Eaten Alive (1976)
- Apr 12, 2022
- 3 min read
Made in the summer and fall of 1975, but released in the summer of 1976, this is a piece of gothic Americana that is vastly underrated. This movie features an all star cast starring veterans like Mel Ferrer and William Finley as well as the first surviving girl from new style terror movies, Marilyn Burns. It was made 2 years after the great financial and cult success, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974). While it isn’t as good as that movie and several others he would make later where he had bigger budgets and more creative special effects, it definitely is worth a look.
Hooper was known as a sweet man with a tough, dark imagination and a feeling for working class heroes as well as average Americans coming up against horror in the real world. There is much to say that he was a creative mind and very underrated compared to a John Carpenter or a George Romero. He was one of the most creative people in terror and horror film making.
It was a troubled production to begin with. Hooper would walk right off the set a few weeks before the completion of the movie and featured actor, Neville Brand, was tough to deal with. He definitely had talent and as Jed, the deranged, hateful hotel keeper, with a mad look and way of talking, he is the unlikeable dark side of Norman Bates from “Psycho.”
That film in addition to other 1950’s gothic styled movies Tobe Hooper would have known such as “The Spiral Staircase” and “I Bury the Living” were definitely influences on this movie. Everything visually is given the look of a 1950’s EC terror comic book. There are great reds and blues and there is an exaggerated color and look to every scene - especially the mammoth, aged hotel that you see. It definitely owes a lot to Mr. Hitchcock. The use of color and sets is obviously given a deranged, “from hell” type of look on purpose. If you don’t like the movie or the story as commonplace terror, you can still get something out of the look of the movie. Hooper never played around with evil, just like Hitchcock and Romero. Evil stares you in the face and is even menacing the world overall in a symbolic way that needs to be fought off. He is very creative at this, though he personally walked off the set before it could be completed.
It is basically a long drawn out movie in some places and the episode set in a bar could have been cut out for reasons of length. The creativity of the color and sets makes up for scenes that are long, drawn out, a little 1970’s dull and a little overblown, even by B-movie standards. It’s definitely a B-movie done on an A-movie level budget and effects. It was almost a lost film over a period of years after its release, with various titles in different movie markets of the world. Like an “Orson Wells” lost production or some other notorious, uncompleted movies over the years, it definitely had to reach an audience slowly. This is a direct piece of Americana where even the final victory over evil is a little horrifying. It gave a start to the early careers of a young Marilyn Burns and Rober Englund. This is not a perfect film, it can be slow and dull and a little vulgar in places, but it does deliver a gothic, Americana back to Hawthorne or Lovecraft or early American tales of the country. It does deliver a good punch at the end. You’re at times wondering, a little emphatically, whatever happened to the alligators used in the movie.
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