Albino mutant pygmy alligators! They're massing beneath NYC, their appetite rising to a fever pitch ... will we be prepared when they rise, and we face THE NIGHT OF THE TOY DRAGONS? And after slogging through Cohen's turgid technothriller drivel, will we care? Probably not!
Cohen's first victim is a sewer worker named Boggs, in a strange bit of synchronicity with David Hagberg's far superior Croc. Was there something in the water? The killer alligators act like cartoon piranhas, stripping bodies to the bone in minutes. At one point, they decapitate a police dog and somehow throw the head back at their human pursuers ... why? These cartoonish antics don't mesh with Cohen's wannabe verisimilitude of computer tooth analysis and bureaucratic infighting, and both aspects are crowded out by too much filler of midcentury character drama: home life, hookups, and the battle of the sexes. Cohen doesn't excel at any of these threads and the final effect is supreme dissatisfaction.
Eventually we get a final battle of flamethrowers vs alligators, but it's too little too late, and the story ends on a promise of more to come as the surviving characters gear up for yet another wave of invincible super-gators which simply elicits an eye roll. David Lippincott's comparable disaster dud Tremor Violet ended the same way, with more violence to come, but that was the one successful play in Lippincott's book. Here it's just another disappointment.
Author Cohen also wrote a couple science fiction thrillers, and ... a puff piece on Sting?
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| Pure terror ... |
How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail fail? Cohen's crocodilian cockup earns a 1/4 rating ... boo, hiss!
A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1977
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