The Brackens already have it in for Desiree as she castrated T.J.'s other son, LeRoy (Douglas Dirkson), when he tried to attack her. The sheriff and T.J. share an uneasy alliance, as the town patriarchs, whose shaky foundations are tested when they go after Desiree into the swamps.

Written by Beverly and Ferd, ‘Gator Bait shows how the patriarchy is just as poisonous to men as to women. Troubled psyches are made to bear the weight of expectations of perceived manhood, ultimately leading the characters to their doom. Something that reminded me a lot of Tanya Rosenberg's Baseball Bimbos in Hillbilly Hell.

Both films show how fragile male egos can often lead to brutal violence. Much like the work of Tennessee Williams, the characters are almost caricatures, or would be if not for their complex interiors. A casual glance at T.J. (Sam Gilman), the father of the Bracken clan, shows a man tortured by self-hate that mutates into a whip-cracking, snarling, wraith of fury. We see glimpses of his warped moral code as he stops one of his sons, Pete (Don Baldwin), from raping their sister. Only to order her to clean up and get dinner on the table. He never asks how his daughter is or even attempts to comfort. He merely goes straight to whipping Pete.

Ferd, shot and edited 'Gator Bait and, despite his low budget, never uses the camera as merely a recording device. He uses angles and framing to create a mood that never distracts from the story at hand. There's a nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship that's absent from many modern Hollywood blockbusters.

The issue with 'Gator Bait is the threadbare script. Too much of the exposition comes out in great heaps as opposed to drips. We are treated to scenes of characters divulging swaths of backstory out of nowhere and undercutting much of the drama. Still, these moments are never dull, and the implications of each revelation begin to form an impressionistic picture of the history of these characters.

The script may not be pitch-perfect, but it still hums along at a nice pace. Though it drags in the middle a little, it moves with such ease, and Jennings is so nice to look at, that it never feels ornately overlong.

'Gator Bait clumsily makes its way through the runtime with a strange amount of class. Ferd's camera is never leering, and the shots of Jennings's denim-clad ass are often more to show how the swamp looms large over everyone, that despite her prowess, she, like everyone else, is nothing but a speck. The sleaze is baked into the narrative itself; hinted at, implied, or talked about, but rarely seen.

The exception being a scene in which the makeshift posse attacks Desiree’s sister Julie (Janit Baldwin). What starts as a brutal sexual assault is interrupted by a stunning and jarring act of violence involving a shotgun as a thinly veiled phallus metaphor. The moment is made all the more layered by the fact that it's the castrated LeRoy wielding the shotgun. Little is shown, but the impact is visceral. 

The Sebastians made films for drive-ins. To promote 'Gator Bait, they would have Claudia Jennings appear in the drive-in concessions dressed in a see-through blouse, and wouldn't you know it, 'Gator Bait made bank. Now, I'm not some marketing exec on Madison Avenue or anything, but it seems to me that if the MCU wanted a surefire way to drum up audiences for their movie, well, it couldn't hurt! I don't have a crystal ball, but you can't tell me Brie Larson, Elizabeth Olsen, Hayley Atwell, Chris Evans, Kat Dennings, Winston Duke, or freaking SacrJo going to local AMCs and working the concession stands wearing skimpy attire wouldn't put asses in seats.

It's called fun, people. We used to have it.

"You can't make a movie with a shotgun. In other words, you can't please everybody. You got to do a movie with a rifle and that is you find the audience that you want to hit and you give him what he wants. We found with Gator Bait it didn't make any difference if you were in Louisiana or if you were in Italy, a cab driver and a mechanic is a cab driver and a mechanic. They're a working-type person. As a matter of fact, Gator Bait was the biggest independent film that had played in Europe."- Ferd Sebastian

'Gator Bait hits all the beats of a revenge exploitation film, but it's the notes they don't play that make it fascinating. It may be shaggy in places, but there's a grit and spirit to the Sebastian's drive-in classic that's hard to ignore. But the real miracle is that I doubt we could make a film starring a Playmate of the Year nowadays and make it half as entertaining.

Images courtesy of Sebastian International Pictures and Dimension Films