January 5, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode of Shelf Criticism, Stephen returns to his trash cinema sweet spot as we wade through the surreal swamp of Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. Crocodiles, scythes, and a cacophony of chaos await as Stephen explores this bizarre 1976 hicksploitation horror. From Judd’s motiveless madness to the film’s infamous censorship history, it’s a fever dream worth interpreting. Delve into the murky depths of nihilism—just don’t blame the croc.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Created by Toby Hooper, maker of the screen sensation, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
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Marty Rushton presents a new horror classic, Eaten Alive.
Welcome to Shelf Criticism. Meet your host, Stephen, a scholar of literature and film by day,
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and by night, a cinematic archaeologist with a penchant for everything from art house to popular to out-white trash cinema.
Over the past quarter century, Stephen has amassed an eclectic DVD collection,
now occupying five shells of a curio cabinet in his living room.
Each week, he bravely selects one of these titles to dissect.
Join him as he unearths everything from obscure gems to cinematic missteps.
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From blockbuster hits to forgotten flops, each film gets the critical once over it probably doesn't deserve but will absolutely receive.
So grab your popcorn and settle in.
It's time to dive into the diverse world of shelf criticism.
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Welcome to the first episode of Shelf Criticism in 2025.
All December we took a side exploration into Christmas films, and may I just say, I'm glad to have that out of the way for at least 11 months.
Of course, we also took another detour with a couple of bonus episodes.
Though Christmas is come and gone, if you want to hear me talk about the worst film in the history of cinema,
and I'm neither joking nor giving into hyperbole,
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you can check out my special Beside My Shelf episode covering National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2, Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure.
Just trust me, do not watch the film. I'm still recovering from that watch.
Also, if you haven't taken a listen to my year-end review, I encourage you to do that as well.
You'll get to hear my assessment of the year that was in film, find out who won each category of the new Shelfies,
get my top 5 films of the year, and hear a fun Owls of Palace blooper reel.
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But as for us today, I'm going back to the Shelf.
As many of you know, the area of scholarship that I focus on is animal attack fiction, both in print and celluloid.
If you didn't know that about me, going back through the titles I've covered now might make some sense to you.
Oh, I get it now.
Not only did Mackenzie and I cover Jaws and the Birds on Reel It, but I have said a lot about sharks on this podcast too,
whether that's spending too much time talking about the tiger shark in Into the Blue,
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or going gaga talking about the ones swimming around the Colosseum in Gladiator 2.
I've also done Rogue for this podcast, that's the 2020 Lion Attack film,
not to be confused with the 2007 Crocodile Attack film by the same name,
though that one also is on my shelf and may be covered at some point.
Today's Shelf Pick, however, will also be about a crocodile.
No, it's not Blackwater or Blackwater Abyss, both of which are also on my DVD shelf.
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It's also not Croc, Crocodile, Dark Age, or Primeval.
Oh, and Lake Placid, that was a croc too, right? Not a gator.
Man, I've got a lot of Croc attacks on my shelf.
This would be the finer Killer Crocodile film that I own, I think.
1976's Eaten Alive.
I'm actually going to talk about how I came to own this Shelf Pick before I describe the DVD case and its cover copy,
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and you'll see why this makes sense in just a moment.
This is an Arrow Films Special Edition.
I think I mentioned them during my episode of Red Rings of Fear as they released a remastered copy of that Yalo.
Arrow Film is a British distributor specializing in reissuing cult classics, or sometimes films with no status whatsoever.
Their work with the Italian Giali, for instance, is unparalleled,
introducing those films to a new generation that might not otherwise have ever encountered them.
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Beyond Giali, Arrow preserves, remasters, and reissues a wide range of films,
primarily foreign language, arthouse, or horror, with a particular focus on the 1970s and 1980s.
Essentially, they're a boon for a certain slice of cinephile.
I just so happen to exemplify that slice, the collector with a penchant for lesser known and often lesser quality films,
or around here what we just call trash cinema.
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Arrow's remastering work is top notch, but one of their standout features for me is the reimagined case wraps,
and this is where it gets really cool.
So the case wraps are double-sided.
On the front side, they have a new artist representation of the film that has never been seen before,
and then if you remove that insert and flip it over, you'll see the original cover art perfectly preserved.
It's a small touch, but for collectors like me, it's a delightful bonus, offering the best of both worlds,
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modern design and nostalgic authenticity.
Many of them also come with recreated lobby cards or other promotional materials.
Most valuable to a film scholar such as myself are the bonus features,
such as interviews with some of the remaining cast and crew.
Often they'll even include interviews with film scholars or small booklets with essays written by some of them,
not that they've ever called me.
Obviously, I am on Arrow's email list, and when I saw they had a special sale going last November, presumably for Christmas,
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I decided to get myself a few gifts instead.
I remember seeing Eatin' Alive somewhere in my younger days.
I can't be for certain where, but I'm sure it was one of those late night movies that played on weekends
when I liked to step late and veg out to bad B-films on the boob tube.
I didn't recall much, as this had to be over three decades ago.
I'm certain this is before I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I had never even heard the name Toby Hooper,
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even if I probably had seen a few of his other films, certainly Poltergeist.
It's not like most teenagers really pay close attention to the directors anyway, though.
I had also certainly seen Nightmare on Elm Street, but I don't know that I made the connection that Robert Englund was the same guy who plays Buck in this film.
He looks rather different without the makeup and the trademark sweater, after all.
What I did remember was this film is freaking bonkers.
As I began researching animal horror cinema, of course I came across this film,
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and it was then I realized the famed director helmed it and the future horror icon starred in it.
It was on the need to watch list for a while, so when I saw that film on sale on Arrow's site, it immediately went into my cart.
Somehow it still took me over a month and a half to get to it, but as I was planning Shelf Criticism Season 2,
I knew this was going to be one of my choices.
I could do double duty, furthering my academic research while also making another episode of this podcast.
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So now let's go back around and look at this DVD and talk about it.
The newly reimagined cover art is quite nice.
We've got a close-up of the crocodilian slitted eye.
Around one side is Judd's trademark scythe.
Through the slit of the eye, Clara is running through with great attention to detail.
She's wearing the very dress she wears in the film, and it's all seamlessly blended together in a perfect mash-up.
It's also surrounded by faded newspapers.
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You see words like bloody, bae, little, horror.
A lot of other words. Oh, there's Buck, I see.
There's a faded sketch of Judd. It's a lot of detail here.
What is the word? Alligator.
It's really interesting. It's also a sort of a greenish tint that plays perfectly on that reptilian idea.
If you take it out and look on the other side, the cover art is the original, as I said before.
And this is an illustration of the croc, jaws open and tail whipping.
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Behind him, knee-deep in the water, stands Judd, seemingly screaming as he swings his scythe.
Try saying that three times fast.
There's a random hand sticking out of the water to their left.
At the top, it reads, meet the maniac and his friend.
At the bottom, we're told, together they make the greatest team in the history of mass slaughter in...
ellipsis... eaten alive!
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In all caps with an exclamation point.
Incidentally, there was an Italian film made in the early 1980s.
I think it was 1982, that is generally translated as eaten alive, and it has an exclamation point after it.
The Reimagine cover that I'm looking at does not have the exclamation points, but the original does.
And it just makes me wonder if that Italian film was ripping it off,
because you know, Italian films never rip off anything.
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Look up the film Great White if you want to see the worst jaws rip off ever.
On the DVD back, the cover copy is the same on both sides.
It reads, nearly a decade before he donned Freddy Krueger's famous red and green sweater,
horror icon Robert Englund delivered a supremely sleazy performance in Eaten Alive,
another essay in taut southern terror from Tobe Hooper, director of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
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Notice here that they're playing up Englund, who was a virtual unknown at the point he starred in it, I suppose,
and they're also giving Hooper his due.
It continues, deep in the Louisiana bayou...
I thought it was Texas, I don't know for sure, I don't know if they ever say,
but I do believe it's supposed to be eastern Texas, we'll ignore that.
Deep in the Louisiana bayou sits the ramshackle Starlight Hotel,
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destination of choice for those who like to check in but not check out.
Presided over by the bumbling mumbling Judd and his pet croc, which he keeps in a large pond out front,
the patron of this particular establishment may seem like a good-natured old southern gent,
but he has a mean temper on him and a mighty large scythe to boot.
Oozing atmosphere from its every pore, the entire film was shot on a soundstage at the famous Raleigh Studios,
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which lends it a queasy, claustrophobic feel.
Eaten Alive matches the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for sheer insanity
and even drafts in Chainsaw Star Marilyn Burns as the terrorized...
by the way, terrorized is spelled with an S instead of a Z, Arrow is a British company after all...
even drafts in Chainsaw Star Marilyn Burns as the terrorized woman in peril alongside William Findlay as Mel Ferrer.
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So there's your synopsis. The special features? Oh, they're numerous. I mean, it's Arrow, right?
So here we go. First thing it does is it notes, in all caps, director-approved special edition contents.
Yes, Hooper was still alive, apparently, when they were at least working on this.
Brand new 2K transfer from the original camera negative approved by director Toby Hooper.
I feel like we just heard that, didn't we?
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High definition Blu-ray 1080p and standard definition DVD presentations.
Original mono audio uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray.
By the way, for a little bit of technical note here if you're curious, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation.
That just means the Blu-ray features the film's original single channel or mono audio track,
which is preserved at its highest possible quality without any compression.
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It's a treat, I guess, for cinephiles who value authenticity and clarity in their film collection.
It also means if you have a nice surround sound system, you don't really need to worry about turning it on.
Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Audio commentator with co-writer and producer Marty Rustam.
Makeup artist Craig Reardon and stars Roberta Collins, William Findlay, and Kyle Richards.
New introduction to the film by director Toby Hooper.
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Blood on the Bayou, brand new interview with Hooper.
Gator Bait, a brand new interview with star Janice Blythe.
Monsters and Metaphors, a brand new interview with makeup artist Craig Reardon.
The Gator Creator, archive interview with Hooper.
My Name is Buck, star Robert Englund discusses his acting career.
Five Minutes with Marilyn Burns, and for some reason the F in five is actually the number five.
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I don't know.
The Star of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre talks about working on Eatin' Alive.
The Butcher of Elmendorf, the legend of Joe Ball, the story of the South Texas bar owner whom Eatin' Alive is loosely based.
We'll talk about that a little later.
Original theatrical trailers for the film under its various titles.
Eatin' Alive, Death Trap, Starlight Slaughter, and Horror Hotel.
US TV and radio spots.
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Alternate opening titles.
Behind the scenes slideshow.
Stills and promo material gallery.
Audience comment cards.
The reversible sleeve featuring original artwork and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullen.
And before you even ask, no I did not get through all of those materials.
I did look at some, but there's just not enough hours in the day.
I know some of my other arrow features where I'm really really interested in the film.
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You know I may really go in deep with those.
And I might with this one too if it continues in my research and pops up at some point in that monograph that I'm apparently never going to get written much less published.
I may come back to some of this. At least I have it available if I ever need it.
We'll get into Critical Reception.
The film holds a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 48 on Metacritic, but there's a quick caveat here.
Rotten Tomatoes is working off only 17 reviews and Metacritic a paltry 6.
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More frustrating is there doesn't seem to be any contemporary reviews with the film.
Granted it did fly under a lot of folks radar.
Even Chainsaw grew into its esteemed place in the horror canon of course.
But it did make a stink to say the least.
Someone had to have reviewed it back in 1976.
And I found a few snippets here and there, but good luck finding a full review.
Instead the reviews began around 2000 when the film got its first DVD release.
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A few more crop up in 2007 when the 2-disc DVD Special Edition came out.
And then the rest are from 2015 when, you guessed it, the Arrow Edition I have came out.
It's also baffling to think that release that I bought just two months ago is actually almost a decade old.
It can't really be 2025 can it?
I mean just a couple years ago weren't we still in the 1990s?
Sure seems that way.
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Anyhow with over 2500 user reviews the popcorn meter keeps eating alive in virtually the same spot.
30%.
Likewise Metacritic's users have it at a 4.5.
Though it should be strongly noted here that there are only 4.
Which is hardly a fair sample set.
For my critical review I'm going to look at the short but well written post from Nick Shager.
I don't immediately recognize the name but it has a familiar ring to it.
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And looking I see that he's a Rotten Tomatoes top critic.
I don't think I've ever used him on this podcast.
But his blog has a ton of reviews he's written from 2004 to 2011.
And it looks like he's written for the likes of the Daily Beast, Variety, Esquire and others.
This one comes from 2007.
And if he is doing this due to the DVD issue of the year before.
He makes no mention of the disc or special features or transfer or remaster or the like.
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It's just a straight up film review.
But either way I'm just going to read it in full because it's quite short.
Dismissed and forgotten almost immediately upon its theatrical release.
Eatin' Alive predictably suffered from being Tobey Hooper's follow up to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
30 years later however that fate seems the product not just of unfair expectations.
But also of an audience unwillingness to accept its aggressively abstract argument in favor of nihilism.
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My name is Buck and I'm raring to...
Yeah, not going to say that word.
Alza Palace productions are clean, remember?
But that's what says Robert Englund's something obsessed rural degenerate.
I'm not going to say this word either.
It's a particular paraphilia that Buck is fond of that the women he tries to do it on are not.
And I'm just going to let you look at that on your own if you want to.
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Again, I don't shy away from topics like this but I'd just rather not mention that part.
So anyway, he's that obsessed rural degenerate as Hooper's camera stares at his jeans encased crotch.
A perfectly scuzzy opening moment for a film that celebrates unbridled sadism and random cruelty.
Without the comforting filters of narrative coherence, character development, or concessions to realism.
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Alas, while its rejection of standard soothing conventions is admirable,
Eaton Live's off-the-wall hybridization of Tennessee Williams, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho specifically,
and Lucio Fulci is more often than not sloppy.
To its credit, the film's opaque story in which events pile up on each other with no discernible logic,
as well as chintzy effects and motel set create an unreal atmosphere that augments its grotesque portrait of backwater southern culture.
(14:32):
And as Judd, the scythe-wielding motel proprietor who likes to feed guests, including TCM's Marilyn Burns,
to his laughably phony-looking killer crocodile,
Neville Brand delivers a spitting, blazing-eyed performance full of muttered scripture, denunciations of prostitution, and maniacal grins.
Yet any hint that the evildoer's madness stems from naughty psychosexual issues remains as underdeveloped as every other aspect of Hooper's sophomore effort.
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Which earns points for its uncompromising vileness and pessimism.
But imparting the impression that it was slapped together without so much thought or care
never finds a way to make its hallucinatory horror frightening or as bleakly amusing as his similar, subsequent, and superior the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
Okay, there's so much to unpack here.
Shager knows how to pack a lot of detail into his sentences, but let's start with a claim of nihilism.
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Many B-movies of the 70s embody this philosophy shaped by a general sense of disillusionment.
There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, and other crises that eroded public faith and institutions.
While even foundational societal structures like the family were under strain, with divorce rates skyrocketing.
Violence felt omnipresent, were the due to the televised horrors of Vietnam or the reality of rising crime in urban centers.
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This societal unease permeates a film like Eatin' Alive.
Judd's prosthetic leg suggests a military background, possibly hinting at the psychological toll of war.
The breakdown of the family is evident in Harvey and Libby's search for runaway Clara, who's ended up working in a brothel.
These fractured relationships reflect a broader sense of societal collapse.
Perhaps most strikingly, Eatin' Alive exemplifies a rise of genre or subgenre, technically, exploitation.
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It's an exploitation type of film that thrives on the grotesqueness of rural or backward settings.
Like the Southern Gothic, and it is sort of Southern Gothic, it explores isolation, natural dangers, the decay of societal norms in remote areas.
While the urban horror of the 70s often centered on themes of urban decay and violence, which is captured in films like think of Taxi Driver, Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham 123,
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Hicksploitation turned its lens to the countryside.
Films like Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, Hooper Zone, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those depict rural areas as equally perilous, populated by unhinged characters and remnants of a decayed past.
You see the abandoned homes, the failing farms, the forgotten towns all along the landscape.
Hicksploitation thrived on the growing divide between urban and rural America.
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Just as urban areas were perceived as dangerous and anarchic, rural areas became alien and lawless in the public imagination.
These films play on the fear of the other, cultural and geographical differences exaggerated into grotesque caricatures.
In the 1970s, cultural upheavals like Vietnam, Watergate, The Oil Crisis, those left many questioning societal stability.
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And urban horror explored the collapse of safety in quote unquote civilized spaces, while rural horror delved into the chaos of the untamed world.
Together they painted a picture of society where danger lurked everywhere.
You're not safe in any place, the city, the country.
With this thought of nihilism, we can see where Shager is going with his claim that Eat and Alive is, quote,
a film that celebrates unbridled sadism and random cruelty without the comforting filters of narrative coherence, character development, or concession to realism.
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And I can't say that I disagree with any of that.
Unlike Chainsaw, which was terrifying but more suggestive with its gore, Eat and Alive revels in it.
That's not to say any of it is convincing.
The fake blood is way too bright to be believed, and there aren't many instances of truly gruesome practical effects.
Shager mentions Lucio Fulci, but there's nothing quite like what happens to the splintered door and that eyeball in Zombie.
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Then again, there's pretty much nothing in cinema that matches that, at least until Hostel came along, and you know what?
Let's just leave the eyeballs out of this, folks.
Those things just make me shudder thinking about them.
The point is, though, that violence in Eat and Alive is not merely suggestive.
It's shown on screen, and as much as budget and technology allows, it's pretty gruesome.
It also does seem that a lot of this cruelty is focused on females.
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Yes, three of the four characters who actually meet their untimely end are male, with Clara being the only woman who falls victim.
However, as with Sally Hardacy and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the survivors are going to have immense trauma scarring them forever.
Indeed, one of the few snippets of a contemporaneous review I could find, one by Martin Auti, says that that very violence suggests sexism remains an unconscious force in exploitation cinema.
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He could be right. It could be simple outright misogyny.
It could be simply putting the so-called, quote-unquote, weaker sex in prolonged peril to up the ante on suspense and tension in the film.
Or it could possibly be a sly, subversive criticism of the way women are treated by society.
The way so many exploitation films are, attempting to have their cliched cake and eat it too, I kind of think it might be all three.
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Either way, yeah, cruel film. Yeah, there's little in the way of narrative.
Events pile up with no discernible logic, as Shager puts it. And there is no character development. Why does Judd do what he does? Who knows?
As I stated, it could be trauma from being a veteran.
There's the enmity between him and Miss Hattie, who runs the House of Irrepute down the road,
and the way he reacts when he realizes Clara has come from there, which might suggest, as Shager mentioned, some sort of psychosexual issues.
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But while it's hinted at, there's no motivation really revealed.
Judd does vacillate, sometimes seems to be remorseful or at least feel some guilt.
But he's hardly a three-dimensional character. The narrative is not going for that.
As a matter of fact, when it comes to characterization, all we really get are weird quirks and assentrincities of people who move in and out of the film.
Like, why is Miss Hattie wearing that odd green makeup?
What makes Buck the entitled little snot that he is?
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And Roy. Can we just stop and talk about Roy for a moment?
You know, I get that he and Faye are having marital problems.
I get they just watch the family pet get eaten by a crocodile, which is a very disturbing scene.
Yeah, not to spoil anything, but does the dog die? It's a 70s film. It happened more often than not.
Anyway, so they've just seen that happen. And that's going to have everybody on edge.
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But what is it with the scene in the hotel room?
The way he like reaches towards Faye like he's Darth Vader trying to use the force to choke her.
And then he says something about her taking his eye, though he's clearly got both of them.
And then he starts barking like a dog.
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
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While I'm at it, why does Faye wear a wig? Why does Angie have a brace on one leg?
Why did Claire run away from home in the first place?
Why am I asking these questions as if it matters?
The film clearly doesn't care about answering them.
And it's this lack of explanation, the randomness of events and characters that reinforces the film's nihilistic ethos.
Eatin' Alive doesn't seek to provide meaning or resolution.
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Instead, it immerses viewers in a surreal, chaotic nightmare where nothing makes sense.
Everything hurts. And isn't that, in its own way, the point?
And this is where I take issue with Shager, who gets, quote,
the impression that it was slapped together without much thought or care.
It's evident to me that Hooper's taken a lot of care, a lot of attention to detail.
Heck, maybe some of the craziness to a viewer made sense in his own vision. I don't know.
(21:39):
But after all, you know, David Lynch does some back crap insane stuff in his films.
And I mean that as a compliment, by the way. And he gets hailed as an auteur.
Now, I'm not comparing this film to Mulholland Drive by any stretch.
But it does evoke a strange otherworldliness in a similar way.
Like a good Lynch film where logic and verisimilitude fade far away, dissolve and quite forget,
like a Keatsian nightingale. It's really about the mood it evokes.
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And this one's a fever dream. If you can walk away from this one and not feel icky.
I mean, I worry about your eternal soul, my friend.
Which brings me to my take. I'm just going to come out and say it.
This is one of those genuinely bad films that I can still manage to like.
Striking that balance is no small feat. You can't take yourself too seriously.
But you also can't go completely off the rails, especially for a horror film like the one Hooper's crafting here.
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You got to have just the right mix of camp and genuine weirdness.
It's all about hitting that sardonic sweet spot where the humor lands in a way that makes audience chuckle,
but also feel a little bad for laughing at it.
And the film knows exactly where that line is, and it straddles it masterfully.
By the time Roy starts barking like a dog and then storms off to shoot the crocodile,
you just think, yeah, that tracks.
(22:47):
By then we've been bombarded with so much weirdness and absurdity
that it just feels like a natural extension of the film's logic, or maybe lack thereof is more accurate.
It's not really the population of weird characters, however.
I mean, that does contribute.
But much has been said by other critics about the difference in this and, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The contrast between the sprawling sun-bleached Texas countryside in Chainsaw
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and the claustrophobic chaos of the Sawyer House is one of those films' most striking features.
That juxtaposition makes the Sawyer House feel like a trap,
like a grotesque, inescapable layer hidden within an otherwise open and endless landscape.
By comparison, Eat and Alive flips that script entirely.
The soundstage exteriors immediately establish a different kind of unease.
Even the outdoor settings feel unnatural and hemmed in with those painted backdrops and artificial lighting,
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which create this surreal, almost dreamlike atmosphere.
The confinement is palpable, and it turns the entire world of the film into a swampy pressure cooker.
And this makes Judd's hotel not just a setting, but a psychological space where there's no reprieve from the danger of the madness.
It's as if Hooper is playing with the idea of space itself.
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In Chainsaw, you're trapped by contrast between the freedom and captivity,
while in Eat and Alive, the boundaries are drawn so tightly that freedom doesn't even exist as a concept.
Both approaches reinforce the nihilistic chaos central to his work, but they achieve it in wildly different ways.
The artificiality of the soundstage in Eat and Alive, combined with the heightened saturation of colors and dense fog,
(24:20):
it creates a setting that feels both unreal but also oppressive.
And this deliberate artifice reinforces the film's surreal tone,
which I think helps to make the audience, again, accept more of the film's bizarre logic.
By leaning into the uncanny, Eat and Alive achieves a sense of disconnection from reality.
And it's as though the film exists in a nightmare space where the rules of the real world don't apply.
(24:44):
The surreal aesthetic primes the viewer to accept the illogical events and unhinged behavior as part of this warped reality.
And that, too, is an interesting contrast with the immersive realism of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
where there the horror feels grounded, maybe even mundane.
In Eat and Alive, the film embraces that artificiality to create something intentionally theatrical and grotesque.
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That duality speaks to Hooper's range as a director.
Whether he can build tension through gritty realism or surreal artifice,
he can always craft environments that deeply unsettle the audience in ways that feel uniquely his.
His use of sound also is very interesting.
In Eat and Alive, the soundscape is less a score and more of an extension of the chaos on screen.
Hooper leans very heavily into what the French might call musique concrete.
(25:28):
Again, my apologies for French pronunciation.
But it just simply means using real noises and actual noises instead of music as the background.
He's got like animal noises, environmental noises.
There's no traditional musical score here.
It's just a constant cacophony of buzzing insects and screeching animals,
coupled with this mechanical grind of unseen contraptions or machines.
(25:50):
I mean, the auditory backdrop is as unsettling as the film's visuals.
And it's not just sound. It's like a weapon.
It's an assault on the senses that keeps you perpetually on edge.
By contrast, those jarring chords, which are the extra diegetic sounds,
are alternated with the diegetic sounds of the nearly omnipresent crackle of that cheap radio.
It plays folk and country songs that I've never heard of,
(26:14):
probably because there was no budget to stretch to license anything familiar.
But the radio adds a strange veneer of normalcy to the chaos.
It's as if the music is trying and failing to ground the film in a recognizable world.
One of the most surreal moments comes when Judd, in the middle of all this madness going on,
just sits calmly on the couch while a song about what is it like,
what a real cowboy is, is playing in the background.
(26:35):
And he plays almost as if it's an entirety.
And we cut to these scenes where his guests are struggling with their own confinement just feet away.
You know, Faye being bound on the bed.
Ashley, was that her name? They all run together.
The child trapped underneath.
It's that contrast between the faux serenity of the song
and the desperate struggles of the characters that amplifies the film's nightmarish quality.
(27:16):
It's as if the radio, a relic of civilization, becomes a mocking soundtrack
to the lawlessness and despair that unfolds here at the Starlight Hotel.
And when you add on top of this the sheer lack of motive for Judd,
it does make for an entertaining ride, if nothing else.
Judd's actions remind me of Coleridge's critique of Iago
when he says that Iago possesses what is that, motiveless malignancy.
(27:38):
Judd's killing spree doesn't seem to stem from any coherent motive,
and that sort of chaotic senselessness is ultimately terrifying.
Speaking of, you know I'm going to talk about the crocodile, at least for a minute anyway.
Now, I find it interesting. The crocodile's not evil, it's just hungry.
You know, Judd tells Roy at one point, it's all according to their instincts.
There ain't no harm done.
And that echoes a sentiment that reminded me of Jaws,
where Hooper explains that Jaws is the novel, not Jaws the film.
(28:00):
But Hooper explains to Brody, you can't go off half-cocked against a fish.
The shark isn't evil, it's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts.
Both this film and that novel remind us that nature operates on a different moral code,
or perhaps maybe no moral code at all.
The true danger lies not in the animals themselves, but in how humans react to them.
And the humans project vengeance or fear into forces that are just simply indifferent.
(28:25):
And I might add this further reinforces the nihilistic themes.
The crocodile can be seen as a stand-in for the void itself,
swallowing everything, literally and metaphorically.
It consumes life without care or remorse, much like the chaotic universe Eat and Live portrays.
And Judd's admiration for the crocodile could reflect his own surrender to meaninglessness,
aligning himself with a creature that embodies pure survival without morality.
(28:48):
Then again, perhaps we're just getting too deep into a B-movie that's really about gore and guts and TNA.
Standout performance. This is really going to be a challenge for this film.
Every person is just so weird. And I'm not knocking any acting performances, it's the script, it's the direction,
and I'm not knocking the script and the direction for that matter.
It's supposed to be nuts. But it just makes it hard to pick a winner.
I mean, the film's worth watching just for Robert Englund, to see him so smooth-faced and in such an early role.
(29:13):
He's despicable, and he plays the role with the right amount of smarmy dismissiveness mixed with redneck oafishness.
Whatever the heck William Finley's Roy is doing, barking like a dog and talking about losing an eye and all that stuff,
it just, I give up. I don't know. So weird.
All I can say is we're certainly not giving it to him.
Nor are we giving it to Kyle Richards as Angie. Angie was the name.
(29:35):
I get it, she's young and, you know, child actress, but she's so much better in her later roles, including Halloween, by the way.
But here she's just thoroughly unconvincing. The poor girl's gone through some real trauma, but her whining is just so grating.
And again, I get it. But it doesn't feel real. It's just not very well done.
Not that I could expect that much from a child of her age, but I don't know. She's definitely not getting it.
(29:56):
She's no Anna Paquin on the piano, let's put it that way.
Marilyn Burns isn't bad here, but she's a far cry from Sally Hardesty.
Mostly she just torments Roy a little to make it clear to the viewer that their marriage is not going well.
And then she screams and struggles against her restraints for almost the entire rest of the film.
True, she does that a lot in Chainsaw as well, but she's given much more to work with in that film, which makes sense as she's a central character.
(30:17):
Here she's in a supporting role and she just doesn't have the time or material to do anything with it.
Neville Brand's Judd is perhaps the most obvious choice here.
Even though we get no explanation for his manic behavior, only hints, I like that aspect of the film.
And he plays the role well, moving from an almost meek and sniveling doormat to suddenly snapping and going all medieval with his scythe.
Unless, of course, you come from his Hatties and then he's just snapping right off the bat.
(30:41):
He does not like Miss Hattie, does he?
It's not what I would call a nuanced portrayal, but it is notable.
But I think, however, I'm going to do the thing I usually do and come at this one sideways.
And I'm going to give the standout performance to Stuart Whitman.
I know him a little because he played the lead in 1972's Night of the Lepus, another animal attack film, of course.
If you don't speak fluent Latin or you don't know your Linnean textometry forwards and backwards, you should just search it up, find out what a lepis is.
(31:06):
Suffice to say, we don't normally think of leperine animals attacking unless you're Monty Python.
Nasty big pointy teeth.
Whitman has a litany of credits, though not really many others I recognize.
Seems he did quite a few Westerns and had a lot of TV guest spots.
I'm kind of guessing he has a face that doesn't exactly stand out because he tends to make multiple appearances in shows playing different roles.
(31:29):
And I guess they assume the viewer won't recognize him again.
But to put this in perspective, he had two different credits on both Simon and Simon and the A-Team.
And on Murder, she wrote, he made four appearances and played a different character every time.
In Eatin' Alive, he's got a very limited role as Sheriff Martin, but he makes the most of what he's given.
And perhaps he's the only character without some sort of cuckoo tick or bizarre mannerism, which might be hard to play when you're surrounded by such nuttiness.
(31:50):
He does try diligently to help the Wood family locate Clara, and he later accompanies Libby to make sure she gets a bite to eat.
He shows compassion. He looks out for her. Maybe, right? That's the nuance I appreciated.
He's clearly a lot older than Libby, but it's unclear whether his concern for her is simply an avuncular protectiveness or maybe just physical attraction.
He plays it so understated that it could be either. It could be both.
(32:11):
It's a small detail, one that most viewers would miss, but it adds to all the other questions that are never answered, all the deliberate vagueness of the film.
So I think it rounds out the narrative quite nicely.
It's a great earnest portrayal in a movie where almost everyone is putting teeth marks on the scenery.
And I don't just mean the crocodile. Moving into our cultural context, let's talk about early 20th century Chicago for a minute.
(32:32):
I know it makes perfect sense during a discussion of a Hicksploitation film from the 70s set in an East Texas bayou, but bear with.
You know I'm going somewhere with this.
When this newfangled technology of moving pictures came out, many U.S. municipalities began to blame the rise on crime on their presence.
Chicago took it upon itself in 1907 to form a review board, which would approve any film shown there.
(32:54):
Other cities such as New York would quickly follow suit.
But the Film Sensor Board in Chicago was run by the Chicago Police Department, and it was run by a man with the most unlikely of names.
Second Deputy Superintendent Major Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser.
It's a mouthful.
Funkhouser, along with the hand-selected board, would comb through films and send them back to the studios and detail which scenes should be cut or risk being banned in the city.
(33:21):
And it wasn't like, you know, there's no like full-blown sex scenes and stuff in this time.
Some of the scenes they banned were, I'm going to just quote these, a man cheating at cards, a woman in a bar, use of the word hell.
I mean, this is an Owls of Palace production. We can get away with saying that one.
And my personal favorite, a boxing match. Heaven forbid.
Well, it's crazy as it was later discovered that he would string together reels of the so-called footage they wanted removed and have viewing parties of the extended, quote unquote, naughty features, as they called them, in the censorship office.
(33:51):
If only there were a word for someone whose morally superior stance doesn't quite match their own behavior.
Hmm. Got to be one out there, right?
But despite Funkhouser's hypocrisy, hey, there's the word, concerns like these were widespread.
This led to, of course, the Hayes code and eventually the formation of the rating system for the MPAA.
However, it never seemed to be good enough for Chicago, which continued to have a film censorship board.
(34:13):
In the late 1960s, that board decided it could change a rating to X just for violence.
X, of course, was almost always given for sexual content and nudity before this.
And I think you see where this is going now, right?
In 1976, Eat and Alive was slapped with an X rating in Chicago.
The studio sued and the courts agreed with the studio, but appellate courts turned around and sided with the censorship board.
(34:34):
And this is even after Supreme Court cases like Friedman v. Maryland and Miller v. California,
which had supposedly weakened the arbitrary, censorious tendencies of such sanctimonious organizations,
prizing freedom of speech over pearl-clutching.
And to my friends and listeners across the pond, don't think you can just shake your head and say,
you poor yanks, still clinging to your Puritanism.
Sure, your nation beats us in health care standards, quality of life,
(34:57):
and sheer number of priceless historical artifacts looted from sovereign nations,
but you're not immune to playing history's Malvolio either.
When Eat and Alive was released for VHS in the UK under the uncut title Death Trap,
the National Viewers and Listeners Association went after it with vigor,
decrying its graphic and gratuitous violence.
Leading the charge was the infamous Mary Whitehouse,
a moral crusader who makes Phyllis Schlossfly look like a liver teen.
(35:21):
If Schlossfly was an architect of the quote-unquote traditional values movement in the US,
Whitehouse was her British counterpart, rallying against anything she deemed indecent.
Using the Obscene Publications Act of 1959,
Whitehouse's campaign led to all VHS copies of Eat and Alive being removed from retail distribution.
In doing so, the film secured its place in the notorious roster of what the UK calls Video Nasties,
(35:44):
a fascinating chapter in censorship history.
But we'll save the Nasties for another day.
I have a few of them on DVD, including Dario Argento's Inferno,
so rest assured we'll talk about that more in the future.
Just as the Chicago Film Censors Board didn't officially disband until 1984,
even if it were toothless by then,
and all the Video Nasties have since been released uncut in the UK,
it is a reminder of a persistent push to pressure filmmakers and creative folks of all types,
(36:07):
you know, playwrights, visual artists, musicians,
all of them to conform to a button-up, easy, palatable form of expression.
You know, art is meant to push boundaries, and sometimes that makes people uncomfortable.
On this very podcast, I've expressed my exasperation about certain organizations who are the vestiges,
you know, the inheritors of this push to censor.
And yeah, if you don't like something or find it objectionable, by all means, avoid it.
(36:30):
But let the rest of us have our cakes and ale.
Just a couple of quick notes of trivia.
As I mentioned before, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was very loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein,
and this film was based on reported serial killer Joe Ball.
Joe Ball was known as Bluebeard from South Texas or the Alligator Man.
He did own a bar that had live alligators as an attraction,
(36:52):
and there were several women that he murdered, including a couple of his wives.
And the legend was he would dispose of his victims' bodies by feeding them to his pet alligators.
That was never proven. They never found any flesh that they could actually deem as human.
Joe Ball was about to be arrested by the police and committed suicide before.
He was able to be questioned and confessed about any of this.
But it does make for an odd story and one certainly that Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel
(37:15):
both would have been interested in.
And just one more little piece of trivia.
Miss Hattie, we mentioned her odd makeup, that green and everything,
and that might prevent her face from igniting a spark of recognition,
but the role is played by Carolyn Jones.
And if you don't know that name, you know the name she played, Morticia Adams,
on the original Adams Family TV show.
All right, let's put this joker on a shelf in my Shelf Esteem segment.
(37:37):
Y'all know how it works by now, or if you're new, I'll tell you really quickly.
There are five shelves on my DVD Curio, so I use the bartender's model.
Top shelf gets the absolute best.
Bottom shelf gets the rot guts.
And then in between you have second shelf, mid shelf, and fourth shelf.
So Tobey Hooper is a legendary name in horror,
and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is truly a standard bearer in the genre.
As a matter of fact, in October, eight critics from Variety put together a list of top 100 horror films,
(38:02):
and Chainsaw took top honors.
Now, I strongly disagree with this.
You know, Jaws, Halloween, Psycho, probably a few more should be up there.
But I would have to say that's a top 10 film, no doubt.
His output afterwards is safe to say of varying quality,
but you can't deny his trademark nor his influence on generations of filmmakers to come.
I would never say Eatin' Alive is even sniffing at a good film.
It is an interesting one, though.
(38:24):
I think it could hold anyone's attention, even if it's just to consistently shake one's head and go,
Dude, WTF.
So this one's tough for me.
I've looked my rubric up and down, thought about the nuances, additions, alterations.
I keep thinking I'm being too generous, and then I keep thinking I'm being too harsh.
The heck with it.
It's not like I'm going to sink or elevate this film's reputation with my personal take.
So I'm placing this film on...
(38:50):
...Mid-Shelf.
I know, I even surprised myself there.
But each time I said Fourth, I kept wanting to raise it once, so I'm just finally going with my gut.
Per my rubric, Fourth Shelf is for
films that may have significant flaws or only appeal to specific tastes.
Watch if you're interested or a fan of the genre.
Now for sure, if you love horror, exploitation, or Hooper, you have to see this.
If you're a fan of Robert Englund, it's a memorable role for him.
(39:13):
If you're obsessed with animal attack fiction, well, you're probably just me.
Because nobody has that narrow of an area of interest.
But Mid-Shelf is for good films that have a few flaws or aren't quite as impactful,
but still enjoyable and worth your time.
Now, Eating Alive stretches the definition of good.
It's not good.
But it is firmly in the So Bad It's Good Camp, and I think that counts.
Its flaws paradoxically make it more entertaining,
(39:36):
and the chaotic mismatch becomes something oddly compelling.
You'll laugh, you'll cringe, you may curse me for recommending it.
But when it's all over, I think you'll be glad you've ventured into this surreal swamp of insanity
that is this cacophonous symphony of the grotesque.
Well, you know Reel It, that other podcast I have, with my colleague, the known Perel McKenzie?
(39:57):
Our upcoming January episode is going to be all sorts of literary and respectable, unlike today's,
as we're looking into Gene Reese's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and both in 1993 and 2006, film adaptations.
Yeah, on Reel It, we proudly fly our academic flag while still trying to remain entertaining.
Shelf criticism, on the other hand, is mostly just me trying to sound erudite in order to mask the fact that
(40:18):
my taste in film is mostly trash cinema.
And you don't believe me? Next week, I'm revisiting a film that I saw once nearly a decade ago.
It was neo-exploitation, maybe pseudo-exploitation, maybe quasi-exploitation.
I don't know, maybe I'm just overthinking my prefixes.
It was not quite as nuts as Eating Alive, but it does have its moments of what did I get myself into.
I guess after a month of Christmas films and that anal fissure of a movie that is Christmas Vacation 2, Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure,
(40:45):
I just want to do what I want to do.
And when I saw this DVD the other day, I thought, I need to re-watch.
So next week, we're going to rip down the dusty back roads of another piece of Southern Gothic,
maybe borderline Hicksploitation, with a 2012 film, Baytown Outlaws.
The film is currently streaming on Plex, Pluto, and Tubi, so check it out.
If you do watch it and want to talk about it, want to hear me highlight any specific scene that jumped out at you,
(41:07):
want to curse me for telling you to watch Eating Alive and you watched it and hated it thoroughly,
email me. My email is steven at ShelfCriticism.com. Remember that's Steven with a PH.
And you can also, of course, find us on social media at ShelfCriticism.
And with that said, until next time, DVD aficionados, remember to treat yourself to a little shelf indulgence of your own.
(41:30):
Amelia, sing us all.
Shelf Criticism is an Owls of Palace production.
This podcast is in no way connected with the educational institutions the host is employed by.
(41:52):
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the host and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other organization with which he is affiliated.
Most images displayed are public domain.
Images and stills from films, descriptions of scenes, and passages from books are used for educational and critical purposes and not for profit and therefore fall under the terms of fair use.
(42:22):
Self-portained heroes who call themselves cowboys, they don't make a hair on a real cowboy's chest.
Created by Toby Hooper, maker of the screen sensation, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
(00:07):
Marty Rushton presents a new horror classic, Eaten Alive.
Welcome to Shelf Criticism. Meet your host, Stephen, a scholar of literature and film by day,
(00:32):
and by night, a cinematic archaeologist with a penchant for everything from art house to popular to out-white trash cinema.
Over the past quarter century, Stephen has amassed an eclectic DVD collection,
now occupying five shells of a curio cabinet in his living room.
Each week, he bravely selects one of these titles to dissect.
Join him as he unearths everything from obscure gems to cinematic missteps.
(00:58):
From blockbuster hits to forgotten flops, each film gets the critical once over it probably doesn't deserve but will absolutely receive.
So grab your popcorn and settle in.
It's time to dive into the diverse world of shelf criticism.
(01:19):
Welcome to the first episode of Shelf Criticism in 2025.
All December we took a side exploration into Christmas films, and may I just say, I'm glad to have that out of the way for at least 11 months.
Of course, we also took another detour with a couple of bonus episodes.
Though Christmas is come and gone, if you want to hear me talk about the worst film in the history of cinema,
and I'm neither joking nor giving into hyperbole,
(01:40):
you can check out my special Beside My Shelf episode covering National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2, Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure.
Just trust me, do not watch the film. I'm still recovering from that watch.
Also, if you haven't taken a listen to my year-end review, I encourage you to do that as well.
You'll get to hear my assessment of the year that was in film, find out who won each category of the new Shelfies,
get my top 5 films of the year, and hear a fun Owls of Palace blooper reel.
(02:04):
But as for us today, I'm going back to the Shelf.
As many of you know, the area of scholarship that I focus on is animal attack fiction, both in print and celluloid.
If you didn't know that about me, going back through the titles I've covered now might make some sense to you.
Oh, I get it now.
Not only did Mackenzie and I cover Jaws and the Birds on Reel It, but I have said a lot about sharks on this podcast too,
whether that's spending too much time talking about the tiger shark in Into the Blue,
(02:28):
or going gaga talking about the ones swimming around the Colosseum in Gladiator 2.
I've also done Rogue for this podcast, that's the 2020 Lion Attack film,
not to be confused with the 2007 Crocodile Attack film by the same name,
though that one also is on my shelf and may be covered at some point.
Today's Shelf Pick, however, will also be about a crocodile.
No, it's not Blackwater or Blackwater Abyss, both of which are also on my DVD shelf.
(02:51):
It's also not Croc, Crocodile, Dark Age, or Primeval.
Oh, and Lake Placid, that was a croc too, right? Not a gator.
Man, I've got a lot of Croc attacks on my shelf.
This would be the finer Killer Crocodile film that I own, I think.
1976's Eaten Alive.
I'm actually going to talk about how I came to own this Shelf Pick before I describe the DVD case and its cover copy,
(03:12):
and you'll see why this makes sense in just a moment.
This is an Arrow Films Special Edition.
I think I mentioned them during my episode of Red Rings of Fear as they released a remastered copy of that Yalo.
Arrow Film is a British distributor specializing in reissuing cult classics, or sometimes films with no status whatsoever.
Their work with the Italian Giali, for instance, is unparalleled,
introducing those films to a new generation that might not otherwise have ever encountered them.
(03:36):
Beyond Giali, Arrow preserves, remasters, and reissues a wide range of films,
primarily foreign language, arthouse, or horror, with a particular focus on the 1970s and 1980s.
Essentially, they're a boon for a certain slice of cinephile.
I just so happen to exemplify that slice, the collector with a penchant for lesser known and often lesser quality films,
or around here what we just call trash cinema.
(03:57):
Arrow's remastering work is top notch, but one of their standout features for me is the reimagined case wraps,
and this is where it gets really cool.
So the case wraps are double-sided.
On the front side, they have a new artist representation of the film that has never been seen before,
and then if you remove that insert and flip it over, you'll see the original cover art perfectly preserved.
It's a small touch, but for collectors like me, it's a delightful bonus, offering the best of both worlds,
(04:22):
modern design and nostalgic authenticity.
Many of them also come with recreated lobby cards or other promotional materials.
Most valuable to a film scholar such as myself are the bonus features,
such as interviews with some of the remaining cast and crew.
Often they'll even include interviews with film scholars or small booklets with essays written by some of them,
not that they've ever called me.
Obviously, I am on Arrow's email list, and when I saw they had a special sale going last November, presumably for Christmas,
(04:49):
I decided to get myself a few gifts instead.
I remember seeing Eatin' Alive somewhere in my younger days.
I can't be for certain where, but I'm sure it was one of those late night movies that played on weekends
when I liked to step late and veg out to bad B-films on the boob tube.
I didn't recall much, as this had to be over three decades ago.
I'm certain this is before I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I had never even heard the name Toby Hooper,
(05:10):
even if I probably had seen a few of his other films, certainly Poltergeist.
It's not like most teenagers really pay close attention to the directors anyway, though.
I had also certainly seen Nightmare on Elm Street, but I don't know that I made the connection that Robert Englund was the same guy who plays Buck in this film.
He looks rather different without the makeup and the trademark sweater, after all.
What I did remember was this film is freaking bonkers.
As I began researching animal horror cinema, of course I came across this film,
(05:35):
and it was then I realized the famed director helmed it and the future horror icon starred in it.
It was on the need to watch list for a while, so when I saw that film on sale on Arrow's site, it immediately went into my cart.
Somehow it still took me over a month and a half to get to it, but as I was planning Shelf Criticism Season 2,
I knew this was going to be one of my choices.
I could do double duty, furthering my academic research while also making another episode of this podcast.
(05:57):
So now let's go back around and look at this DVD and talk about it.
The newly reimagined cover art is quite nice.
We've got a close-up of the crocodilian slitted eye.
Around one side is Judd's trademark scythe.
Through the slit of the eye, Clara is running through with great attention to detail.
She's wearing the very dress she wears in the film, and it's all seamlessly blended together in a perfect mash-up.
It's also surrounded by faded newspapers.
(06:19):
You see words like bloody, bae, little, horror.
A lot of other words. Oh, there's Buck, I see.
There's a faded sketch of Judd. It's a lot of detail here.
What is the word? Alligator.
It's really interesting. It's also a sort of a greenish tint that plays perfectly on that reptilian idea.
If you take it out and look on the other side, the cover art is the original, as I said before.
And this is an illustration of the croc, jaws open and tail whipping.
(06:42):
Behind him, knee-deep in the water, stands Judd, seemingly screaming as he swings his scythe.
Try saying that three times fast.
There's a random hand sticking out of the water to their left.
At the top, it reads, meet the maniac and his friend.
At the bottom, we're told, together they make the greatest team in the history of mass slaughter in...
ellipsis... eaten alive!
(07:04):
In all caps with an exclamation point.
Incidentally, there was an Italian film made in the early 1980s.
I think it was 1982, that is generally translated as eaten alive, and it has an exclamation point after it.
The Reimagine cover that I'm looking at does not have the exclamation points, but the original does.
And it just makes me wonder if that Italian film was ripping it off,
because you know, Italian films never rip off anything.
(07:26):
Look up the film Great White if you want to see the worst jaws rip off ever.
On the DVD back, the cover copy is the same on both sides.
It reads, nearly a decade before he donned Freddy Krueger's famous red and green sweater,
horror icon Robert Englund delivered a supremely sleazy performance in Eaten Alive,
another essay in taut southern terror from Tobe Hooper, director of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
(07:48):
Notice here that they're playing up Englund, who was a virtual unknown at the point he starred in it, I suppose,
and they're also giving Hooper his due.
It continues, deep in the Louisiana bayou...
I thought it was Texas, I don't know for sure, I don't know if they ever say,
but I do believe it's supposed to be eastern Texas, we'll ignore that.
Deep in the Louisiana bayou sits the ramshackle Starlight Hotel,
(08:09):
destination of choice for those who like to check in but not check out.
Presided over by the bumbling mumbling Judd and his pet croc, which he keeps in a large pond out front,
the patron of this particular establishment may seem like a good-natured old southern gent,
but he has a mean temper on him and a mighty large scythe to boot.
Oozing atmosphere from its every pore, the entire film was shot on a soundstage at the famous Raleigh Studios,
(08:33):
which lends it a queasy, claustrophobic feel.
Eaten Alive matches the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for sheer insanity
and even drafts in Chainsaw Star Marilyn Burns as the terrorized...
by the way, terrorized is spelled with an S instead of a Z, Arrow is a British company after all...
even drafts in Chainsaw Star Marilyn Burns as the terrorized woman in peril alongside William Findlay as Mel Ferrer.
(08:56):
So there's your synopsis. The special features? Oh, they're numerous. I mean, it's Arrow, right?
So here we go. First thing it does is it notes, in all caps, director-approved special edition contents.
Yes, Hooper was still alive, apparently, when they were at least working on this.
Brand new 2K transfer from the original camera negative approved by director Toby Hooper.
I feel like we just heard that, didn't we?
(09:19):
High definition Blu-ray 1080p and standard definition DVD presentations.
Original mono audio uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray.
By the way, for a little bit of technical note here if you're curious, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation.
That just means the Blu-ray features the film's original single channel or mono audio track,
which is preserved at its highest possible quality without any compression.
(09:40):
It's a treat, I guess, for cinephiles who value authenticity and clarity in their film collection.
It also means if you have a nice surround sound system, you don't really need to worry about turning it on.
Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Audio commentator with co-writer and producer Marty Rustam.
Makeup artist Craig Reardon and stars Roberta Collins, William Findlay, and Kyle Richards.
New introduction to the film by director Toby Hooper.
(10:03):
Blood on the Bayou, brand new interview with Hooper.
Gator Bait, a brand new interview with star Janice Blythe.
Monsters and Metaphors, a brand new interview with makeup artist Craig Reardon.
The Gator Creator, archive interview with Hooper.
My Name is Buck, star Robert Englund discusses his acting career.
Five Minutes with Marilyn Burns, and for some reason the F in five is actually the number five.
(10:26):
I don't know.
The Star of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre talks about working on Eatin' Alive.
The Butcher of Elmendorf, the legend of Joe Ball, the story of the South Texas bar owner whom Eatin' Alive is loosely based.
We'll talk about that a little later.
Original theatrical trailers for the film under its various titles.
Eatin' Alive, Death Trap, Starlight Slaughter, and Horror Hotel.
US TV and radio spots.
(10:47):
Alternate opening titles.
Behind the scenes slideshow.
Stills and promo material gallery.
Audience comment cards.
The reversible sleeve featuring original artwork and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullen.
And before you even ask, no I did not get through all of those materials.
I did look at some, but there's just not enough hours in the day.
I know some of my other arrow features where I'm really really interested in the film.
(11:10):
You know I may really go in deep with those.
And I might with this one too if it continues in my research and pops up at some point in that monograph that I'm apparently never going to get written much less published.
I may come back to some of this. At least I have it available if I ever need it.
We'll get into Critical Reception.
The film holds a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 48 on Metacritic, but there's a quick caveat here.
Rotten Tomatoes is working off only 17 reviews and Metacritic a paltry 6.
(11:34):
More frustrating is there doesn't seem to be any contemporary reviews with the film.
Granted it did fly under a lot of folks radar.
Even Chainsaw grew into its esteemed place in the horror canon of course.
But it did make a stink to say the least.
Someone had to have reviewed it back in 1976.
And I found a few snippets here and there, but good luck finding a full review.
Instead the reviews began around 2000 when the film got its first DVD release.
(11:56):
A few more crop up in 2007 when the 2-disc DVD Special Edition came out.
And then the rest are from 2015 when, you guessed it, the Arrow Edition I have came out.
It's also baffling to think that release that I bought just two months ago is actually almost a decade old.
It can't really be 2025 can it?
I mean just a couple years ago weren't we still in the 1990s?
Sure seems that way.
(12:18):
Anyhow with over 2500 user reviews the popcorn meter keeps eating alive in virtually the same spot.
30%.
Likewise Metacritic's users have it at a 4.5.
Though it should be strongly noted here that there are only 4.
Which is hardly a fair sample set.
For my critical review I'm going to look at the short but well written post from Nick Shager.
I don't immediately recognize the name but it has a familiar ring to it.
(12:39):
And looking I see that he's a Rotten Tomatoes top critic.
I don't think I've ever used him on this podcast.
But his blog has a ton of reviews he's written from 2004 to 2011.
And it looks like he's written for the likes of the Daily Beast, Variety, Esquire and others.
This one comes from 2007.
And if he is doing this due to the DVD issue of the year before.
He makes no mention of the disc or special features or transfer or remaster or the like.
(13:01):
It's just a straight up film review.
But either way I'm just going to read it in full because it's quite short.
Dismissed and forgotten almost immediately upon its theatrical release.
Eatin' Alive predictably suffered from being Tobey Hooper's follow up to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
30 years later however that fate seems the product not just of unfair expectations.
But also of an audience unwillingness to accept its aggressively abstract argument in favor of nihilism.
(13:24):
My name is Buck and I'm raring to...
Yeah, not going to say that word.
Alza Palace productions are clean, remember?
But that's what says Robert Englund's something obsessed rural degenerate.
I'm not going to say this word either.
It's a particular paraphilia that Buck is fond of that the women he tries to do it on are not.
And I'm just going to let you look at that on your own if you want to.
(13:47):
Again, I don't shy away from topics like this but I'd just rather not mention that part.
So anyway, he's that obsessed rural degenerate as Hooper's camera stares at his jeans encased crotch.
A perfectly scuzzy opening moment for a film that celebrates unbridled sadism and random cruelty.
Without the comforting filters of narrative coherence, character development, or concessions to realism.
(14:08):
Alas, while its rejection of standard soothing conventions is admirable,
Eaton Live's off-the-wall hybridization of Tennessee Williams, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho specifically,
and Lucio Fulci is more often than not sloppy.
To its credit, the film's opaque story in which events pile up on each other with no discernible logic,
as well as chintzy effects and motel set create an unreal atmosphere that augments its grotesque portrait of backwater southern culture.
(14:32):
And as Judd, the scythe-wielding motel proprietor who likes to feed guests, including TCM's Marilyn Burns,
to his laughably phony-looking killer crocodile,
Neville Brand delivers a spitting, blazing-eyed performance full of muttered scripture, denunciations of prostitution, and maniacal grins.
Yet any hint that the evildoer's madness stems from naughty psychosexual issues remains as underdeveloped as every other aspect of Hooper's sophomore effort.
(14:57):
Which earns points for its uncompromising vileness and pessimism.
But imparting the impression that it was slapped together without so much thought or care
never finds a way to make its hallucinatory horror frightening or as bleakly amusing as his similar, subsequent, and superior the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
Okay, there's so much to unpack here.
Shager knows how to pack a lot of detail into his sentences, but let's start with a claim of nihilism.
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Many B-movies of the 70s embody this philosophy shaped by a general sense of disillusionment.
There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, and other crises that eroded public faith and institutions.
While even foundational societal structures like the family were under strain, with divorce rates skyrocketing.
Violence felt omnipresent, were the due to the televised horrors of Vietnam or the reality of rising crime in urban centers.
(15:44):
This societal unease permeates a film like Eatin' Alive.
Judd's prosthetic leg suggests a military background, possibly hinting at the psychological toll of war.
The breakdown of the family is evident in Harvey and Libby's search for runaway Clara, who's ended up working in a brothel.
These fractured relationships reflect a broader sense of societal collapse.
Perhaps most strikingly, Eatin' Alive exemplifies a rise of genre or subgenre, technically, exploitation.
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It's an exploitation type of film that thrives on the grotesqueness of rural or backward settings.
Like the Southern Gothic, and it is sort of Southern Gothic, it explores isolation, natural dangers, the decay of societal norms in remote areas.
While the urban horror of the 70s often centered on themes of urban decay and violence, which is captured in films like think of Taxi Driver, Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham 123,
(16:32):
Hicksploitation turned its lens to the countryside.
Films like Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, Hooper Zone, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, those depict rural areas as equally perilous, populated by unhinged characters and remnants of a decayed past.
You see the abandoned homes, the failing farms, the forgotten towns all along the landscape.
Hicksploitation thrived on the growing divide between urban and rural America.
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Just as urban areas were perceived as dangerous and anarchic, rural areas became alien and lawless in the public imagination.
These films play on the fear of the other, cultural and geographical differences exaggerated into grotesque caricatures.
In the 1970s, cultural upheavals like Vietnam, Watergate, The Oil Crisis, those left many questioning societal stability.
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And urban horror explored the collapse of safety in quote unquote civilized spaces, while rural horror delved into the chaos of the untamed world.
Together they painted a picture of society where danger lurked everywhere.
You're not safe in any place, the city, the country.
With this thought of nihilism, we can see where Shager is going with his claim that Eat and Alive is, quote,
a film that celebrates unbridled sadism and random cruelty without the comforting filters of narrative coherence, character development, or concession to realism.
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And I can't say that I disagree with any of that.
Unlike Chainsaw, which was terrifying but more suggestive with its gore, Eat and Alive revels in it.
That's not to say any of it is convincing.
The fake blood is way too bright to be believed, and there aren't many instances of truly gruesome practical effects.
Shager mentions Lucio Fulci, but there's nothing quite like what happens to the splintered door and that eyeball in Zombie.
(18:05):
Then again, there's pretty much nothing in cinema that matches that, at least until Hostel came along, and you know what?
Let's just leave the eyeballs out of this, folks.
Those things just make me shudder thinking about them.
The point is, though, that violence in Eat and Alive is not merely suggestive.
It's shown on screen, and as much as budget and technology allows, it's pretty gruesome.
It also does seem that a lot of this cruelty is focused on females.
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Yes, three of the four characters who actually meet their untimely end are male, with Clara being the only woman who falls victim.
However, as with Sally Hardacy and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the survivors are going to have immense trauma scarring them forever.
Indeed, one of the few snippets of a contemporaneous review I could find, one by Martin Auti, says that that very violence suggests sexism remains an unconscious force in exploitation cinema.
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He could be right. It could be simple outright misogyny.
It could be simply putting the so-called, quote-unquote, weaker sex in prolonged peril to up the ante on suspense and tension in the film.
Or it could possibly be a sly, subversive criticism of the way women are treated by society.
The way so many exploitation films are, attempting to have their cliched cake and eat it too, I kind of think it might be all three.
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Either way, yeah, cruel film. Yeah, there's little in the way of narrative.
Events pile up with no discernible logic, as Shager puts it. And there is no character development. Why does Judd do what he does? Who knows?
As I stated, it could be trauma from being a veteran.
There's the enmity between him and Miss Hattie, who runs the House of Irrepute down the road,
and the way he reacts when he realizes Clara has come from there, which might suggest, as Shager mentioned, some sort of psychosexual issues.
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But while it's hinted at, there's no motivation really revealed.
Judd does vacillate, sometimes seems to be remorseful or at least feel some guilt.
But he's hardly a three-dimensional character. The narrative is not going for that.
As a matter of fact, when it comes to characterization, all we really get are weird quirks and assentrincities of people who move in and out of the film.
Like, why is Miss Hattie wearing that odd green makeup?
What makes Buck the entitled little snot that he is?
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And Roy. Can we just stop and talk about Roy for a moment?
You know, I get that he and Faye are having marital problems.
I get they just watch the family pet get eaten by a crocodile, which is a very disturbing scene.
Yeah, not to spoil anything, but does the dog die? It's a 70s film. It happened more often than not.
Anyway, so they've just seen that happen. And that's going to have everybody on edge.
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But what is it with the scene in the hotel room?
The way he like reaches towards Faye like he's Darth Vader trying to use the force to choke her.
And then he says something about her taking his eye, though he's clearly got both of them.
And then he starts barking like a dog.
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
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While I'm at it, why does Faye wear a wig? Why does Angie have a brace on one leg?
Why did Claire run away from home in the first place?
Why am I asking these questions as if it matters?
The film clearly doesn't care about answering them.
And it's this lack of explanation, the randomness of events and characters that reinforces the film's nihilistic ethos.
Eatin' Alive doesn't seek to provide meaning or resolution.
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Instead, it immerses viewers in a surreal, chaotic nightmare where nothing makes sense.
Everything hurts. And isn't that, in its own way, the point?
And this is where I take issue with Shager, who gets, quote,
the impression that it was slapped together without much thought or care.
It's evident to me that Hooper's taken a lot of care, a lot of attention to detail.
Heck, maybe some of the craziness to a viewer made sense in his own vision. I don't know.
(21:39):
But after all, you know, David Lynch does some back crap insane stuff in his films.
And I mean that as a compliment, by the way. And he gets hailed as an auteur.
Now, I'm not comparing this film to Mulholland Drive by any stretch.
But it does evoke a strange otherworldliness in a similar way.
Like a good Lynch film where logic and verisimilitude fade far away, dissolve and quite forget,
like a Keatsian nightingale. It's really about the mood it evokes.
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And this one's a fever dream. If you can walk away from this one and not feel icky.
I mean, I worry about your eternal soul, my friend.
Which brings me to my take. I'm just going to come out and say it.
This is one of those genuinely bad films that I can still manage to like.
Striking that balance is no small feat. You can't take yourself too seriously.
But you also can't go completely off the rails, especially for a horror film like the one Hooper's crafting here.
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You got to have just the right mix of camp and genuine weirdness.
It's all about hitting that sardonic sweet spot where the humor lands in a way that makes audience chuckle,
but also feel a little bad for laughing at it.
And the film knows exactly where that line is, and it straddles it masterfully.
By the time Roy starts barking like a dog and then storms off to shoot the crocodile,
you just think, yeah, that tracks.
(22:47):
By then we've been bombarded with so much weirdness and absurdity
that it just feels like a natural extension of the film's logic, or maybe lack thereof is more accurate.
It's not really the population of weird characters, however.
I mean, that does contribute.
But much has been said by other critics about the difference in this and, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The contrast between the sprawling sun-bleached Texas countryside in Chainsaw
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and the claustrophobic chaos of the Sawyer House is one of those films' most striking features.
That juxtaposition makes the Sawyer House feel like a trap,
like a grotesque, inescapable layer hidden within an otherwise open and endless landscape.
By comparison, Eat and Alive flips that script entirely.
The soundstage exteriors immediately establish a different kind of unease.
Even the outdoor settings feel unnatural and hemmed in with those painted backdrops and artificial lighting,
(23:37):
which create this surreal, almost dreamlike atmosphere.
The confinement is palpable, and it turns the entire world of the film into a swampy pressure cooker.
And this makes Judd's hotel not just a setting, but a psychological space where there's no reprieve from the danger of the madness.
It's as if Hooper is playing with the idea of space itself.
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In Chainsaw, you're trapped by contrast between the freedom and captivity,
while in Eat and Alive, the boundaries are drawn so tightly that freedom doesn't even exist as a concept.
Both approaches reinforce the nihilistic chaos central to his work, but they achieve it in wildly different ways.
The artificiality of the soundstage in Eat and Alive, combined with the heightened saturation of colors and dense fog,
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it creates a setting that feels both unreal but also oppressive.
And this deliberate artifice reinforces the film's surreal tone,
which I think helps to make the audience, again, accept more of the film's bizarre logic.
By leaning into the uncanny, Eat and Alive achieves a sense of disconnection from reality.
And it's as though the film exists in a nightmare space where the rules of the real world don't apply.
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The surreal aesthetic primes the viewer to accept the illogical events and unhinged behavior as part of this warped reality.
And that, too, is an interesting contrast with the immersive realism of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
where there the horror feels grounded, maybe even mundane.
In Eat and Alive, the film embraces that artificiality to create something intentionally theatrical and grotesque.
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That duality speaks to Hooper's range as a director.
Whether he can build tension through gritty realism or surreal artifice,
he can always craft environments that deeply unsettle the audience in ways that feel uniquely his.
His use of sound also is very interesting.
In Eat and Alive, the soundscape is less a score and more of an extension of the chaos on screen.
Hooper leans very heavily into what the French might call musique concrete.
(25:28):
Again, my apologies for French pronunciation.
But it just simply means using real noises and actual noises instead of music as the background.
He's got like animal noises, environmental noises.
There's no traditional musical score here.
It's just a constant cacophony of buzzing insects and screeching animals,
coupled with this mechanical grind of unseen contraptions or machines.
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I mean, the auditory backdrop is as unsettling as the film's visuals.
And it's not just sound. It's like a weapon.
It's an assault on the senses that keeps you perpetually on edge.
By contrast, those jarring chords, which are the extra diegetic sounds,
are alternated with the diegetic sounds of the nearly omnipresent crackle of that cheap radio.
It plays folk and country songs that I've never heard of,
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probably because there was no budget to stretch to license anything familiar.
But the radio adds a strange veneer of normalcy to the chaos.
It's as if the music is trying and failing to ground the film in a recognizable world.
One of the most surreal moments comes when Judd, in the middle of all this madness going on,
just sits calmly on the couch while a song about what is it like,
what a real cowboy is, is playing in the background.
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And he plays almost as if it's an entirety.
And we cut to these scenes where his guests are struggling with their own confinement just feet away.
You know, Faye being bound on the bed.
Ashley, was that her name? They all run together.
The child trapped underneath.
It's that contrast between the faux serenity of the song
and the desperate struggles of the characters that amplifies the film's nightmarish quality.
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It's as if the radio, a relic of civilization, becomes a mocking soundtrack
to the lawlessness and despair that unfolds here at the Starlight Hotel.
And when you add on top of this the sheer lack of motive for Judd,
it does make for an entertaining ride, if nothing else.
Judd's actions remind me of Coleridge's critique of Iago
when he says that Iago possesses what is that, motiveless malignancy.
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Judd's killing spree doesn't seem to stem from any coherent motive,
and that sort of chaotic senselessness is ultimately terrifying.
Speaking of, you know I'm going to talk about the crocodile, at least for a minute anyway.
Now, I find it interesting. The crocodile's not evil, it's just hungry.
You know, Judd tells Roy at one point, it's all according to their instincts.
There ain't no harm done.
And that echoes a sentiment that reminded me of Jaws,
where Hooper explains that Jaws is the novel, not Jaws the film.
(28:00):
But Hooper explains to Brody, you can't go off half-cocked against a fish.
The shark isn't evil, it's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts.
Both this film and that novel remind us that nature operates on a different moral code,
or perhaps maybe no moral code at all.
The true danger lies not in the animals themselves, but in how humans react to them.
And the humans project vengeance or fear into forces that are just simply indifferent.
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And I might add this further reinforces the nihilistic themes.
The crocodile can be seen as a stand-in for the void itself,
swallowing everything, literally and metaphorically.
It consumes life without care or remorse, much like the chaotic universe Eat and Live portrays.
And Judd's admiration for the crocodile could reflect his own surrender to meaninglessness,
aligning himself with a creature that embodies pure survival without morality.
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Then again, perhaps we're just getting too deep into a B-movie that's really about gore and guts and TNA.
Standout performance. This is really going to be a challenge for this film.
Every person is just so weird. And I'm not knocking any acting performances, it's the script, it's the direction,
and I'm not knocking the script and the direction for that matter.
It's supposed to be nuts. But it just makes it hard to pick a winner.
I mean, the film's worth watching just for Robert Englund, to see him so smooth-faced and in such an early role.
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He's despicable, and he plays the role with the right amount of smarmy dismissiveness mixed with redneck oafishness.
Whatever the heck William Finley's Roy is doing, barking like a dog and talking about losing an eye and all that stuff,
it just, I give up. I don't know. So weird.
All I can say is we're certainly not giving it to him.
Nor are we giving it to Kyle Richards as Angie. Angie was the name.
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I get it, she's young and, you know, child actress, but she's so much better in her later roles, including Halloween, by the way.
But here she's just thoroughly unconvincing. The poor girl's gone through some real trauma, but her whining is just so grating.
And again, I get it. But it doesn't feel real. It's just not very well done.
Not that I could expect that much from a child of her age, but I don't know. She's definitely not getting it.
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She's no Anna Paquin on the piano, let's put it that way.
Marilyn Burns isn't bad here, but she's a far cry from Sally Hardesty.
Mostly she just torments Roy a little to make it clear to the viewer that their marriage is not going well.
And then she screams and struggles against her restraints for almost the entire rest of the film.
True, she does that a lot in Chainsaw as well, but she's given much more to work with in that film, which makes sense as she's a central character.
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Here she's in a supporting role and she just doesn't have the time or material to do anything with it.
Neville Brand's Judd is perhaps the most obvious choice here.
Even though we get no explanation for his manic behavior, only hints, I like that aspect of the film.
And he plays the role well, moving from an almost meek and sniveling doormat to suddenly snapping and going all medieval with his scythe.
Unless, of course, you come from his Hatties and then he's just snapping right off the bat.
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He does not like Miss Hattie, does he?
It's not what I would call a nuanced portrayal, but it is notable.
But I think, however, I'm going to do the thing I usually do and come at this one sideways.
And I'm going to give the standout performance to Stuart Whitman.
I know him a little because he played the lead in 1972's Night of the Lepus, another animal attack film, of course.
If you don't speak fluent Latin or you don't know your Linnean textometry forwards and backwards, you should just search it up, find out what a lepis is.
(31:06):
Suffice to say, we don't normally think of leperine animals attacking unless you're Monty Python.
Nasty big pointy teeth.
Whitman has a litany of credits, though not really many others I recognize.
Seems he did quite a few Westerns and had a lot of TV guest spots.
I'm kind of guessing he has a face that doesn't exactly stand out because he tends to make multiple appearances in shows playing different roles.
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And I guess they assume the viewer won't recognize him again.
But to put this in perspective, he had two different credits on both Simon and Simon and the A-Team.
And on Murder, she wrote, he made four appearances and played a different character every time.
In Eatin' Alive, he's got a very limited role as Sheriff Martin, but he makes the most of what he's given.
And perhaps he's the only character without some sort of cuckoo tick or bizarre mannerism, which might be hard to play when you're surrounded by such nuttiness.
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He does try diligently to help the Wood family locate Clara, and he later accompanies Libby to make sure she gets a bite to eat.
He shows compassion. He looks out for her. Maybe, right? That's the nuance I appreciated.
He's clearly a lot older than Libby, but it's unclear whether his concern for her is simply an avuncular protectiveness or maybe just physical attraction.
He plays it so understated that it could be either. It could be both.
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It's a small detail, one that most viewers would miss, but it adds to all the other questions that are never answered, all the deliberate vagueness of the film.
So I think it rounds out the narrative quite nicely.
It's a great earnest portrayal in a movie where almost everyone is putting teeth marks on the scenery.
And I don't just mean the crocodile. Moving into our cultural context, let's talk about early 20th century Chicago for a minute.
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I know it makes perfect sense during a discussion of a Hicksploitation film from the 70s set in an East Texas bayou, but bear with.
You know I'm going somewhere with this.
When this newfangled technology of moving pictures came out, many U.S. municipalities began to blame the rise on crime on their presence.
Chicago took it upon itself in 1907 to form a review board, which would approve any film shown there.
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Other cities such as New York would quickly follow suit.
But the Film Sensor Board in Chicago was run by the Chicago Police Department, and it was run by a man with the most unlikely of names.
Second Deputy Superintendent Major Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser.
It's a mouthful.
Funkhouser, along with the hand-selected board, would comb through films and send them back to the studios and detail which scenes should be cut or risk being banned in the city.
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And it wasn't like, you know, there's no like full-blown sex scenes and stuff in this time.
Some of the scenes they banned were, I'm going to just quote these, a man cheating at cards, a woman in a bar, use of the word hell.
I mean, this is an Owls of Palace production. We can get away with saying that one.
And my personal favorite, a boxing match. Heaven forbid.
Well, it's crazy as it was later discovered that he would string together reels of the so-called footage they wanted removed and have viewing parties of the extended, quote unquote, naughty features, as they called them, in the censorship office.
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If only there were a word for someone whose morally superior stance doesn't quite match their own behavior.
Hmm. Got to be one out there, right?
But despite Funkhouser's hypocrisy, hey, there's the word, concerns like these were widespread.
This led to, of course, the Hayes code and eventually the formation of the rating system for the MPAA.
However, it never seemed to be good enough for Chicago, which continued to have a film censorship board.
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In the late 1960s, that board decided it could change a rating to X just for violence.
X, of course, was almost always given for sexual content and nudity before this.
And I think you see where this is going now, right?
In 1976, Eat and Alive was slapped with an X rating in Chicago.
The studio sued and the courts agreed with the studio, but appellate courts turned around and sided with the censorship board.
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And this is even after Supreme Court cases like Friedman v. Maryland and Miller v. California,
which had supposedly weakened the arbitrary, censorious tendencies of such sanctimonious organizations,
prizing freedom of speech over pearl-clutching.
And to my friends and listeners across the pond, don't think you can just shake your head and say,
you poor yanks, still clinging to your Puritanism.
Sure, your nation beats us in health care standards, quality of life,
(34:57):
and sheer number of priceless historical artifacts looted from sovereign nations,
but you're not immune to playing history's Malvolio either.
When Eat and Alive was released for VHS in the UK under the uncut title Death Trap,
the National Viewers and Listeners Association went after it with vigor,
decrying its graphic and gratuitous violence.
Leading the charge was the infamous Mary Whitehouse,
a moral crusader who makes Phyllis Schlossfly look like a liver teen.
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If Schlossfly was an architect of the quote-unquote traditional values movement in the US,
Whitehouse was her British counterpart, rallying against anything she deemed indecent.
Using the Obscene Publications Act of 1959,
Whitehouse's campaign led to all VHS copies of Eat and Alive being removed from retail distribution.
In doing so, the film secured its place in the notorious roster of what the UK calls Video Nasties,
(35:44):
a fascinating chapter in censorship history.
But we'll save the Nasties for another day.
I have a few of them on DVD, including Dario Argento's Inferno,
so rest assured we'll talk about that more in the future.
Just as the Chicago Film Censors Board didn't officially disband until 1984,
even if it were toothless by then,
and all the Video Nasties have since been released uncut in the UK,
it is a reminder of a persistent push to pressure filmmakers and creative folks of all types,
(36:07):
you know, playwrights, visual artists, musicians,
all of them to conform to a button-up, easy, palatable form of expression.
You know, art is meant to push boundaries, and sometimes that makes people uncomfortable.
On this very podcast, I've expressed my exasperation about certain organizations who are the vestiges,
you know, the inheritors of this push to censor.
And yeah, if you don't like something or find it objectionable, by all means, avoid it.
(36:30):
But let the rest of us have our cakes and ale.
Just a couple of quick notes of trivia.
As I mentioned before, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was very loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein,
and this film was based on reported serial killer Joe Ball.
Joe Ball was known as Bluebeard from South Texas or the Alligator Man.
He did own a bar that had live alligators as an attraction,
(36:52):
and there were several women that he murdered, including a couple of his wives.
And the legend was he would dispose of his victims' bodies by feeding them to his pet alligators.
That was never proven. They never found any flesh that they could actually deem as human.
Joe Ball was about to be arrested by the police and committed suicide before.
He was able to be questioned and confessed about any of this.
But it does make for an odd story and one certainly that Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel
(37:15):
both would have been interested in.
And just one more little piece of trivia.
Miss Hattie, we mentioned her odd makeup, that green and everything,
and that might prevent her face from igniting a spark of recognition,
but the role is played by Carolyn Jones.
And if you don't know that name, you know the name she played, Morticia Adams,
on the original Adams Family TV show.
All right, let's put this joker on a shelf in my Shelf Esteem segment.
(37:37):
Y'all know how it works by now, or if you're new, I'll tell you really quickly.
There are five shelves on my DVD Curio, so I use the bartender's model.
Top shelf gets the absolute best.
Bottom shelf gets the rot guts.
And then in between you have second shelf, mid shelf, and fourth shelf.
So Tobey Hooper is a legendary name in horror,
and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is truly a standard bearer in the genre.
As a matter of fact, in October, eight critics from Variety put together a list of top 100 horror films,
(38:02):
and Chainsaw took top honors.
Now, I strongly disagree with this.
You know, Jaws, Halloween, Psycho, probably a few more should be up there.
But I would have to say that's a top 10 film, no doubt.
His output afterwards is safe to say of varying quality,
but you can't deny his trademark nor his influence on generations of filmmakers to come.
I would never say Eatin' Alive is even sniffing at a good film.
It is an interesting one, though.
(38:24):
I think it could hold anyone's attention, even if it's just to consistently shake one's head and go,
Dude, WTF.
So this one's tough for me.
I've looked my rubric up and down, thought about the nuances, additions, alterations.
I keep thinking I'm being too generous, and then I keep thinking I'm being too harsh.
The heck with it.
It's not like I'm going to sink or elevate this film's reputation with my personal take.
So I'm placing this film on...
(38:50):
...Mid-Shelf.
I know, I even surprised myself there.
But each time I said Fourth, I kept wanting to raise it once, so I'm just finally going with my gut.
Per my rubric, Fourth Shelf is for
films that may have significant flaws or only appeal to specific tastes.
Watch if you're interested or a fan of the genre.
Now for sure, if you love horror, exploitation, or Hooper, you have to see this.
If you're a fan of Robert Englund, it's a memorable role for him.
(39:13):
If you're obsessed with animal attack fiction, well, you're probably just me.
Because nobody has that narrow of an area of interest.
But Mid-Shelf is for good films that have a few flaws or aren't quite as impactful,
but still enjoyable and worth your time.
Now, Eating Alive stretches the definition of good.
It's not good.
But it is firmly in the So Bad It's Good Camp, and I think that counts.
Its flaws paradoxically make it more entertaining,
(39:36):
and the chaotic mismatch becomes something oddly compelling.
You'll laugh, you'll cringe, you may curse me for recommending it.
But when it's all over, I think you'll be glad you've ventured into this surreal swamp of insanity
that is this cacophonous symphony of the grotesque.
Well, you know Reel It, that other podcast I have, with my colleague, the known Perel McKenzie?
(39:57):
Our upcoming January episode is going to be all sorts of literary and respectable, unlike today's,
as we're looking into Gene Reese's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and both in 1993 and 2006, film adaptations.
Yeah, on Reel It, we proudly fly our academic flag while still trying to remain entertaining.
Shelf criticism, on the other hand, is mostly just me trying to sound erudite in order to mask the fact that
(40:18):
my taste in film is mostly trash cinema.
And you don't believe me? Next week, I'm revisiting a film that I saw once nearly a decade ago.
It was neo-exploitation, maybe pseudo-exploitation, maybe quasi-exploitation.
I don't know, maybe I'm just overthinking my prefixes.
It was not quite as nuts as Eating Alive, but it does have its moments of what did I get myself into.
I guess after a month of Christmas films and that anal fissure of a movie that is Christmas Vacation 2, Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure,
(40:45):
I just want to do what I want to do.
And when I saw this DVD the other day, I thought, I need to re-watch.
So next week, we're going to rip down the dusty back roads of another piece of Southern Gothic,
maybe borderline Hicksploitation, with a 2012 film, Baytown Outlaws.
The film is currently streaming on Plex, Pluto, and Tubi, so check it out.
If you do watch it and want to talk about it, want to hear me highlight any specific scene that jumped out at you,
(41:07):
want to curse me for telling you to watch Eating Alive and you watched it and hated it thoroughly,
email me. My email is steven at ShelfCriticism.com. Remember that's Steven with a PH.
And you can also, of course, find us on social media at ShelfCriticism.
And with that said, until next time, DVD aficionados, remember to treat yourself to a little shelf indulgence of your own.
(41:30):
Amelia, sing us all.
Shelf Criticism is an Owls of Palace production.
This podcast is in no way connected with the educational institutions the host is employed by.
(41:52):
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the host and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other organization with which he is affiliated.
Most images displayed are public domain.
Images and stills from films, descriptions of scenes, and passages from books are used for educational and critical purposes and not for profit and therefore fall under the terms of fair use.
(42:22):
Self-portained heroes who call themselves cowboys, they don't make a hair on a real cowboy's chest.
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