Crazy old Judd (Neville Brand) is the owner of a run down hotel on the edge of a swamp that is home to a massive crocodile. The old coot, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, thinks nothing of feeding his guests to the old croc, after hacking them to death with his huge scythe.
Eaten Alive, Tobe Hooper's follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was co written by Chainsaw collaborator Kim Henkel, and stars Marilyn Burns, the damsel-in-distress from the '74 horror classic. It even features a scene in which a young woman is chased through the woods by a maniac wielding a large cutting tool. However, this movie fails to capture the intense feeling of terror that Hooper delivered so well with his incredible debut; only in the closing moments of Eaten Alive does he manage anything close to the absolute horror of his first and finest film.
Before that, we get a rather dreary hour and a half of loopy old Judd muttering to himself and occasionally offing the odd guesttipping them into the water for his scaly friend to devour. The realism of Chainsaw is gone, replaced by an almost cartoonish atmosphere; the characters are mostly freakish caricatures, there is a smattering of gore, everything is swathed in garish primary-coloured light, and the old croc is as bad as one might expect from a low budget horror.
Tobe also finds time to throw a few fit birds into the mix, and two of them obligingly flip their norks out (and very fine they are too).
Eaten Alive is enjoyable on a trashy level, and if this had been directed by anyone other than the director of possibly the finest horror movie of all time, I wouldn't have felt quite so disappointed; but as a follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eaten Alive just didn't impress me enough.
Eaten Alive, Tobe Hooper's follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was co written by Chainsaw collaborator Kim Henkel, and stars Marilyn Burns, the damsel-in-distress from the '74 horror classic. It even features a scene in which a young woman is chased through the woods by a maniac wielding a large cutting tool. However, this movie fails to capture the intense feeling of terror that Hooper delivered so well with his incredible debut; only in the closing moments of Eaten Alive does he manage anything close to the absolute horror of his first and finest film.
Before that, we get a rather dreary hour and a half of loopy old Judd muttering to himself and occasionally offing the odd guesttipping them into the water for his scaly friend to devour. The realism of Chainsaw is gone, replaced by an almost cartoonish atmosphere; the characters are mostly freakish caricatures, there is a smattering of gore, everything is swathed in garish primary-coloured light, and the old croc is as bad as one might expect from a low budget horror.
Tobe also finds time to throw a few fit birds into the mix, and two of them obligingly flip their norks out (and very fine they are too).
Eaten Alive is enjoyable on a trashy level, and if this had been directed by anyone other than the director of possibly the finest horror movie of all time, I wouldn't have felt quite so disappointed; but as a follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eaten Alive just didn't impress me enough.