Eaten Alive! (1980)

the audience applauded

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

What happens when you throw assassins in New York City, cannibals in the jungle and a Jim Jones-like cult leader into a big pot and set it to boil? You get Eaten Alive!Sheila (Janet Agren, City of the Living Dead, Hands of Steel) is searching for her sister, Diana (Paola Senatore, Emanuelle in America) who has disappeared in the jungle. She hires Mark (Robert Kerman, Cannibal Holocaust) to help her find her way through the jungle. Oh yeah - and there are killers in the city using blowdarts. That doesn't matter so much once we're in the jungle.When they find Diana - after being chased by cannibals - they learn that she has joined the cult of Jonas (Ivan Rassimov, everyone cheer when he shows up to make this movie awesome), who abuses, murders, manipulates and ********* everyone and anyone he gets close to. Seriously, the minute Jonas shows up, this film goes off the rails. First, he burns a man on a funeral pyre and ordering his wife Mowara (Me Me Lai, who thanks to appearances in this film, Last Cannibal World and Man from Deep River is pretty much to this genre as Edwich Fenech, Barbara Bouchet or Nieves Navaro are to giallo)to be ritually raped. Then, he hypnotizes Sheila and takes her on an altar using a snake phallus covered in venom and blood (yep, really). He pretty much owns everyone he can get his hands on, but Mowara, Sheila,Jonas preaches the Book of Isiah and pretty much owns everyone he can get his hands on, but Mowara, Sheila, Mark and Diana all attempt to escape. Diana and Mowara are overtaken by cannibals, with Diana graphically devoured while her sister and Mark watch helplessly. A helicopter arrives at the last minute to save them while the film goes into full exploitation mode, with the cult killing themselves ala Jonestown, leaving only one female survivor.Oh man, I forgot! Mel Ferrer (The Visitor, Nightmare City) shows up as a professor!Director Umberto Lenzi knows how to make a down and dirty film. He also knows how to keep it entertaining. Just witness other films he's done like Ghosthouse! Plus, he's the master of recycling, as this film re-uses the crocodile death and a woman being eaten from his 1972 film Sacrifice! (also starring Rassimov and Me Me Lai), Me Me Lai's death from Ruggero Deodato's Jungle Holocaust and a castration, a monkey being devoured by a monkey and a man being eaten by a crocodile from Sergio Martino's Slave of the Cannibal God. You could say he...cannibalized those movies! Sorry.Again, keep in mind that these are rough films. They're nearly indefensible, to be honest. I kind of wish the story of Jonas and his cult was more of the movie, with less of the cannibals. But you know, I can't send notes back to Lenzi with a time machine or anything!

Umberto Lenzi's madcap jungle caper can't really be called a cannibal film. The cannibals themselves are hardly featured in this film, which concentrates on the activities of a religious cult in the middle of the jungle and the wacko who leads it. This truly crazy film is a mixture of different themes, scenes and rip offs of other films, and to see it is beyond belief. In the end it all comes down to exploitation, and EATEN ALIVE is one of the funniest films that you'll ever see. With poor acting and atrocious dubbing, it's a bad movie fanatic's dream come true. Almost every scene is awash with female nudity, plus plenty of gratuitous violence which the Italians know and love. The cannibal chomp down, when it comes, is rather short and consists of the typical dismembering and beheading. Other than that we're treated to the sight of Robert Kerman running around and killing natives left, right, and centre.The acting will seem poor to a newcomer to this genre, but it's the type I'm fond of: extremely wooden. Kerman is the supposedly macho character, all that is required of him is to lead expeditions and fight off enemies. Janet Agren, the female lead, is blank and expressionless too. The interest comes from Ivan Rassimov, who goes way over the top as a mad sect leader (his character based on the real-life Jim Jones, who lead a similar suicide cult), dressed in robes and eyeliner. He's insane! Other familiar faces pad out the cast, from Me Me Lai (AU PAIR GIRLS) to Mel Ferrer.This film has it all: men running around firing darts, people being drugged, painted gold, committing suicide in a hilarious way, running through the jungle and plenty of violence, although the gore content is kept to a minimum. Lenzi is more interested in the activities of the religious cult he has created. One thing the film has going for it, though, is an exciting ending where Kerman runs towards the helicopter as the cannibals close in behind him. It had me on the edge of my seat anyway. If you're a fan of the Italian exploitation genre of the early '80s, then EATEN ALIVE is indeed the one for you.

If you think Cannibal Holocaust is a bad movie mainly because seven live animals died and women are treated badly, you ain't seen nothing yet. There is no movie that can make my blood boil like molten lava than Umberto Lenzi's Eaten Alive. Don't believe me? Let's take a good, long look at this movie....First of all, the acting. It's like the actors aren't putting any effort into their roles. It's also like Battlefield Earth minus the Klingon look-a-likes with dreadlocks. Second, like Cannibal Holocaust and presumably Jungle 2 Jungle, there are innocent live animals who died during the making of this piece of s---. An example of this is a grotesque scene where a crocodile is skinned alive.... or rather yet, stock footage of a crocodile getting skinned alive. But the worst is yet to come. I maybe no feminist, but there are no strong female characters in this movie at all. They are treated like slaves, beaten, slapped, raped, carved up, beheaded, and, hence the title of this movie, eaten alive.I watched the entire movie and I was absolutely furious by not only how cheesy or corny the acting is, but by how bad women are treated in this movie. I'm surprise feminist organizations didn't come after the director with pitchforks and torches! Can you imagine if they did the same thing to One Piece's female characters? I F------ CAN'T! Bottom Line: Terrible acting, generic music, live animals killed on camera, and negative stereotyping on women are the reasons why you should avoid Eaten Alive like the West Nile Virus. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and show this movie to a local feminist group.

One IMDb reviewer calls Eaten Alive a passable film for the "cannibal connoisseur." Are there such people? I didn't know. But if you are one of them, hey, have a ball. The rest of you might find this tripe a bit hard to swallow (pun intended), even if, like me, you consider yourself a horror film connoisseur. I have been an avid horror fan for about 15 years now, although I never got around to the cannibal subgenre until a few weeks ago, and I guess I owe my short-lived interest in these groan-inducing movies, strangely enough, to China's total disregard for copyright laws. You see, I bought a two-disc DVD collection of all of Wesley Snipes' films for 20 yuan (about $2.75), which turned out to include Last Cannibal World, Mountain of the Cannibal God, Eaten Alive, Cannibal Holocaust, Next, with Nicholas Cage, and something called Voodoo Lagoon, along with Blade 1-3, in Chinese. Nice.Being a second sequel, I immediately got a sinking feeling when the movie opened with a cannibal in street clothes wandering around major American cities, shooting unsuspecting Americans with poison darts and then scrambling away at full speed. Having run out of ways to keep movie cannibals scary, it seems that now they have made their way to the mainland. Later, you may be shocked to learn that this guy is on a "training exercise." Lock up your daughters! Before long the movie settles into the old missing sister routine, as a young blonde woman named Sheila begins her own investigation of the disappearance of her sister, who looks nothing like her in any way, but she's willing to spend most of the movie naked so I guess that doesn't matter. It seems that, after shooting one of his victims, the hapless cannibal we met early in the movie, not used to big city life, ran into the road and was struck dead by a moving van. The brilliant police force find a mysterious bit of film on him showing Sheila's sister involved in some bizarre ritual behavior, but other than the film, the guy is a complete mystery. As the piteous police chief laments, "we know nothing about him except that he's dead!" Poor guy, he must be getting a headache from all this. I recommend a nap. Luckily, Sheila is the kind of girl who can throw around tens of thousands of dollars like it's nothing in the search for her sister. Perfect for hiring a plucky backwoods guide caricature, since the police are clearly going to be no help.Obviously, nothing new is added to this miniscule sub-genre. Quite the contrary, cannibalism almost seems like a background to a completely different kind of bad movie, about the rescue of a missing person from the dangerous elements. Thickening the plot of that clothesline is not difficult, all you have to do is add in a cartoonish jungle cult of people who follow some guy who calls himself Jonas, who believes in using pain as a way to reunite man with nature, a process they call "purification." Personally, I prefer just peeing outside occasionally.One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Sheila is caught by one of the cult members - an overweight guy who looks like he took a three-day weekend from the office to appear in this movie. As he pulls out his trusty medical kit to give her an injection, he warns her, "If you don't believe in Jonas and purification (through pain), God help you." He then gives her a shot and, when she winces from the tiny pinch, he politely apologizes to her. I sense a true believer in this guy!As far as the gore, there are plenty of nasty sound effects over random shots of animals getting slaughtered and more than enough disgusting footage of women being cut up and eaten alive, so I guess right there the movie lives up to its name. The acting is astonishingly bad, as can be expected, and interestingly enough, the editing is also spectacularly botched but still strangely effective. Unfortunately, I think you have to be able to relate to people who believe in utterly insane cults in order to relate to anyone in the movie. There are plenty of outlandish religious ceremonies that take place, which make it more and more difficult to understand why Sheila's sister decided to turn her back on normal society. I'm all for individualism and doing your own thing, but come ON. After a while the movie descends even further into your basic, run of the mill escape movie, just before we witness the most wildly inappropriate rendition of Glory, Glory Hallelujah in film history. WOW. Note: in this movie, a woman is raped with a severed snake. If you need any more reason never to watch it, seek professional help. Avoid this mess at all costs.