Eaten Alive

Tobe Hooper
1977

Hooper's first directorial effort after his horror masterpiece "The Texas Chansaw Massacre" sees him returning to the fertile fields of rural psychos. Neville Brand runs a shabby motel deep in swamp country. When he's not mumbling to himself and scratching figures in a notepad, the wooden-legged nut feeds folks to the massive pet croc (from Africa!) on his property. This one gets off to a slow start with a by-the-books murder of a failed hooker, the evidence being promptly erased by Brand's reptilian garbage disposal. Luckily the picture picks up when a seemingly normal family is forced to bunk down in the menacing motel - the family dog has become crocodile chow, leaving their little girl traumatized. In private, the father proves to be a bonafide wackjob, and the mother a pill-popper. When the family's situation goes South, the daughter winds up beneath the motel porch hiding from a scythe wielding Brand. The sets are a touch wooden and the heavily colored lighting is tacky, but Hooper excels in instilling terror not from sudden scares, but in morbidly lingering on the horror of an unsound mind - the alien otherness of psychosis. The presumably animatronic crocodile prop works with varying success. At times it's terrifyingly large but appears comically small when the pooch gets mowed down. Top it off with Robert Englund (Freddy Kruger!) as the town stud and lots of lady toplessness and you've got a winning chiller.