R.I.P. Tobe Hooper
In honor of the man who gave us some of my favorite horror movies [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1 & 2, The Funhouse, Eaten Alive] here is my review of Eaten Alive.

Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, the much maligned follow up to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, hits the screen like a fever dream. Drenched in a thick red glow, the film is an oddly paced and often times suffocating experience. What it lacks in overall story, it more than makes up for with its cyclical descent into madness. It plays out like avant-garde theater with a dash of dadaism and a heaping dose of horrifying anxiety.
The film follows Judd, the proprietor of a gimicky roadside attraction and lodge — the run-down, past-its-prime — Starlight Hotel, whose mental faculties have long since deteriorated. An unhinged Norman Bates type, Judd is a secluded, anti-social burnout who is quick to turn on his victims with a manic fury brought on by an unhealthy mixture of warped christian morality and repressed lust.
The Starlight Hotel’s main attraction is a Nile Crocodile that feeds graciously on its owner’s victims, who are brutally struck down by a scythe, the weapon of Death.
Judd is played with ferocity by veteran character actor Neville Brand (Stalag 17). In fact, Eaten Alive is stacked in terms of its cast: Marilyn Burns (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Carolyn Jones (The Addams Family), Mel Ferrer (War & Peace), and Robert Englund (A Nightmare of Elm Street) all make an appearance.
Englund gives an especially sleazy performance as Buck, who kicks off the film trying to sodomize a naive prostitute, Clara, at Miss Hattie’s brothel. After being turned away by Miss Hattie, Clara finds herself at the Starlight Hotel, where she is murdered by Judd and fed to his crocodile. Reworking a similar plot from Psycho, this murder sets off a chain of events that leads to a bloody finale.
Brand’s unhinged portrayal of Judd is enhanced by the impoverished surroundings of a close knit community of weirdos, delinquents, and prostitutes. By the 1970s, gimmicky roadside hotels — a lucrative business during the advent of the American highway system — were quickly becoming a relic of the past. With the death spiral of local businesses at the hands larger chains, the shifting attitudes brought on by the decade long Vietnam war, the rising cost of gas, and a sustained period of recession, Eaten Alive paints a rather grim portrait of ’70s America and a bitter indictment of the capitalist system that saw entire communities wiped out by the supposed forward march of progress in the post-war years.
Intended or not, Hooper’s brand of horror reflects the American nihilism that reached its peak during the Carter administration and laid the groundwork for the “God is good, America is great” fundamentalism of the Reagan years.
Filmed entirely on a sound stage in Los Angeles, Eaten Alive was filmed on a budget and it shows. However, the shoddy nature of the film’s sets compliments the relentlessly degraded Americana that Hooper excels at depicting. The film successfully imbues the thick East Texas humidity familiar to anyone who has ever spent time in the Lone Star state swatting mosquitoes away on a hot summer night. Eaten Alive is as thick and sticky as the swamp land it depicts.
It doesn’t get as much love as Texas Chainsaw Massacre — nor does it deserve that love — but it is a singular vision that retains a bit of TCM’s grime and incoherent madness. Whereas TCM’s horror is aided by its docu-style realism, Eaten Alive forgoes realism entirely for a swampy, minimalist nightmare-scape. With its cheap effects and brutal kills, the movie walks a fine line on the horror scale, sometimes veering into unintentional comedy, but still it manages to unnerve viewers looking for a continuation of TCM’s themes.
Despite its cheap facade, there is a certain amount of truth to its violent depiction of small town dissolution and its struggle to survive the encroaching modern era. Hooper would later update and expand upon this theme to maximum effect in his outrageous Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but Hooper spares no one in Eaten Alive, not even Judd, who clings to his last remaining life line until he succumbs to his own feverish degradation and is consumed by the very thing that sustains him.
Three stars. Recommended for those who want a good old fashioned romp through the swamp. Great soundtrack.
