FrightFest review – Gator Face
Padraig Reynolds has been working a retro-grindhouse vibe for fifteen years now – Rites of Spring, Worry Dolls, Open All Hours, Dark Light. Gator Face, one of two 2026 films with that title, is even more of a 1970s pastiche, to the extent that if it did away with mobile phones it could be a period piece.
Set in Florida, it’s especially a homage to early Tobe Hooper – though giving an audience a relentlessly miserable time to remind them of earlier movies isn’t quite the achievement Hooper and others managed in their relentless yet artful 1970s efforts. Gator Face has the sunstruck look down pat and makes interesting use of a landscape perhaps left behind by recession or weather event – an entirely abandoned row of beachfront holiday homes, fields full of rusting vehicles. Even the local mad gator cult has to admit congregation numbers aren’t what they used to be.
It opens with three pretty girls in skimpy clothes on a beach, then unwisely investigating when they spot graffiti – ‘three dead inside’ – on an abandoned house. A killer in a cool gator coat and a slightly dopey gator mask (Nikolas Kolasinski) – like all masked maniacs, you wonder how he ever finds victims while wearing something which cuts down peripheral vision – murders two of the girls with an axe or in the jaws of his pet gator. This leaves skinny redhead Jess (Amariah Dionne) as survivor … though she soon runs into a quartet of other young folk whose van keeps overheating, and they join the docket of corpses-to-be. For a while, Reynolds makes the uncomfortable interreactions of the normal people under pressure interesting – it’s tempting to blame the stranger for the disaster – then the film defaults to the usual slasher business of folk instantly getting over shock bereavements in order to keep the chase going.
The run and hide stuff is well-staged and intense, then we get to the gator cult, which allows for a terrific cameo from grizzled, grinning Scot Scurlock (of Gator Lake and Snake Creek) as the slow-drawling high priest and a few images copped from Midsommar and other ‘sacrifice to nature’ films. It’s short enough not to be dull but has an issue I found with some of Reynolds’ other films: one or two of its downbeat horrors don’t feel earned, so situations seem drawn out just to punish the characters and the audience. ‘Screw you for caring’ isn’t exactly a message which will ever be received gratefully.
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