EATEN ALIVE (Hooper, 1977)

EATEN ALIVE doesn't seem to get a lot of love, or, for that matter, print. I found my copy (which seems to not be the uncut version, from what I've read) at BLOBFEST 2005 from a vendor on the street, and I'd never even heard of it before, which is odd, considering it was Hooper's follow up to CHAIN SAW and that Robert Englund plays a major role almost ten years before NIGHTMARE made him a genre legend.

But maybe the reason that no one ever talks about EATEN ALIVE is that it just sort of is silly and not really very good. This is in spite of the wonderful Neville Brand turn as a tortured WWII vet-cum-hotel-owner who freaks out and starts feeding people to his aligator that he swears is really a crocodile. It's set in Louisiana's swamps and features Hooper's stock characters: terrifying rednecks who do wretched things to The Other. The Other in EATEN ALIVE is a bunch of people from the Big City coming into the backwoods and meeting their fate. The city people are portrayed as neurotic pill poppers, and their doom is assured. They exist for no reason but to meet their end and, in several cases, survive, surely only to become even more neurotic in the aftermath. Sound familiar?

EATEN ALIVE is a whole lot like TEXAS CHAIN SAW, but where as SAW was essentially asexual (aside from Leatherface's gender-bending), EATEN ALIVE is crawling with horrific sexual violence right from the opening shots (don't miss Englund's opening line which Tarantino pilfered for KILL BILL VOL. 1, too). It's sort of the evolution of Hooper's realistic brand of ultraviolence, as he branches out and discovers that the implied threat of rape is probably the scariest thing you can commit to film. There are several really effective sequences in EATEN ALIVE; not quite at the level of the bad trip that CHAIN SAW is, but they are still grisly and unrelenting. Hooper really lets the weirdness run rampant, though, as Neville mumbles and stumbles his way through several creepy monologues where you can barely make out what he's saying. It's a good case of Hooper burying the vocals low in the mix and Neville just looking like a fucking psychopath.

But that's essentially what EATEN ALIVE is good for, a snapshot of Hooper's development as a filmmaker. It's not nearly as good as CHAIN SAW and is in no way essential. It's for completists, those who wish to see where Hooper started and where he went after his first feature became the drive-in legend that it was. If you're a fan of his work, then by all means, track it down, but if you're faced with the choice between EATEN ALIVE or THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, well, you know who you're picking.