‘The Bayou’ review – Even meth-fueled alligators can’t save this mess

The alligator side of crocsploitation has its small share of winners, namely the 1980 Lewis Teague movie and Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, but even fans have to admit this genre niche churns out more mediocrity than gold. Films like The Bayou (formerly Gator Creek) certainly don’t help to change things, despite its somewhat high concept. In a logline that reeks of Cocaine Bear, nature gets loaded on manmade narcotics and then vies for the top of the food chain. Sounds appealing, no? Unfortunately, the outcome is a wet mess that should have never been allowed to escape the schlock swamp.

While cinema has been doing the “past trauma meets current trauma” concept for ages, this current crop of films tends to do it both poorly and clumsily. Taneli Mustonen (Lake Bodom) and Brad Watson’s The Bayou joins the herd by having  its main character Kyle (Athena Strates) mourn the loss of her brother — her grief is compounded by guilt — prior to the ‘gator tussle. It’s safe to wager that writers do this trauma bit because it’s a shortcut for making the characters more sympathetic and relatable. There’s no need to waste any time fleshing them out to do the same thing and without the baggage. In this case, though, it’s hard to feel anything for Kyle or anyone else because this film’s script is just, simply put, awful.

Kyle is on her way to spread her brother’s ashes in the Everglades, along with her two friends and a frenemy, when their small charter flight goes down somewhere in the Louisiana swamps. The surviving core characters as well as the pilot and other passengers then quickly become fodder for the meth ‘gators found ’round these parts. As shown in the outset, a local drug bust is to blame for this new breed of aggressive alligators. It’s a silly setup that’s played deadly serious.

The pitch of plane survivors fending off alligators in the bayou sounds entertaining on paper, but the execution is egregiously bad. Usually the CGI and effects are to blame for these kinds of terrible films, but by all means, the alligators look halfway decent here. There are even practical effects that elevate the scenes between humans and reptiles. What namely drowns The Bayou is the performances. No one is good. And it’s quite obvious not everyone here is American, much less from the South, and that motley of poorly veiled natural accents is distracting. More of a problem is the setting, which doesn’t look all that bayou-ish or ‘glades-esque, either.

Forgiving the washed-out, too-dark and ultra-realistic aesthetic that plagues all filmmaking, The Bayou boasts acceptable production values; it looks a tad better than similar indie films coming out these days. Also, the alligators border on convincing-looking, and the carnage is serviceable. Everything else, on the other hand, is abysmal. It’s not mandatory for the characters to be likable or worth rooting for, but The Bayou goes out of its way to make nearly everyone loathsome or unappealing.

Fans of croc and ‘gator flicks could do a lot worse, admittedly, but the downsides here are hard to overlook.

The Bayou is now streaming.