Eaten Alive
It’s a hard and unforgiving life in the backwoods of Texas, Clara Wood a naïve girl who has tried her hand as a working girl at Miss Hattie’s bawdy house, but running afoul of the particular demands of Buck, a regular client who often causes trouble, it is she who is kicked out, instead forced to seek shelter under the light of the full moon at the decayed Starlight Hotel run by creepy misanthrope Judd.
A sinister and unforgiving man obsessed with the crocodile which lives in the swamp beside the hotel, when he realises Clara’s background she is thrown in and eaten alive, a fate which also befalls the small dog of the family who later arrive seeking a room, the father then murdered and the mother beaten and imprisoned while the young daughter hides under the porch, terrified but out of reach.
Known under various titles including Horror Hotel and Starlight Slaughter, it was as Death Trap that the film was prosecuted as a “video nasty” although it was originally released as Eaten Alive in 1976, directed by Tobe Hooper as his follow up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and supposedly based on the “Butcher of Elmendorf,” saloon owner and presumed multiple murderer Joe Ball who killed himself in 1938 when confronted by the authorities about missing women in the area.
Consciously over the top and deliberately provocative in the murders and obvious misogyny, the characters including wayward women, abused wives and neglected children, many of them perpetually dishevelled and disrobed, Eaten Alive is not a subtle or sophisticated film, nor does it capitalise on what it does have to offer, the hungry crocodile never felt as a lingering threat which lurks in the mist and may strike unexpectedly so much as a waste disposal unit for unruly tenants.
The cast an odd mix, former US Army sergeant Neville Brand is the eye-rolling scythe-wielding PTSD-afflicted Judd and Phantom of the Paradise’s William Finley is similarly disturbed as Roy, his pill-popping wife Faye played by Chain Saw survivor Marilyn Burns, while Carolyn Jones, the original Morticia Addams, appears as Miss Hattie and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, has a featured role as Buck, a man more crass than class.
Yet approaching their roles so seriously they might almost be in a different film are The Monster Club’s Stuart Whitman, The Antichrist’s Mel Ferrer and Crystin Sinclaire, the latter’s confidence and grace recalling a young Faye Dunaway until she is called upon to perform what amounts to a silent strip tease for the camera, narratively redundant since she immediately dresses again before continuing to the next scene, Eaten Alive feeling less like a cohesive whole of backwoods horror than a jumble of ideas degrading into country and western noise.
Eaten Alive will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 17th May
