Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
Certain directors do certain things really well. Hitchcock did suspense like no one else, and early Spielberg is rife with absent fathers. In the horror world, backwoods psychopaths come in a lot of flavors, and you have to give some credit to directors like Wes Craven for films like The Hills Have Eyes. But no one really does true hillbilly psychopathy like Tobe Hooper did. Don’t get me wrong; Craven wrote and directed a good psycho, but there’s a real touch of nastiness to Hooper’s work. You can see it in a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it genuinely feels like he found a family of inbred mutants. Eaten Alive has the same feeling. There’s something about this film that feels legitimately dangerous, like we’re seeing people who aren’t acting.
Eaten Alive is not long on plot, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s not the sort of movie that trades on its plot in general. It trades specifically on the idea of the audience wanting to see people get eaten by a crocodile. We’re going to ignore the fact that this takes place in Texas so it should be an alligator. To the person being dined upon, that difference is going to be pretty low on the list of concerns.
We start in what is certainly the worst little whorehouse in Texas and a new prostitute named Clara (Roberta Collins) who is refusing to let a client named Buck (Robert Englund) play a little backdoor Santa Claus with her. Refusing a guest’s request is a no-no, so Clara is booted from the house by the madam, Miss Hattie (Carolyn Jones, who looks just enough like she’s still TV’s Morticia Addams for it to be sad). Clara winds up the Starlight Hotel, a decrepit building run by local psychopath Judd (Neville Brand). Once Judd figures out that Clara came from the house of ill repute, he decides the best thing to do is kill her and feed her to his pet crocodile.
So that’s the set-up; let’s get to what passes for the plot. A family that seems to be barely hanging on shows up at the hotel and decides to stay for some reason despite it looking like it’s about to fall down. The man of the family (William Finley) is going to end up tossed to the crocodile while his wife Faye (Marilyn Burns) is going to end up tied to a bed. Their daughter Angie (Kyle Richards) is going to be chased under the building by the croc, and she’s going to be there for some time.
The second part of the plot concerns Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer) and his daughter Libby (Crystin Sinclaire) who also show up and the Starlight. Turns out that Clara from the opening scene was Harvey’s daughter. They’re going to enlist the aid of the local law (Stuart Whitman) to find out what happens. If you think that this means more crocodile and perhaps the discovery of poor Faye’s predicament, you’ve seen a horror movie before.
Eaten Alive isn’t anything more than what it pretends to be, which is a movie about a crazy man who feeds people to his pet crocodile, and the plot is basically what is laid out above—some people get fed to the croc, some people get tied to beds, and some people try to figure out what is going on.
What sells Eaten Alive is the performances, and specifically the performance of Neville Brand, who is completely unhinged. It’s almost sad that Brand had such a substantial career before this and that so much of the cast is recognizable. Some of that can’t be helped—Robert Englund wasn’t recognizable to most people in 1976, but certainly is now. But much of the rest of the case is recognizable, and it’s a shame. Eaten Alive, with these performances but from essentially unknown actors would still feel like something almost documentary in nature.
It's not great, but it is really interesting to watch because of just how dirty it feels. Everything in the film feels like it was shot through a dirty lens. There’s a sense that this is a film that wants to hurt the people who were in it and force the audience to watch. It’s seedy in a way that few movies can match. Even the moments of nudity are less titillating than they are simply dirty and feral.
Eaten Alive is not an easy movie to recommend, but it’s worth seeing for how thin that line is between the filmed story and what genuinely feels like reality.
Why to watch Eaten Alive: Nobody really captures backwoods insanity like Tobe Hooper.
Why not to watch: The lighting is weirder than a low-rent strip club.