The follow up to White Lightning, 1976's Gator once again cast Burt Reynolds as Gator McKlusky. This time around the film was also written by William W. Norton, but White Lightning's director Joseph Sargent did not return and instead the directorial duties were handled by none other than Reynolds himself.

As you'd guess, the movie takes place in a backwoods Georgia town where a bad dude named Bama McCall (Jerry Reed, who starred alongside Reynolds in Smokey And The Bandit), a well-connected criminal running a very profitable protection racket. He and his right hand man, Bones (William Engesser), have been getting away with too much for too long now and so the law would like to see a stop put to their little operation. Enter a cop named Irving Greenfield (Jack Weston), an NYPD detective under cover in the south to do just that. There's a problem though: Irving sticks out in Georgia like a sore thumb.

Through a little coercion from the powers that be, Gator winds up helping Irving work the case. Why? Because he needs to earn enough cash to keep his old man Ned McClusky (John Steadman) afloat and so that he won't see his daughter Suzie (Lori Futch) shipped away to a foster home. Gator's in a bind and this job offers him a way out. Gator works his way into McCall's crew and takes a job as one of his agents in hopes that it'll get him close enough that they can shut this case and move on. Along the way, he falls for a foxy TV reporter named Aggie Maybank (Lauren Hutton).

Gator is pretty much chock full of clichés and it's hard an original film, really it's a fairly typical ‘good ol' boys' yarn with all the goofy comedy and slick car chase scenes you could hope for in a movie like this. What sets it apart is the cast. Reynolds is his typically likeable self here, taking the character he made famous in the earlier film and basically just delivering more of the same. He's a hit with the ladies and quick with a quip when facing down both authority figures and the requisite bad guys, it's the type of role that Reynolds really did make a name for himself with in the seventies and he's a lot of fun to watch in the part. Lauren Hutton isn't given as much to do as the main love interest but she's perfectly fine in the role. She looks good and she and Reynolds share an interesting dynamic in the movie and they would later work together on Paternity and the almighty action film Malone. Jack Weston is a lot of fun as the fish out of water big city cop and William Engesser is equally entertaining as the main heavy's super tall go to guy. Speaking of the heavy, Jerry Reed is the real scene stealer here. Most will be familiar with him from Smokey And The Bandit but he popped up in a lot of other films playing similar characters before he passed away. Here we get the rare chance to see him play the bad guy and he's obviously having a blast doing it. That enthusiasm for the part translates nicely into a very animated and entertaining performance from Reed.

If Reynolds and company aren't reinventing the wheel with this film, it hardly matters. The picture does earn some points for an ending that you won't see coming but outside of that, even if the film is a long string of clichés and corny jokes it's a whole lot of fun. There's enough action here to keep things exciting while the humor is generally pretty effective, at least to the point where the good jokes outweigh the bad. A high art masterpiece it is not, but as far as seventies drive-in fare goes, Gator is a kick.

Kino presents Gator on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed in the film's original aspect ratio of 2.35.1 widescreen. This is a cleaner, crisper picture than the one that we saw on the White Lightning Blu-ray. Detail is tighter and strong and while the image still has a natural amount of film grain evident in pretty much every frame, it doesn't feel as thick here as it did on the earlier film. Color reproduction is very strong across the board and black levels are nice and solid. Aside from a few minor white specks here and there you won't notice any major print damage to complain about while the picture remains free of noise reduction and edge enhancement problems. When it's all said and done, Gator winds up looking really good in high definition.