In 1973, amid the blistering heat of the Texas summer, Tobe Hooper caught lightning in a bottle. With his breakthrough and masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper crafted a film rooted in exploitation that nevertheless transcended those grimy trappings to become what’s considered by many as one of the greatest horror films of all time. With a shoestring budget of $140,000—the narrator of the iconic opening text crawl, John Larroquette, was paid in weed—Hooper subjected a cast of unknown, largely Texan actors to a month straight of 12-16 hour shoots in a sweltering, poorly ventilated farmhouse with the stench of spattered animal blood and scattered slaughterhouse viscera hanging heavy in the stagnant air. In one scene, when a blood hose gummed up, Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen grew so frustrated he actually cut into Marilyn Burns finger for the desired effect. Temperatures soared to 110 degrees, rotten stenches reportedly caused crewmembers to vomit, and Edwin Neal, who played the Hitchhiker, would go on to claim that one particular 27-hour shoot amid such nightmarish conditions was “the worst time of my life…and I had been to Vietnam.”
What resulted was a horror film brimming with Vietnam-era socio-political subtext, a film which not only introduced a prototypical slasher but used implied gore to conjure its greatest terrors from within the minds of its viewers. There may have been crop tops and hot pants, but nudity in the film is suggestive rather than overt in an era of an exploitation boom that nearly demanded oodles of skin in its B-movies. The film’s villainous characters were obscenely sadistic and depraved, a rendering of the festering rot that can take hold in societal isolation, but any lust here is purely for blood and death and meat.
Two years after Chain Saw’s 1974 release, Hooper returned to the well of exploitation-drenched horror with Eaten Alive. But this time, what he brought forth from its murky depths had curdled and soured. Eaten Alive is a film that doesn’t so much make the skin crawl as it makes viewers feel like they need a shower. He brought back Chain Saw co-writer Kim Henkel, and even final girl Marilyn Burns, but compared to Chain Saw, Eaten Alive’s similar vein of deranged redneck horror simply hits different: far less frightening, considerably less artful and much ickier.
Eaten Alive opens in a Texas brothel, with a fledging prostitute named Clara (Roberta Collins) frantically refusing anal sex from a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund (whose slimy hick character Buck helpfully announces that he is “raring to fuck”). Like many of the film’s female characters at one point or another, Clara is shown virtually topless—the brothel’s madam, Miss Hattie (Morticia Addams herself, Carolyn Jones) does manage to keep her shirt on, but probably because she sports a tacky visor and bizarre, corpse-like pancake makeup reminiscent of Grandpa from Chain Saw. Due to Clara angering such a loyal customer, Miss Hattie sends the young woman packing, and like Marion Crane before her, Clara finds her way to a dingy, out-of-the-way motel.
She should know better, because not only does this dilapidated hotel look like the kind of place from which guests don’t check out, but its primary amenity is a large, bellowing gator inhabiting the adjacent swamp. But actually, this is no ordinary East Texas bayou gator; “that’s a croc,” from Africa, the hotel’s skeezy proprietor Judd (Neville Brand) informs her, the kind of apex predator that doesn’t die on its own (“you have to kill it”). Of course, only mere minutes pass before Judd, who’s creepy from the start like a heavy-breathing amalgam of the Hitchhiker and Cook from Chain Saw, reveals himself to also be a predator. Unlike fellow murderous hotelier Norman Bates, whose attraction to a pretty blonde sparked violence from his overprotective “Mother”—Psycho, like Chain Saw, was famously inspired by the heinous crimes of Ed Gein—Judd is thrust into lecherous action when he figures out Clara is “one of Miss Hattie’s girls.” He attacks her by awkwardly ripping at her clothes and, after a protracted struggle, hacks her to near-death with a garden implement in a scene far bloodier than anything found in Chain Saw, all before tossing what’s left of her to the croc.
Hotel guests come and go throughout the film and are similarly dispatched for no reason other than Judd doesn’t want them around anymore. A young family shows up, apparently amid a domestic dispute about husband/father Roy (William Finley losing a job. He acts inexplicably strange, even barking like a dog at one point in their hotel room, and when he impulsively marches downstairs to shoot the croc that ate his daughter Angie’s (Kyle Richard) pooch Snoopy, Judd kills him. This time Judd uses a scythe, his weapon of choice after the first murder. And when it’s all over, the croc eats wells again. Faye (Burns) tries to comfort Angie, but when Judd assaults Faye in the bathtub, Angie witnesses the attack on her mother and screams, eventually fleeing to the relative safety amid a maze of clutter underneath the front deck.
The incorporation of a child into the story may be Eaten Alive’s greatest sin. A young child enduring the trauma of witnessing the violent attack on her mother, and then other atrocities, while being pursued by a deranged hick and, later, a killer croc, feels unnecessarily exploitative and just plain gross. Angie’s character essentially only exists within the script to be traumatized, and Richard’s flat performance as the young girl (the child actor would go on to appear to Carpenter’s Halloween two years later), doesn’t elevate the character beyond that.
Elsewhere, the frequent nudity is largely pointless other than to add a salacious element to a story that, frankly, goes nowhere fast despite the lurid subject matter. It’s difficult to care about anyone involved. One hotel guest, Libby (Crystin Sinclaire), who arrives with her father (Mel Ferrer) on the trail of her already-eaten sister Clara, relaxes after a long day of searching for a missing loved one by brushing her hair in front of the mirror while topless. Such hackneyed scenes feel particularly inelegant amid the general rapey vibe that’s soaked into the fiber of much of the film. Burns’ iconic screaming frenzy within the house of horrors in Chain Saw is echoed here as Judd binds her to a bed, from which she thrashes and muffled-screams for much of the film’s third act, but it feels more mean-spirited this time around than in service to true, desperate horror. And Hooper’s decision to ramp up the onscreen gore—his effort to keep the gore implied in Chain Saw was a masterstroke despite not earning that film the PG rating he had hilariously hoped for—doesn’t work well either. While not overly gratuitous, the gore, involving frequent blood-spilling puncture wounds and hokey-looking crocodile attacks, seems tawdry; it simply doesn’t possess enough transgressive power to truly shock.
While sleazy and ineffective, Eaten Alive isn’t without some level of artistic merit. Shot entirely on sound stages, the film’s atmosphere is heightened by lightning choices. After Judd murders Clara, the swamp from then on is lit a sultry and ominous red, giving it a surreal feeling as events unfold under this perpetual, crimson night. The sound design also adds to the atmosphere, with ominous metallic scraping noises similar to those used much more effectively in Hooper’s previous film. Likewise, there’s an interesting contrast in various screams juxtaposed with Judd’s favored folk rock music that perpetually wafts on the muggy swamp air. Brand, who often played villains in westerns and crime films before this late-career role, is committed to his performance of the murderous Judd, often embodying the conflicted duality of Chain Saw’s Cook: sadistic and taunting one minute, consoling and wringing his hands the next. Judd even fusses a bit like Leatherface, without anywhere near the same unnerving effect. And that’s what much of Eaten Alive is: an ineffectual retread of elements that made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre work, rendered artless by the abandonment of that film’s sociocultural subtext and its singular paradox of grindhouse restraint.
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