Eaten Alive

Directed by Tobe Hooper, Eaten Alive follows several characters, including Marilyn Burns’ Faye and Robert Englund’s Buck, as they’re terrorized and menaced by a demented motel owner (Neville Brand’s Judd) and his pet crocodile. Filmmaker Hooper, working from Kim Henkel, Alvin L. Fast, and Mardi Rustam’s screenplay, delivers an often astonishingly unwatchable endeavor that’s been hardwired with a series of grating, thoroughly unpleasant attributes and elements, as Eaten Alive, which unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a single, shoddy location, progresses through an aggressively sluggish narrative that contains virtually nothing designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by one-dimensional, one-note characters and Hooper’s pervasively low-rent approach to the material. (The film does, in terms of the latter, generally feel like a community-theater production that’s gone hopelessly awry somewhere along the line.) It goes without saying, as a result, that Eaten Alive feels much, much longer than its interminable 91 minute running time, and it’s clear, too, that the movie, on top of everything else, fails to make much of an impact in terms of its uniformly less-than-frightening horror elements (ie that crocodile is hilariously shoddy and unconvincing) – which does, in the end, cement the picture’s place as a complete and total disaster that’s aged horribly in the years since its 1976 release.

no stars out of ****