Vintage Pulp | Jun 3 2012 |

Because it’s been written about on pretty every much cinema blog in existence, there’s really no point in us adding our two cents about ’Gator Bait. But you know what? We’re going to do it anyway. How else are we supposed to use what is possibly the greatest promo image ever shot? (See below). We hadn’t seen ’Gator Bait since we rented it for a bad movie night during college, and we’d forgotten how tame it is for a sexploitation film. Not to say it’s chaste. It isn’t. But for this genre, it’s strictly middle-of-the-road—or rather, the swamp. The plot involves Jennings being framed for murder, and later battling a gaggle of slobbering crackers who want to kill her almost as much as they want to climb inside her Daisy Dukes. ’Gator Bait was panned upon release, but today it’s a cult classic, owing, of course, to the presence of Jennings. She has only a few lines of dialogue, but she performs most of her own stunts and generally plays her semi-feral character Desiree to the hilt as she kicks redneck caboose all over the bayou. The movie isn’t very good, truthfully. In fact, it’s safe to say that if not for Jennings, ’Gator Bait would be totally forgotten by now. It went into national release in he U.S. today in 1974.