Cocaine Bear, Hold My Beer: Production Company Behind ‘Sharknado’ Releasing ‘Meth Gator’ Movie This Summer
AP Photo/Chris O’Meara
Sharknado. Snakes on a Plane. Cocaine Bear. The last few decades have blessed us with an abundance of films about the insane (and obviously highly-fictionalized) hijinks of various critters and creepy-crawlies, and moviegoers can now look forward to following the adventures of a meth-addled alligator this summer.
Yes, really. Attack of the Meth Gator is, in fact, an actual film in production and not just a Twitter prank.
Meth Gator is a project by The Asylum, the independent film company and distributor responsible for introducing the world to the bizarro wonder that is the Sharknado series, the first of which earned accolades from Rotten Tomatoes for being so “[p]roudly, shamelessly, and gloriously brainless” as a film that it “redefines so bad it’s good’ for a new generation.”
The Asylum announced the new film project on Twitter with a reference to Cocaine Bear, the Elizabeth Banks-directed movie released this month that took the internet by storm.
Cocaine Bear is loosely based on an actual 1985 incident in which a bear ingested millions of dollars of cocaine dropped by drug smugglers from a Cessna, and Meth Gator seems to have a similarly-tenuous connection to reality with a 2019 news report about a local police department urging people not to flush drugs like methamphetamine down the toilet, so authorities didn’t have to deal with “methed up animals.”
“Hold our bear…I mean, beer. Coming for your life this summer,” The Asylum tweeted last week, along with emojis for a test tube, alligator, rain cloud, and teddy bear and an image of the Meth Gator movie poster.
Many Twitter users seemed to believe Meth Gator was a prank, and not a real movie, but The Asylum insisted the film was real, tweeting back at an incredulous commenter, “This is real! We’re pumping the meth into Florida’s fresh water reserves as we speak!”
(Note: as a native Floridian, I urge you, please do not pump meth or cocaine or any other illegal drug into our waters. The manatees do not need that trouble in their lives right now.)
Vulture reporter Jason P. Frank noted that Cocaine Bear’s recent box office success meant that more films in this genre were “likely an inevitability.”
“Of course, what this really makes us think about is other drug-animal movie combos,” wrote Frank. “Ketamine Kangaroo? Ecstasy Boa Constrictor? Opium Fruit Bat? The world is our heroin oyster.”
Attack of the Meth Gator is scheduled for release in May 2023, according to IMDB, and claims to have been in development before Cocaine Bear was announced.
