Eaten Alive is Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to his swan song, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  As such, it serves--as does any subsequent entry after a cinematic shot-in-the-dark--as the test of a director’s artistic acumen.  This being said, for many this signaled very early on that TCM was mere happenstance luck, a film which just happened to appear at the right time, at the right place, whose pieces fortunately fell into the proper order.  However, as any artist will attest, one does not produce a true masterpiece without possessing at least an iota of skill.  Unfortunately, Eaten Alive was not only lambasted by critics upon its release, but continues to be in lieu of the passage of time and benefit of the doubt.

   Eaten Alive’s only claim to fame is that Quentin Tarantino lifted the opening line of the feature and inserted it into Kill Bill, “My name is Buck and I’m ready to fuck.”  Any aesthete who truly believes that a masterpiece, by definition, is a work which--if altered in any form or fashion--will suffer as a consequence in that it has garnered its title for being otherwise perfect, will concur that the American director’s homage to Hooper’s film is by no means arbitrary.  Not to imply that Tarantino’s film is a masterpiece and that, granted, sometimes a cigar is just that, but rather Tarantino, along with Akira Kurosawa, not only crafts his work to optimum effect but, when creating an allusion, demands that the reference is not posited without purpose.  So, the question now stands:  If Hooper’s work isn’t the celluloid mishap that most claim it to be, what does the narrative offer? 

   Based on the legend of the 1930’s serial killer Joe Ball, who purportedly disposed of his victims via a collection of alligators, Eaten Alive is as rote and uninteresting as its execution.  Furthermore, I will consent that, in and of itself, the work does not pose any great philosophical, economic, psychological, or sociological insight.  What is does offer, much like John McNaughton’s Henry:  Portrait of a Serial Killer, is a succinct portrayal of the environment and the people contained within and, as such, what Hooper presents is an aesthetic meditation upon the glamorization of murder and those involved verses the reality of such events and its caricatures. 

   Hooper does not attempt to craft the events within Eaten Alive (barring the exception of the omnipresent radio whose Country ditties foreshadow the events throughout), but rather merely issues the vile nature of those which the equally repugnant environment has created.  He does not seek to justify, renounce, or even explain his killer’s motivations for, like many murderers, the reasons remain hidden while society is nonetheless left to contend with their consequences.  Furthermore, we do not sympathize with any character, even though our main character slaughters our heroine early in the film.  Thus, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Hooper leaves us with a deranged psychopath who possesses a strange fondness for the true killer, his pet crocodile (thus replacing Mother Bates with the being which is the true impetus for the murders) yet Hooper’s ironic positioning of his audience nonetheless remains inconsequential in the wake of emotion or reason.

   Yes, despite the raw form in which the narrative is presented, Robert Caramico’s cinematography and Michael Wiegand’s set decoration could have been a bit more polished in order for our medicine to go down easier yet this is a moot point in that, as Samuel Beckett said of the detractors of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, no one said art had to be fun.  So, no, the main character’s soliloquies are not supposed to add to the plot or, for that matter, even be audible any more than the nudity is implemented for the purpose of viewer arousal.  Everything within Eaten Alive is intended to be boring and bland and, natch, that is exactly what it is.

   I highly doubt that many have revisited Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive after their initial viewing.  However, as with most challenging cinema, those who embark with the sole agenda of being entertained will leave disappointed.  Granted, many films illuminate in an enjoyable manner, but there are no rules that state a substantive film must travel this route in order to arrive at its intended designation yet it seems that many a critic adheres to the notion that for a film to be worthwhile, it must be at least tolerable.  As Charles Bukowski notes in Pulp, Thomas Mann presumes that boredom is art, his evidence being The Magic Mountain.  Yet, the American author never implies that the German writer’s masterpiece suffers as a consequence.  My question now stands, Is life always tolerable and mile-a-minute?  If our singular designating factor upon whether or not we pause to permit ourselves the opportunity for insight is whether or not the forthcoming information is clad in a clown suit, I fear that the events contained within Eaten Alive might well be all-the-more further removed from its fictional form in the not-so-distant future as a result.  As such, this is a rare instance in which I prey for a big budget remake.

 -Egregious Gurnow

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