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Eaten Alive
Death Trap / Slaughter Hotel / Blutrausch / Brutes and Savages / Horror Hotel / Legend of the Bayou / Murder on the Bayou / Starlight Slaugher
USA 1976
produced by
Mardi Rustam for Mars Productions
directed by Tobe Hooper
starring Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns, William Finley, Stuart Whitman, Roberta Collins, Kyle Richards, Robert Englund, Crystin Sinclaire, Janus Blythe, Betty Cole, Sig Sakowicz, Ronald W. Davis, Christine Schneider, David Hayward, David Carson, Lincoln Kibbee, James Galanis, Tarja Leena Halinen, Caren White, Valerie Lukeart, Jeanne Reichert
writen by Alvin L. Fast, Mardi Rustam, music by Wayne Bell, Tobe Hooper, special effects by Ken Speed
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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Judd (Neville Brand) runs a quiet hotel somewhere in the bayou, quite a bit
out of town and out of sight of the locals - which is much to his liking because
he has an African alligator as a pet, one that he got from Frank Buck himself,
or so he claims. Now of course, alligators need a special kind of diet ... as
poor runaway-turned-hooker Clara (Roberta Collins) has to experience early on
when Judd throws her to the crocodile (he keeps in a fenced pool) when she
refuses his advances. Thing is, Clara's dad (Mel Ferrer) and sister (Crystin
Sinclaire) soon come looking for her with the help of the local Sheriff (Stuart
Whitman) both at Judd's place (where they find nothing) and at Mrs Hattie's
(Carolyn Jones) brothel where Clara used to work ... Judd really loses it when
a family (William Finley, Marilyn Burns, Kyle Richards) stop by his place and
his alligator eats the family dog and dad (Finley) wants to kill the alligator
as retaliation. Sparked by that, Judd kills dad with a scythe and feeds him to
the alligator, ties mum (Burns) to a bed and locks the girl (Richards) in below
the hotel, at water level. And once unhinged, Judd doesn't go back to normal
again but makes good use of his scythe-and-alligator combo - a combination that
can only lead to disaster ... Later horror icon Robert Englund can be seen in
an early role in this one as a sleazy womanizer ... who gets fed to the beast,
deservedly. To make one thing clear from the get-go: Eaten
Alive, director Tobe Hooper's follow-up to his iconic horror movie, is no
second Texas Chainsaw Massacre:
Despite featuring a rather star-studded cast (in B-movie terms), it's far more
straight-forward, formulaic than the earlier film and lacks its imagination and
nihilism. But taken by its own merits as a rather typical grindhouse feature, Eaten
Alive does indeed hold out rather well: Sure, its story might not be
original and its characters might be flat, but Hooper creates a really eerie
atmosphere here, making the most out of his locations via perfect use of colour
and locations as such, suspense and scares are definitely there in all the right
places, and Neville Brand does make a great psycho. So while no Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Eaten Alive is still great retro genre fodder. Unfotrunately,
Hooper's oeuvre never again made it to such heights, most of his later movies
were disappointments on one level or the other, including the Stephen King-TV-bore Salem's Lot (1979), the
mainstreamed big budget Steven Spielberg-movie Poltergeist
(1982), the rather lame rip-off of the already lame Firestarter,
Spontaneous Combustion (1989), the Stephen King-absurdity The
Mangler (1994) or the semi-sequel to Eaten Alive, the
incredibly impersonal CGI-powered Crocodile (2000) - and even his more
entertaining pictures like Lifeforce or Living Nightmare
have little more than trash-value ... which in a way is all the more
reason to watch and enjoy Eaten Alive ...
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