'GATOR BAIT is a post-DELIVERANCE backwoods revenge pic that takes place deep in an unnamed bayou, a forbidding environment best avoided by those who don't know its ways, and utterly at home in this seemingly limitless swamp is Desiree Thibodeau (the unbelievably hot Jennings), a barefoot Cajun trapper in the skimpiest of outfits, including a pair of Daisy Dukes that pretty much doesn't have a butt, and a potato sack blouse that allows occasional glimpses of her mouth-watering assets who poaches the local wildlife to provide for herself and her younger brother and sister. Desiree's activities are illegal but overlooked by the local sheriff who doesn't care because her family has hunted the swamp for generations, so he figures she's got the right by virtue of ancestral territory. Unfortunately his moron of a son, apparently the town's only other cop, has other ideas, and along with a slow-witted hillbilly pal he lays in wait to catch Desiree in the act and offer her a choice of going to jail or having sex with him and his buddy. The would-be sexual extortion goes terribly wrong, however, as Desiree eludes her pursuers after lobbing a bag full of poisonous snakes onto their swamp boat; as the stupid cop shoots at the snakes, he blows holes into the boat's hull, and accidentally shoots his homeboy in the head. Panicking, he returns to town and claims Desiree killed his friend, so the sheriff rounds up the dead guy's outrageously inbred redneck relatives and sets off into the deep swamp to apprehend Desiree. Operating under the false impression that the poacher is a murderess, the rednecks can't wait to get their hands on her, both to hand out their own brand of justice and get a piece of her swamp-living self.
That's the setup, and from there viewers are taken deep into a swamp virtually untouched by man and made witness to a game of cat and mouse so over-matched that it's like what would happen if a bunch of great white hunters had the incalculable stupidity to mess with Tarzan on his own turf. Desiree may not have the jungle lord's near-superhuman capabilities, but she's plenty smart and knows her way through the bayou like it was the back of her own bootyless shorty-shorts, so it's just a matter of time until she's done killing those gurk- gurks one by one.
During the course of all of this we learn a lot about Desiree's antagonists and swiftly realize just how vile and sleazy they are. The patriarch of the redneck family has a love/hate relationship with his sons, all of whom are at least mildly retarded or just plain mentally ill, and even disciplines the perpetually-horniest of his brood with a bullwhip when he catches the lad attempting to nail his own very willing sister in the mud near where she was hanging the laundry. (Dad wasn't all that irritated about the boy wanting a piece of sis, but was seriously irked at the possibility of the voluptuous girl getting knocked up and squeezing out another dimwit.) The other redneck son holds a personal grudge against Desiree for having had the gall to cut off his manly equipment years earlier when he tried and failed to rape her, and now wanders about with his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun serving as an ever-rigid and potent surrogate penis.
With all of this mess going on there's plenty of bad taste to go around, and once the hunt for Desiree gets underway things go from very bad to that much worse when, after searching for her home for days, the inbred posse locates the place just after our heroine has left on a three day hunting trip. The bad guys stage a home invasion that begins with them abusing Desiree's tongueless little brother, and her nubile jailbait sister ends up in the lusty hands of the sheriff's son and the two inbred brothers. What happens then doesn't go where you'd expect, and is in fact far worse; no joke, when that bit of business happened I actually exclaimed "Oh my God!!!" and I'm pretty hard to shock. It's not graphically depicted, but the idea alone really gets to you, so keep this in mind before sitting down to watch 'GATOR BAIT with your girlfriend.
Which brings me to the oft-cited sentiment that 'GATOR BAIT is one of many exploitation flicks held to be a feminist statement. Lemme tell ya, buddy, the makers of this film simply set out make a movie about a scantily clad hottie who kicks ass on the people who messed with her and her family, but I strongly doubt that capital F feminism was intentionally involved in the creative process. Think about it: you have fine-as-hell Claudia Jennings, a woman for whom the wearing of clothing should have been a punishable by law, traipsing about the fen in gear that shows off her priapism-inducing assets for all they're worth, despite the fact that such gear is in no way conducive to the rigors of marshland hunting and trapping. Desiree is not so much a feminist role model as she is a fantasy wild woman/jungle girl updated and transplanted to a sweltering southern bayou, and as a lifelong fan of such characters I have no problem with that. But don't hand me that feminist over-analysis horse-hockey; Desiree's a forest spirit fantasy made flesh hell, she even looks like an anthropomorphic fox and to say otherwise is a more than a tad disingenuous.
That's the setup, and from there viewers are taken deep into a swamp virtually untouched by man and made witness to a game of cat and mouse so over-matched that it's like what would happen if a bunch of great white hunters had the incalculable stupidity to mess with Tarzan on his own turf. Desiree may not have the jungle lord's near-superhuman capabilities, but she's plenty smart and knows her way through the bayou like it was the back of her own bootyless shorty-shorts, so it's just a matter of time until she's done killing those gurk- gurks one by one.
During the course of all of this we learn a lot about Desiree's antagonists and swiftly realize just how vile and sleazy they are. The patriarch of the redneck family has a love/hate relationship with his sons, all of whom are at least mildly retarded or just plain mentally ill, and even disciplines the perpetually-horniest of his brood with a bullwhip when he catches the lad attempting to nail his own very willing sister in the mud near where she was hanging the laundry. (Dad wasn't all that irritated about the boy wanting a piece of sis, but was seriously irked at the possibility of the voluptuous girl getting knocked up and squeezing out another dimwit.) The other redneck son holds a personal grudge against Desiree for having had the gall to cut off his manly equipment years earlier when he tried and failed to rape her, and now wanders about with his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun serving as an ever-rigid and potent surrogate penis.
With all of this mess going on there's plenty of bad taste to go around, and once the hunt for Desiree gets underway things go from very bad to that much worse when, after searching for her home for days, the inbred posse locates the place just after our heroine has left on a three day hunting trip. The bad guys stage a home invasion that begins with them abusing Desiree's tongueless little brother, and her nubile jailbait sister ends up in the lusty hands of the sheriff's son and the two inbred brothers. What happens then doesn't go where you'd expect, and is in fact far worse; no joke, when that bit of business happened I actually exclaimed "Oh my God!!!" and I'm pretty hard to shock. It's not graphically depicted, but the idea alone really gets to you, so keep this in mind before sitting down to watch 'GATOR BAIT with your girlfriend.
Which brings me to the oft-cited sentiment that 'GATOR BAIT is one of many exploitation flicks held to be a feminist statement. Lemme tell ya, buddy, the makers of this film simply set out make a movie about a scantily clad hottie who kicks ass on the people who messed with her and her family, but I strongly doubt that capital F feminism was intentionally involved in the creative process. Think about it: you have fine-as-hell Claudia Jennings, a woman for whom the wearing of clothing should have been a punishable by law, traipsing about the fen in gear that shows off her priapism-inducing assets for all they're worth, despite the fact that such gear is in no way conducive to the rigors of marshland hunting and trapping. Desiree is not so much a feminist role model as she is a fantasy wild woman/jungle girl updated and transplanted to a sweltering southern bayou, and as a lifelong fan of such characters I have no problem with that. But don't hand me that feminist over-analysis horse-hockey; Desiree's a forest spirit fantasy made flesh hell, she even looks like an anthropomorphic fox and to say otherwise is a more than a tad disingenuous.