Eaten Alive, Tobe Hooper’s savage, spirited follow-up to breakthrough The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, centers on a psychopathic Deep South hotelier Judd (Neville Brand) who slaughters his tenants with a humongous scythe and feeds their bodies to his giant pet crocodile. Inspired by Psycho (to a point), this over-the-top monster movie is as graphically tasteless as it is emphatically hilarious. While Massacre delved into the grisly real, Eaten Alive heightens the sense of set-bound, (no-less-bloody) chromatic fantasy, lending an animated, cartoonish quality, which would represent quintessential Tobe Hooper style for years to come. His successful marriage of swampy, sleazy bloodbath with clever hotel comedy sets the film apart from most brutal exploitation fare and is no easy task, much like surviving a night in Judd’s backwater hotel.
