It's Tobe Hooper's second film after Texas Chainsaw, and it's a good, if extremely bizarre one. It concerns an old southern motel and roadside attraction joint. The attraction is a giant crocodile or alligator. The film doesn't know the difference between the two, and neither do I. I do know that I used to be on a bowling team called the "Alley Gators," and that such a punning name would be quite difficult to form from the word "crocodile."
The motel has deteriorated over the years, and the substance of the plot, such as it is, is that a bunch of people show up at the motel and are terrorized by the crazy old man running the joint and/or eaten by the huge carnivorous varmint.
What makes Tobe Hooper's first two films so great is that they're some sort of feverish nightmare. Everything is gritty and surreal, a weird parody of real life. In Chainsaw, this is most evident in the homicidal family, which acts very much like a family, except that they're all really into cannibalism.
Eaten Alive is almost as distressing. Shot very darkly and in menacing red lights, the characters are extremely exaggerated and act very oddly. A family that arrives at the motel has their little dog eaten by the thing in the pool. Unsettled, the family takes a room in the motel, where the father proceeds to break down in bizarre fashion, uttering weird nonsense and ultimately asking his bride to extinguish her cigarette by grinding it out in his eye.
Most of the action revolves around this family. The crazed husband gets whacked by a sickle through the throat, Throne of Blood style, and then falls to the reptile. The wicked old proprietor ties the mother to a bed for some purpose he's never allowed to carry out. Creepiest, though, is the little daughter, who's like 7 years old and has a leg brace. She hides from the madness underneath the motel itself, amongst the rats and garbage, through which she's chased both by the reptile and the old coot. That's some prime scary - a crippled little girl being chased by a maniac and his pet carnivore of indeterminate species.
The film is a little too far to the loopy side for it to be as frightening as Chainsaw, but it's still a unique little horror flick and well worth watching.
Posted by mattb at October 24, 2003 10:41 PM