Movies That Suck: Eaten Alive (1977)

If you like Tobe Hooper, that's cool, but you'd better not read the majority of my reviews of his movies because you will not be happy about what I have to say. In my humble opinion, Hooper is one of the biggest hack directors ever. Amongst the classic horror directors that came out of the 70's and 80's, like John Carpenter, George Romero, Wes Craven, etc., he's at the bottom of the barrel. He may have made a real classic in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and, depending on who you talk to, Poltergeist) but ever since then, he's proven time and time again that he's really a talentless moron who got lucky once or twice. Sometimes you get enjoyably bad or silly movies like Lifeforce and The Mangler but, most of the time, it's stuff that's just so awful that it makes you wish someone would put you out of your misery. Case in point, our featured item here, which also shows that it wasn't a gradual downward spiral but an immediate revelation that Hooper is an idiot. Eaten Alive was his follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released three years after that film, and it's an obvious attempt to recapture the intensity and raw terror of that film with a little more money. However, it falls flat on its face almost from the get go and proves to be one of the most abusively boring and uninteresting horror films ever made.

The plot (what little there is) concerns a crazy old kook named Judd who runs a decrepit motel in the middle of the Texas wilderness. Basically, anybody who stops by there runs the risk of getting butchered by the guy's scythe or fed to the crocodile he has living in the water hole next to his motel. And that's really all there is to it. You're pretty much just watching a bunch of random people stop by the motel and eventually get killed by this guy. Sounds like an entertaining movie, right? Like if Psycho was made as just an ordinary slasher movie, right? Yeah, well, it's not!

The reason this movie fails so badly is because, for most of the movie, there is virtually nothing interesting going on. Most of the time is spent watching the crazy hotel manager, Judd, mumbling a bunch of rambling nonsense to himself or chasing somebody with the scythe (the latter is not exciting, trust me), watching him or someone else do something mundane while something else that's probably more interesting is going on off-screen, or, worst of all, a constant cutting back and forth between him doing something crazy and someone he has prisoner screaming about it. It goes on and on and on and even though the movie is only 91 minutes long, it feels like three hours. There are even some moments that show nothing but the guy singing to himself or hooting at an owl that's outside the window. Why was it necessary to show that? I'm not kidding, the first time I watched this movie, I almost fell asleep. But, if I had fallen asleep, I would have then been jarred awake because there are scenes that are almost nothing but constant screaming, usually from both Judd and the people he's trying to hack up. The most unbearable one is near the finale, where Judd has a woman tied up in a room on the upper floor and, even though she's gagged, she's still managing to yell, while her child is trapped underneath the motel and is calling for help. At the same time, there are two people trying to have sex in one room and Judd, so they won't hear the screaming from his victims, turns up the volume on the radio he always has playing, and it keeps cutting back and forth between this craziness, going on for probably two full minutes. I was about to actually tell the movie to shut up because it's just unbearable.

Judd is played by Neville Brand, an actor who was apparently just as bonkers off-camera as he was on. Brand was a fairly well known character actor, appearing in lots of movies and TV shows since the early 50's, as well as serving a little over nine months in the army during World War II (he apparently won a lot of medals during his tenure), but from what I can gather, he had bad alcohol and drug habits that caused him to lose acting jobs and a lot of his co-stars throughout the years had mixed opinions about him, some saying he was okay and others saying he was insufferable (in fact, one of his co-stars from this very film accused him of date rape!) As for his performance in this movie, I'd say it's akin to Norman Bates since he's playing an insane motel manager but that would be a major insult to Anthony Perkins. At least Perkins played Norman as having periods of normalcy along with the insanity; Judd is virtually never normal. He's always either talking to himself, going on and on about nothing, or suddenly snapping, sometimes for no clear reason, and attacking his guests. Hooper focuses on his insanity for so long in some scenes that you're like, "I don't care what this nut is saying or doing!" I know the point is that he's supposed to be crazy but he's so insane that you can't connect with him (and that really sucks because he's the main character) and it also doesn't make sense that he has so many guests because anybody would take one look at how this guy looks and acts and would get out of that motel pretty quick (and you wish the film would go with them to something else). I know that the point is that most of these people just come across the hotel and don't know how crazy he is but still, you need only be around him for a couple of minutes to realize that you'd best look elsewhere for a room for the night.

Most of the people in this movie are either almost as crazy as Judd, assholes, or just plain stupid. Case in point: this couple and their little daughter arrive at the motel and, boy, you want to talk about a dysfunctional family! The husband, Roy (William Finley), is the one who's about as crazy as Judd. After their daughter's little dog, Snoopy, is eaten by Judd's crocodile, they go up to their room where the wife, Faye (Marilyn Burns from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), tries to calm their hysterical daughter down. Roy suddenly snaps when Faye admonishes him for stupidly asking whether their daughter is alright and does crazy stuff like making angry faces while making a crushing hand gesture at her, saying that she ought to put her cigarette out in his eye and then starts acting like his eye fell out, saying, "Where'd my eye go", and then, when Faye goes back to their daughter, Roy suddenly starts barking. That leads me to Faye. The two of them apparently hate each other and she clearly knows how insane he is because she doesn't find it at all out of the ordinary when she hears a gunshot (by the way, the guy keeps a shotgun in the back of his car?) and tells her daughter, "Daddy's killing the dragon." Why hasn't she divorced him yet? Also, we don't hear what was probably an important argument between the two of them because we have to see what crazy stuff Judd's doing. And as for Burns' performance, she does what she can, but the poor material leaves her unable to create an interesting character and she soon ends up tied to a bed until the end of the movie. Poor little Kyle Richards (who would go on to have a small role in John Carpenter's classic Halloween) plays the daughter Angie and she spends the entire movie either crying for her dog or stuck underneath the motel, trying to get away from Judd. She really has no dialogue other than a lot of screaming, so it's the most thankless role possible for a child actor.

Robert Englund has an early role as a sex-obsessed cowboy named Buck. Because of him, the very first line in the movie is, "Name's Buck. I'm rearin' to fuck," which, if you didn't know what kind of movie you were in for, you sure did now. I don't know, I usually like Englund, obviously from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but here, he's not in the movie that much and besides, he's playing an unlikable, misogynistic asshole. After that opening line, he tries to have rough sex with this poor woman who's clearly not up to being a prostitute and for the rest of the film, he does stuff like pop in every now and then to be a nuisance to Judd (not that I care, mind you) or act like a total jerk to some guy at a bar just because he glanced at his girl. He ends getting fed to the crocodile near the end of the film, which is a shame because it looked like he was about to do something decent. He can hear Angie screaming for help beneath the motel and it gets his attention enough to where he tries to follow the sound to its source, only to be attacked by Judd right before he can find her. I do wonder how it would have played out if he had found her (given who he is, though, he may have tried to save his own hide when he realized what crazy stuff Judd was doing). All in all, I know it was one of Englund's first roles and, to be fair, he does do a fair job with the character he has to play, but I just thought he was wasted here.

There are two big names in the movie, the first of which is Mel Ferrer as Harvey Wood, a wealthy guy from Dallas who's searching for his daughter who disappeared some time ago (she's the prostitute who's almost raped by Buck and eventually killed by Judd at the beginning of the movie). Even though he doesn't have that much screen-time, he's actually the most sympathetic character in the film. He's a dying man who regrets kicking his daughter out of their house and wants to reconnect with her in the short time he has left. He's kind of uppity towards the townsfolk he has to go through to find his daughter but, once his other daughter who's accompanying him explains why they're there, you do feel bad for him. It makes me wish that Ferrer was given more to do with his character because I find that story to be much more interesting than the main one with Judd. As for Wood's other daughter, Libby (Crystin Sinclaire), there's not much to her, other than she does come across as sympathetic both towards her father's plight and the townspeople. The only thing that she does that I don't like is when she and Faye are attacked at the end of the movie by Judd and at one point, she runs off and leaves Faye behind. She does attempt to save Angie from the crocodile but that act of selfishness really turned me off of her. Other than that, though, there's not much to her aside from the fact that she does get naked and is pretty hot, so I guess that's one reason to actually watch this movie.

The other well known actor in the film is Carolyn Jones (Morticia from The Addams Family in what was, sadly, one of her last roles) as the madam of the town brothel, Miss Hattie. She's only at the beginning of the movie and in a brief scene near the middle but in that short amount of time, she proves to not be a very sympathetic character. She's insensitive to the prostitute Clara's unwillingness to have kinky sex with Buck at the beginning of the movie simply because she doesn't want to lose any business and, while she does have a good point when she says that she didn't make Clara work for her, she's just downright mean to her. Even worse, later on when Clara's father and sister come looking for her, she denies having ever seen her. What a selfish bitch. 

Finally, I have to mention the minor characters. Roberta Collins as Clara Woods at the beginning of the film doesn't have much to do before she's killed but I couldn't help but feel sorry for this poor young woman who isn't cut out to be a prostitute, is thrown out for not putting out, and meets a nasty end at the hands of Judd and his crocodile. And, of course, what you find out about her later on makes her all the more sympathetic. (Incidentally, Collins was also the one who claimed that Neville Brand raped her.) Stuart Whitman as Sheriff Martin comes off as a nice, sympathetic type of authority figure instead of the jerky type you often see in horror films but he doesn't have that much of a role. Even though she's only briefly at the very beginning, I liked Betty Cole as Ruby, the sympathetic maid at the brothel who gives Clara some money to get by. And finally, Janus Blythe as Lynette, Buck's intended sexual partner whom he takes to the motel, has a pretty demeaning role in that she has to get naked and pretty much stay that way for all of her scenes, as well as be felt up by Buck and chased around the woods by Judd, similar to the chase between Sally and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (though nowhere as intense), while wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. She's eventually picked up by a passerby and never heard from again, although I'm guessing she's the reason why Sheriff Martin suddenly shows up at the motel at the end because she would have had to have gone to the police first thing.

Despite all my trashing of this movie, it does have some interesting aspects to it. The best thing about it is its look, which is that grimy Grindhouse, midnight movie feel like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other movies like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. It has a very cool, blood-red sunlight effect that's used throughout and gives it a distinct, hyper-reality look, which I do like. The sets are very well designed, too. The motel looks effectively rundown and creepy and, besides the crocodile, Judd also has some cages with monkeys in them here and there. The bathroom especially looks really undesirable and not a place where you'd want to take a bath, as Faye almost does. The design of the inside of the brothel also looks suitably sleazy, with the wallpaper, carpeting, and lighting, and the bar also has a similarly seedy look. I also have to say that the crocodile is handled very well for the most part. Most of the time, Hooper keeps it off-camera or in the shadows, so we only get glimpses of it, with the way it's used during the scene where it eats the little dog being particularly well done. Unfortunately, that's all spoiled near the end of the movie when you do get a good look at it and you can painfully tell it's a model. But, for the most part, I will say that Eaten Alive is at least interesting visually.

Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell worked together on the bizarre soundtrack for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and managed to create a nightmarish and unnerving sound design for that movie. However, as with just about everything else here, lightning didn't strike twice and their attempts this time around yielded an unpleasant sound that's just a scrambled mess. I swear, the music sounds like they just went crazy on a bunch of loud, synthesizer-like instruments and I guess it does fit with the psychotic nature of the movie but it's just excruciating and loud. Also, all those songs playing on Judd's radio really got on my nerves after a while. I know I keep going back to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but in that movie, the country songs on the radio added to the uncomfortable nature of most of the scenes; here, there are hardly any scenes that are tense or remotely interesting, so it comes off as just an annoying background noise that won't hush. To me, Eaten Alive is just as annoying and unpleasant to listen to as it is to watch.

Eaten Alive just sucks period. It may have some interesting visual elements but on the whole, it's just a bad attempt by Tobe Hooper to recapture the effective madness of his previous film. It's uninteresting and boring, drawn out, with really unlikable and annoying characters for the most part, an unpleasant soundtrack, and often feels just as insane and schizophrenic as its main character. I know this movie is considered by some to be a forgotten exploitation classic but it should have stayed forgotten in my opinion and I really don't understand why Dark Sky Films gave it a two-disc DVD with a cleaned up transfer. Is there really that much of a market for this movie? If you get some enjoyment out of this movie, that's fine (I don't understand it but whatever) but personally, I have never seen a director shoot himself in the foot right after his big, break-out movie as badly as Hooper did. I just hate this stupid, waste of time movie.