Horror Double Feature: Eaten Alive & Night Creature

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will be startled by a very hungry crocodile, Robert Englund, a ferocious leopard, and yummy Nancy Kwan! It’s Eaten Alive and Night Creature!

EATEN ALIVE (1976)

Tobe Hooper’s debut film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), although not nearly as graphically violent as popularly believed, is nevertheless quite a nightmarish experience to sit through. His sophomore effort, 1977’s comparatively unknown Eaten Alive, is almost as nightmarish and ups the gore quotient considerably. It too tells a story of American Gothic dementia in the hinterlands, specifically that of the owner of the swampland Starlight Motel, Judd, who has an unfortunate habit of feeding guests he doesn’t approve of to his pet crocodile. As played by Hollywood veteran Neville Brand, Judd is an ugly, slovenly, mumbling, grunting mess; a boogyman equally inclined to slice up a full-grown adult with his handy scythe as he is to terrorize a young girl. Hooper has wisely chosen to film his second movie solely on almost surreal stage sets, bedecked with lurid, garish lighting and swirling mists. The musical background that he helped compose is one of the freakiest you will ever hear; almost a musique concrete composition that manages to outweird the electronic bleeps-and-gurgles score of 1956’s Forbidden Planet. The film has been cast with a full roster of past and future stars: Mel Ferrer, Stuart Whitman, Carolyn “Morticia” Jones (here almost unrecognizable under wrinkle makeup), Chain Saw star Marilyn Burns, Roberta Collins and Robert Englund (who delivers the film’s first and funniest line). Lurching from one murderous set piece to the next, the film seems to have nothing on its mind but freaking the bejeebers out of its audience, and in this pursuit it succeeds admirably. And if Eaten Alive can be said to have one overriding moral, I suppose it would be that it is better to take it in the porthole by a future Freddy Krueger than get chomped on by a giant crocagator!!!

NIGHT CREATURE (1978)

Perhaps I should explain that I am one of those people who are willing to sit through the most egregious crap, just to be able to hear Nancy Kwan’s charming Hong Kong accent and see her fabulous zygomatic bones. But even for me, 1978’s Night Creature, directed by Lee Madden, was tough to get through. In this one, Nancy and a few others pick the wrong time to pop in on her dad, big-game hunter Donald Pleasence, at his private Thai island in the River Kwai. Donald has just released a preternaturally cunning and spitefully ferocious black leopard to hunt and engage in a battle of wits; a creature that wastes little time going after Nancy’s half sister… Anyway, this movie is basically junk. Ineptly lensed and directed, with a weak story and little in the way of suspense, it surely doesn’t offer much to the casual viewer. And the DVD that I recently watched doesn’t help. The picture is fuzzy and scuzzy, revealing a crummy and scummy 16mm print source, and the sound quality is very poor. Still, somehow, a viewing of Night Creature does have its compensations. Pleasence’s acting is fun to watch, ranging as it does from hypermaniacal to catatonic. The film is atmospheric in parts, the Thai scenery looks nice, and Nancy Kwan looks even nicer. She is 39 in this film – 18 years past her yummy The World of Suzie Wong debut – and still looks very beautiful. Heck, she’s still a looker TODAY, at 85! But even those zygomatic bones aren’t enough to redeem Night Creature. This surely is a film for Nancy Kwan completists only. Like me…

COMING ATTRACTIONS: Obscene phone calls! Psycho killers! Pitchfork murders! Farley Granger! It’s Black Christmas and The Prowler, in the Shocktober Double Feature #9…