31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 8: EATEN ALIVE (1976)

A rundown hotel in a rural Texas swamp serves as a warped nexus that connects several characters in a web of Southern Gothic madness.

Director Tobe Hooper's EATEN ALIVE is not at all what I expected. It's basically a Southern Gothic full of fucked-up people for whom an insane man's remote and run-down swampside hotel will prove their undoing, and there really isn't much of a story to speak of. Assorted relatively innocent individuals arrive, say or do something to cause the already unstable hotel owner to snap, he chases them around with a scythe, and if he doesn't simply hold them captive, he dispatches them with the scythe and dumps them into the swamp (which is conveniently just off the front porch) where they are eaten by Rocky, an African crocodile obtained from a local zoo.

The ball gets rolling when a young runaway who has found employment in a whorehouse refuses to take it up the chocolate starfish from abusive local bad boy Buck (played by a young Robert Englund, some eight years before he gained horror icon status as Freddy Krueger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET). 

Young Robert Englund as Buck, whose introductory line of "My name is Buck...an' I'm rarin' to fuck" was borrowed by Quentin Tarantino in KILL BILL: VOLUME 1 (2003).

The madame (Carolyn Jones, a long way from Morticia Addams in the 1960's iteration of THE ADDAMS FAMILY)  

kicks the girl out, so the poor thing makes her way to the remote Starlight hotel, which is run by Judd (Neville Brand), a clearly insane veteran, whose instability tips over the edge when he realizes the girl was a worker at the bawdy house. 

Judd: a time bomb about to go off. 

He beats her and chases her out onto the porch, where he stabs her with farming equipment and feeds her to Rocky. And from there it's a revolving door of people who end up as victims of Judd's madness. After the failed prostitute comes a family of three — a married couple with a disabled little girl , and their dog — with the father apparently being insane himself (this is never explained), then the father and sister of the dead hooker arrive, as they have been searching for her since she ran away from home. The aforementioned Buck, the up-the-shitter-critter whose unwanted anal attentions against the runaway lit the whole powder keg, also joins the party with an underage girlfriend in tow, with all ending up running afoul of ultra-wacko Judd.

EATEN ALIVE looks and feels like Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE re-imagined as a Tennessee Williams stage play, replete with endless redneck histrionics, sleazy behavior, and an overall sense of misery in a decaying hick landscape. The set pieces quickly become repetitive, and though the film runs 91 minutes, you may find yourself checking your watch from time to time. And, much like CHAIN SAW before it, EATEN ALIVE concentrates more on the creepy/disturbing factor than gore (the blood here is minimal and the crocodile attacks are about on par with animatronics at a cheap amusement park), and it maintains a nervous, disturbing energy throughout. There is much screaming from the victims and lots of muttering from Judd, which gets quite tiresome, and by the time it all winds up, what we are left with is just an hour and a half misery with very little by way of legit scares. 

As a successor to the brilliant THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, EATEN ALIVE leaves a lot to be desired, and I do mean a lot. That said, the film does have its supporters and it has gone on to garner a minor cult following in the nearly fifty years since its original release, so your mileage may vary. But unlike TEXAS CHAIN SAW, I will not be revisiting this chapter of Hooper's filmography.

Poster from the original theatrical release.