Our film opens with a drastically dissonant musical score blaring over a scenes of a full moon -- and unfortunately, these annoying chords have set the tone for the entire movie...

We crotch-cam (seriously!) into our next scene at the local brothel, where the new gal becomes uneasy when her first john drops his pants. And then Clara (Roberta Collins) quickly changes her mind about a life of prostitution after Buck (Robert Englund!) suggests how he wants to do it. (To draw ya a picture, most folks put tab-A into slot-B. Buck, however, wants to put tab-A into slot-C. Noodle that for a sec..) Resistance is futile as he demands to get what he paid for, and when he starts shredding her blouse, Clara calls for back-up. But Hattie, the house madame, (Carolyn Jones -- who doesn’t look so hot, and is a far cry from her days as Morticia Addams) tells Buck to go back and choose another gal. And when Clara refuses to see anymore johns, Hattie kicks her out. Gleaning from the conversation that Clara is a runaway, Ruby, (Betty Cole), the brothels maid, takes pity and gives the frightened girl some money and tells her to go to the old Starlight Motel for the night, and then she can start out fresh in the morning. Reluctantly, Clara takes the money, and as she leaves, Ruby ominously warns her not to let Judd, the hotel's owner, know she was one of Hattie’s girls.

It appears the Starlight Hotel is way, way, WAY! off the beaten path as Clara makes her way through a thick, swampy bayou until she finally stumbles upon the dilapidated hotel. (Why didn’t she just follow the road?) A shadowy figure opens the door, but ignores her calls of hello. Then, something splashes around in a lagoon that's fenced off in front of the hotel. Curious, Clara peers into the dark water and catches a glimpse of something -- something that growls! Frightened, she quickly goes into the lobby and rings the bell on the desk.

Judd (Neville Brand -- who we haven’t seen since Killdozer) emerges from his office. (And yes, we are supposed to get the Norman Bates-creep vibe off of him.) Strategically placing the guest book to maximize his vantage point, he gawks at Clara’s cleavage. (See, I told ya!) He then escorts her upstairs to a room, mumbling all the way, and asks if she saw his crocodile out in the water. (Oy! And she’s a real beauty.) We then get a quick zoological brush-up on crocodiles, finding out that they can outrun a horse on land. (Uh-huh.) Judd then relates the story of how his croc chased down a mule and bit it clean in half. (That's nice. Can I go into my room now?) Upon reaching the top of the stairs, Judd takes a long look at Clara, and the way she’s dressed, and quickly concludes she has to be one of Miss Hattie’s girls. Quickly, things turn a might sinister because this realization causes Judd to go completely haywire! He assaults Clara, they struggle, and then fall down the stairs. She recovers first, but the fall hurt her leg. As she tries to crawl outside, Clara makes it to the door before Judd comes up behind her -- with a heavy farm implement, and proceeds to whack away. Blood flies as he disembowels the poor girl, which eventually drains into the lagoon, stirring the interest of the croc. So Judd dumps the girl over the side into the waiting jaws of the beast. (I note that Clara was still alive, barely, but alive, when she hit the water.)

Time passes while Judd goes through a satchel full of eyeglasses, trying to find the right prescription to help him read. (A nice subtle touch here as we realize Judd has already fed several victims to his pet croc.) Meanwhile, a monkey keels over in his cage near the lagoon. (Anybody know what the heck that was that all about?0 A car pulls up, and then the dysfunctional family from hell spills out. Roy (William Finley) barges in asks to use the restroom, leaving Judd to exchange pleasantries with wife Faye (Marilyn Burns), but she doesn’t seem very talkative, while their daughter, Angie (Kyle Richards -- who would go on to play young Lindsey in Halloween), chases Snoopy, the family dog, around the lagoon. Then Buck pulls up, but Judd angrily tells him to get off his property. Buck ignores him, says he's got a little action lined up for later, prepays for a room, and then leaves just as Angie freaks out when she sees the dead monkey in the cage. While Faye tries to calm her down, Snoopy finds a hole in the fence, crawls into the lagoon, and barks along the water’s edge. Angie sees this and calls for him to come back. She reaches the fence just in time to see the croc emerge and maul the dog to death. Now Angie really freaks out! As Faye tries to calm the frantic child, Judd herds them into a room. He leaves them alone, but starts mumbling again, and by the time he reaches the bottom of the steps, he’s convinced himself that he must kill them all.

Back upstairs, the parents go ten bloody rounds with no clear winner. (What they’re fighting about isn’t really clear, either.) Judd listens in on the argument for awhile, and then starts looking for another farm implement -- but another car pulls up before he picks the right tool. Outside, a tired looking older man and a young woman get out. Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer) goes inside to check in. He shows Judd a picture of Clara, and asks if he’s seen her. Judd panics a little, but says he doesn’t allow that kind of thing here. Harvey grows angry and asks what does he mean by that? Judd flatly says this isn’t a whorehouse like Hattie’s. Harvey then asks if he saw this girl at Hattie’s, but Judd has clammed up. Wanting answers, Harvey grows more belligerent and reveals Clara is his missing daughter. Libby (Crystin Sinder), his other daughter, calms him down. She wants them to take the room and relax for the night, but Harvey insists they go on into town and check out the brothel. They leave.

Upstairs, the family reaches round fifteen: Roy, the simpering sod, is still simpering, Faye is still scolding him, and traumatized Angie is still whining. Faye finally manages to calm her down, but then Roy starts barking for some reason (thanks, dad,) and this drives Angie into a tizzy again. And for that, Faye tears Roy a much deserved new butt-hole. Whipped, Roy leaves to get a shotgun out of the trunk of the car. Judd tries to stop him, but Roy's determined to reclaim his manhood by killing the croc. Scanning the murky water, he tries to bait the croc to the surface. Something moves. He fires the first barrel, misses, and before he can fire the second, Judd whacks him with a large scythe. Wounded badly, Roy fires the other barrel that hits Judd in the leg. Judd still raises his weapon for the deathblow, but the croc breaks through the fence and beats him to it, dragging Roy into the water where it starts to feed. Back upstairs, Faye hears just the gunshots and tells Angie not to worry because her father has just slain the dragon. Judd limps into his room, takes some kind of drugs, and then rolls up his pant leg -- we assume to look at the wound, but reveals a wooden leg with a sizeable chunk blown off.

After Angie has finally cried herself to sleep, Faye calls down to Roy to bring up their bags. When he doesn’t answer, figuring he’s just still mad at her, she goes into the bathroom and starts to strip down. (Wohoo! SHOWER SCENE!) Faye gets down to her slip, fills the tub with water, and starts to soak her feet. (Dagnabbit.) Unfortunately for her, this Calgon moment won't last long as Judd has completely unraveled mentally, breaks in, and proceeds to beat the crap out of her. (Seriously, does Hooper have something personal against Marilyn Burns or what? More on this later.) Angie hears the commotion and investigates. She finds them and starts screaming until Faye tells her to go find daddy. Judd quickly ties Faye up, and then goes after the girl. He chases her outside and takes a few swings at her with his scythe, but Angie proves resourceful, though, and escapes the psycho by getting underneath the house into the crawlspace. Since he can’t get at her, Judd does the next best thing and just barricades her in. He returns to the hotel room and finds Faye, trying to escape, and the screen fades to black as he beats her unconscious...

...We come back as Faye wakes up, lashed to a bed, forced to listen while Judd starts to spill his psychosis to his captive audience: We piece together that Judd is a disturbed veteran who has a thing for regulations and record keeping. And those who go against his regulations, get fed to the croc.

In town, Harvey and Libby find Sheriff Martin (Stuart Whitman), and he takes them to see Hattie, who denies ever seeing Clara. When she finds out where they're staying, she warns them about old Judd. Seems he used to be a regular customer, but his loony talk scared all the girls so he had to be banned. She also reveals it was his croc that tore Judd’s leg off. (I assumed he lost it in the war, reinforcing the crazed veteran angle. Oh, well.) Back at the Starlight, as Judd tries to coax Angie out, she proves a brave little trooper and will have none of it. Enraged, Judd chases her deeper under the house. He has to stop pursuit, though, when a car pulls up; it's the Sheriff, who drops Harvey off, then heads back into town with Libby to get their car. As Harvey makes his way to his room, Faye struggles violently against her bonds. Harvey hears this, but then hears Angie calling for her daddy from underneath the house. Following the noise back outside, he gets a scythe through the neck for his efforts. With Harvey hooked, Judd backs him to the water where the croc latches on to Harvey's legs and tries to pull him under. And in a darkly comical scene, Judd can’t get his scythe to dislodge from Harvey’s neck, resulting in a macabre game of tug of war until finally, the blade comes free and the croc feeds again.

Back in town, after witnessing the most pathetic barroom brawl in screen history, Libby and Martin exposition the plot some more -- something about Harvey being terminally ill, and that’s why he’s trying to track down his estranged daughter blah, blah, blah, it doesn’t really matter. Their waitress asks Martin to do something about Buck, who’s causing trouble over by the pool tables. But it's Buck’s jailbait girlfriend, Lynette (Janus Blythe), whose causing quite a stir among the local denizen's hormones. (She’s real purty!) Martin orders them all out of there before a real brawl erupts. They do, and head out to the Starlight. When they get there, they ignore Judd’s protests and take a room (AND WE FINALLY HAVE NUDITY!), but every time they really get into it, they hear some strange noises -- Faye's gagged screams upstairs, and Angie crying from underneath. Judd hears this too, so he turns a radio up louder. (Frankly, listening to all that country music would probably make me unravel mentally too.)

Unable to *ahem* perform with all the racket, Buck puts his pants on and investigates. He can’t find Judd -- whose gone upstairs, and is trying to calm Faye down -- but hears Angie crying. He follows the noise outside and finds the broken fence where the croc has munched several victims. (To the film's credit, it took the time to show us Judd mopping up all the blood.) While he leans over the railing, trying to trace the sound, Judd comes out of the hotel and gives him the bum’s rush, over the rail, and into the water. Buck tries to get out, but the croc gets him first. Lynette hears him screaming, dresses, and rushes out -- right into Judd and his trusty scythe. She flees into the woods where Judd gives chase, but he loses her in the fog. (Didn’t we do that movie already?) Lynette makes it back to the road and flags down a passing motorist and speeds away, never to be heard from again.

When Libby returns alone -- the Sheriff promised to put out an APB if she would go back to the hotel and rest -- all is quiet. (Too quiet.) She tiredly trudges to her room and sits on the bed...

After a prolonged strip and gawk sequence, Libby is down to her panties and struts around her room for awhile. (Oh, well. Why not?) 

Inside, Judd tosses Faye from the top of the steps. She lands at the bottom in a heap. Judd then runs outside, reaches over the rail, and tries to pull Angie away from Libby back into the croc pen. Bloodied and broken Faye gathers herself up, charges, and pushes Judd over the rail. Grabbing the old psycho by the head, the croc drags him into the water. The Sheriff just misses this but watches Libby pull Angie over the fence to safety. (And where the hell have you been, Mr. APB?) Faye calls for her daughter as Martin looks into the pen. Judd’s wooden leg bobs to the surface, the soundtrack goes out of whack again, and the frame freezes for...

It’s been rumored that while filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there were several brainstorming sessions to try and come up with a scene where Marilyn Burns would have to take her top off. (They felt she had a nice set of hooters that the world needed to see. Who am I to argue?) Well, there is no topless scene in Massacre. Why, I’m not sure. (Did Burns refuse to do a nude scene?) I ask this because I noticed something fishy during Eaten Alive. Aside from Burns and Collins (and Carolyn Jones, thank your lord!), all the other female characters went topless. I also noticed that the gals who went topless escape unscathed. Burns is set up for a topless shot, but it doesn’t happen and her character is put through the wringer again. (Savagely beaten to a pulp, tied up, and slashed to ribbons.) Collins's Clara doesn't either, and she gets hacked to death and fed to the crocodile. Draw your own conclusions here.

Eaten Alive is Hooper’s forgotten film and it’s fairly easy to figure out why. A rehash of themes from his first film, but here, they fall flat on their face. The film just sorely lacks the nightmarish delirium and shock violence of his first film. (You know Judd is a nutcase the second you see him.) At least he didn’t call it The Louisiana or Maybe Florida -- Then Again it Might be Texas -- Hay Scythe Massacre (it’s never clear where we are exactly.) 

Neville Brand makes a good screen villain, but the script gives him no real motivation and calls on him to improvise a lot. (He uses the same lines over and over again. And the couple's fight appears to be improvised, badly, as well.) We can conjecture on some of his psychosis, but a lot of it is left up in the air. Beyond that, the plot is nothing but an excuse to gather as many people as they can to the hotel so Judd can feed his crocodile. (And I honestly wasn't paying close enough attention when I watched Crocodile to see if the monster's origins traced back to this film.) This plot fails by not allowing us to get to know the victims at all. (In Massacre we did, no matter how annoying most of them were.) Here, we don’t know who they are, they’re extremely annoying, we can’t identify with them, which means we’ve crossed the line and can’t wait until they die -- and even root Judd on to dispatch them as quickly as possible.

The gore F/X are okay, but there are no real shock moments as everything is telegraphed badly. And after taking that big of a scythe through the neck, I really doubt that Harvey could walk around as much as he did. It’s been a while since anatomy class, but, if your windpipe has been severed in two, I would think that would be critically fatal and drop you dead on the spot. And then the film really breaks down and becomes laughable in the killer croc F/X. The film’s most blatant screw up comes when we see the croc emerge to pounce on the dog. Later, the croc has miraculously grown some twenty times in size when it attacks Roy through the fence. (See illustration.) And we, as an audience, slowly shake our heads, asking, Tobe, what happened?

To his credit, Hooper does create a claustrophobic atmosphere on the hotel set. It was Filmed on a soundstage, it gives everything a strange unnatural quality -- but this also works against him. One of the scariest things about Massacre was that all this stuff was happening outside, in the open, during the light of day, when we’re supposed to be safe from the bogeymen.

I like to compare Tobe Hooper’s track record to that of the Star Trek film franchise. Every other film he does is okay, while the others, for the most part, suck total ass. But that’s his main problem, though; the films at best are just okay. Lifeforce, Poltergeist and even The Funhouse has become less effective with each viewing. Is it unfair to compare these films to his original effort? I don’t know, probably. I touched on this when talking about Craven’s films nowadays. These guys used to break new ground in the horror genre, but now all they do is paint by the number scary flicks.

So I'll conclude this little retrospective by bringing up this point one more time: It appears to me that these four creators’ films have gotten less effective (not necessarily worse) as their budgets increased.

I truly bemoan the fact that we will never see films like Massacre, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead or The Hills Have Eyes ever again; films shot on miniscule budgets, forcing the creators to get creative and innovative; a guerilla type of filmmaking where the blood and bruises you see on the screen are a little too real that only adds to the film’s gritty realism. Long and the short of it: I just really wish they would all go back to making these kinds of films and start scaring the hell out of me again.

More Sophomore Slumps!

Posted: 07/20/01. Copy and paste at your own legal risk.

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