(1976)

 

aka: Death Trap; Brutes and Savages; Legend of the Bayou; Murder on the Bayou; Starlight Slaughter; Horror Hotel; Horror Hotel Massacre; Swamp Beast (working title)

 

 

Directed by Tobe Hooper

 Starring: Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns, William Finley, Crystin Sinclair, Stuart Whitman, Kyle Richards, Robert Englund

 

Reviewed by Michael Bolvary

 

    I like to think of Tobe Hooper as the Orson Welles of the horror genre.  If you look closely at their cinematic output, many striking similarities emerge: they both started out at the very top, making the best film of their career: Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Welles' Citizen Kane.  Neither films were immediately greeted with overwhelming critical praise or audience adulation, however--their reputations developed gradually over the years.  And while both directors started out at the top, both spent the rest of their lives making films that barely held a candle to their debuts.  Many of Hooper's and Welles' movies were plagued by budgetary constraints, production problems, and erratic distribution.  At one point, both filmmakers directed movies that nearly reproduced the passion of their first films: Hooper's Poltergeist and Welles' Touch of Evil. But somehow their comebacks never really happened.  Welles was reduced to making low-budget adaptations of Shakespeare plays like Othello  and Macbeth, finding more success as an actor than as a filmmaker (the man who started his career with Citizen Kane ended his career as a voice-over on Transformers: The Movie before his death in 1985).

    Every horror fan must feel sorry for Hooper these days--his career suffered particularly damaging blows in the 1990s:  Spontaneous Combustion, Night Terrors, The Mangler and Crocodile look like the films of someone who has never SEEN the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, let alone made it.  (Hooper's latest effort, a remake of Dennis Donnelly's 1978 film The Toolbox Murders, has received some positive word-of-mouth.  But no matter how much you praise it, I can't help but feel distraught that Hooper has been reduced to remaking a ripoff of his own debut film.)

    Eaten Alive was Hooper's second horror feature, and like Welles' second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, the film was a much more frustrating, unsatisfying experience--both for the filmmaker and the viewer.  Ambersons was heavily edited and reshot by the studio without Welles' permission, and Eaten Alive was fraught with fights between Hooper and producer/co-writer Mardi Rustam, which resulted in poor distribution and more title changes than you can shake a stick at.  As a result, the film didn't turn out anywhere near as good as it could and should have.  Despite some good performances, some effective photography and a few splashes of gore, the film pales mightily in comparison to Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  

    Neville Brand plays Judd, the sole worker at the Starlight Hotel, a creepy fleabag in the southern bayou.  He has a leg made out of wood, a huge scythe that he loves to swing, and a pet crocodile in the pond behind his hotel. Not surprisingly, anyone who checks into his inn doesn't live long enough to regret it.  Those who are stalked, terrorized and killed by Judd and his croc include a young hooker (Carolyn Jones); a husband and wife named Roy and Faye (William Finley and Marilyn Burns) with a young daughter named Angie (Kyle Richards) and pet dog; the father (Mel Ferrer) and sister, Libby (Crystin Sinclair) of the hooker, and a john named Buck, who likes to fuck (Robert Englund).  In the end, Libby saves Faye and Angie from Judd by feeding the psycho to his own crocodile.  

    Just as Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on the exploits of Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein, Eaten Alive was based on another (far more obscure) real-life maniac: Joseph Ball, proprietor of the Sociable Inn, a gin mill that had a concrete-lined pool filled with alligators in the back.  In the 1920s and 1930s, he murdered around 25 women and fed their body parts to the reptiles.  In 1938, when the police approached him and asked questions about the disappearances of the women, Ball shot himself.

    Tobe Hooper could never re-create the almost unbearable tension of his debut horror film (indeed, neither could any other filmmaker), but you would think that he could have tried.  Eaten Alive just doesn't have the power, momentum, hysteria, believability and thorough understanding of horror that made Texas Chainsaw Massacre so effective.  Almost everything about the movie feels uninspired:  The hotel and its interiors are clearly all sets and stages.  The electronic score by Hooper and Wayne Bell doesn't come anywhere close to re-creating the dementia of their musique concrete score for Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The photography and editing, so brilliant and deranged in TCM, is nothing special (although the eerie coloured lighting does make the film resemble an old horror comic--or an early Dario Argento picture).  Even the murder weapon isn't as scary--compared to a roaring chainsaw, a big wooden scythe just doesn't cut it. 

    Where Eaten Alive does shine, however, is in the cast.  Neville Brand is suitably deranged as Judd, and Marilyn Burns does a welcome reprisal of her role as cinema's most hysterical damsel-in-distress.  Mel Ferrer is fun to see is his umpteenth horror exploitation movie, and Robert Englund shines as the film's source of some black-humoured comic relief (although this quality would be better served in the Nightmare on Elm Street films).

    Like the film, the Elite Entertainment DVD is adequate, but ultimately negligible.  Letterboxed at 1.85:1, the picture is sharp, if a little too dark in places, and the comic book colour looks great.  Its only special feature, however, is the theatrical trailer, which is nothing very special. 

    Passable but forgettable, Eaten Alive has its moments, but they're too few and far between.  It's not overwhelmingly bad, just thoroughly mundane.  This would unfortunately become the critical reaction to too many of Hooper's subsequent films.  Why?  I think it's because the brightest flame burns out the quickest.

    It seems that there are some exceptionally gifted filmmakers who can somehow produce movies of exceptional artistic merit--albeit with varying degrees of critical and commercial success--over the course of their entire careers.  More often than not, however, a filmmaker produces one movie that represents the zenith of his artistic potential--and never surpasses or even matches it ever again.  It's like a peak that you reach, and then it's all downhill from there.  It happens to nearly every filmmaker, sooner or later.  Tobe Hooper reached his peak too soon.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is and will remain his supreme cinematic achievement. Unfortunately, he burned out his cinematic passion too early and found himself trapped, turning out movies that were a chain of artistic and commercial frustrations.  Eaten Alive was the first link on that chain.

 

 

    STORY: 3 bitch-slaps

    PICTURE/AUDIO: 4 bitch-slaps

    EXTRAS: 2 bitch-slaps

    OVERALL: 3 bitch-slaps

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