Eaten Alive! (1980)

 

Warning: This review contains scenes of nudity and bloody violence

 

AKA: Mangaiti Vivi!

Dir: Umberto Lenzi

Starring: Robert Kerman, Janet Agren, Ivan Rassimov, Paola Senatore, Me Me Lai, Mel Ferrer.

 

In New York City, several murders are committed using darts laced with deadly cobra venom. The murderer is hit by a truck and police are unable to find any clues to his identity. They do, however, find some film footage with the name of Diana Morris (Senatore) engraved on it. The cops call in Diana’s sister, Sheila (Agren), who explains that she hasn’t heard from her sister in weeks. The footage shows Diana in the jungle taking part in some sort of strange ritual. Professor Carter (Ferrer) informs Sheila that what she saw in the footage was a ‘purification ritual’ performed by a cult in New Guinea.  Determined to find her sister and bring her home, Sheila sets off for New Guinea where she tracks down Mark Butler (Kerman) to help her. Mark is reluctant at first, but is soon persuaded by Sheila’s offer of $80,000. After days searching the jungle Mark and Sheila are taken in by the cult who are led by the messiah-like figure of Jonas (Rassimov). Jonas conducts his followers to perform strange rituals and obey his rules. Those who disobey his command are banished from the sect and left to wander in the jungle where a vicious cannibal tribe lurks. When Mark and Sheila catch up with Diana it’s revealed that Jonas maintains his followers’ obedience by forcing them to drink brainwashing liquids. The three of them, along with a native, escape the camp only to run into the cannibals on their way and when Jonas realises that his perfect colony might be under threat, he asks that his followers perform one final sacrifice.

 

Despite its glaring cover art and scenes of tribesmen feasting on human flesh, Eaten Alive doesn’t quite feel like a full blown cannibal movie. Indeed the cannibals are on the fringes of things for most of the movie and don’t really make their presence known until the final quarter of an hour. This is more of a jungle adventure movie and a parable about religious cults that just happens to feature some cannibals. Although it’s an enjoyable enough watch it’s also handicapped by some familiar scenes that have been borrowed from other films and that controversial and unnecessary hallmark of the genre: animal cruelty.

Eaten Alive! Sees Umberto Lenzi return to the jungle and it acts as a slight precursor to Cannibal Ferox, which was made a year later. However, the two films are very different. Ferox is the perfect movie for those looking for some serious gut-munching mayhem. Eaten Alive!, while it has its moments, is not a quintessential cannibal movie. Its main story is inspired by religious cults and particularly by the famous People’s Temple cult. The character of Jonas is meant to represent that cult’s notorious leader Jim Jones and the film resembles several elements of the famous Jonestown incident: the jungle location, the rule that members are forbidden to leave, the mass suicide. Like the Jonestown residents, Jonas’ cult members are forced to drink liquids laced with poison. However, unlike Jones, Jonas does not participate in the suicide – we’re left unaware of his fate, though.  Thanks to the emergence of Scientology into the mainstream via the patronage of several high-profile celebrities, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple are often forgotten about now when we think of religious sects. But it was a huge story in the late ‘70s and when Eaten Alive! was released in 1980 its allusion to the incident would’ve been instantly recognisable by most audiences. The film may also have taken inspiration from Apocalypse Now, which was released the previous year. 

Much like many other films in the cannibal sub-genre such as Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River and Cannibal Ferox; as well Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Sergio Martino’s Mountain of theCannibal God, Eaten Alive! feels the need to employ real scenes of animal cruelty and slaughter as shock value. This practice has understandably been condemned numerous times by critics of these films and I don’t want to touch on this subject too much here. I will say that I do not condone the needless killing of animals for entertainment and thankfully such practices do not exist in movies today. 

You like rock [music]? No, I like whiskey

Like the topic of animal cruelty, another aspect that is regrettable about this film is that not all the scenes are original; in fact they’ve been lifted from three other films. A large portion of footage is lifted from Martino’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, such as when one of the natives is attacked by a crocodile, a scene of castration by the cannibals, and most of the animal violence. Some scenes are also used from Man from Deep River and Deodato’s Last Cannibal World. This method of lifting parts from other movies can be put down to either laziness on Lenzi’s part or that he was hampered by such a tiny budget that he had to add the scenes as padding. 

 

Some familiar faces show up in Eaten Alive! Robert Kerman puts in another good performance in the lead role of Mark Butler. Unlike the more restrained role of Professor Harold Monroe in Cannibal Holocaust, Kerman looks to be having fun as the macho adventurer Mark. As well as Deodato’s classic, Kerman would also show up in a minor role in Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox.

Swedish actor Janet Agren is also decent here as Sheila. She plays a type of southern belle in Eaten Alive and is quite a resourceful woman who can hold her own up against the brash Butler. Her quest to save her sister is noble but she’s terrified of the cannibals and, at one point, begs Mark to kill her before the natives do. A former model, Agren also features in Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Sonja.

Ivan Rassimov is particularly menacing as Jonas. He is also a veteran of the cannibal movie, having starred in both Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World. As is Me Me Lai, who has a minor role as a native woman who helps Mark, Sheila and Diana escape from the camp. Finally the very beautiful Paola Senatore will be familiar to fans of Joe D’Amato’s Nunsploitation film Images in a Convent.

"Their idea of lunch is fresh, hot entrails
 soaked in blood" - Jonas

Eaten Alive is a strange film because of the patchwork effort created by the aforementioned borrowed scenes. Of course, if you’ve not seen those other films, I guess you won’t notice anything untoward. You will feel let down though if you’re expecting anything like Cannibal Ferox. This movie isn’t at all bad by any stretch of the imagination and is good fun. If you can stomach the animal violence it’s worth a watch.

Nightmare City



By chance, this week I viewed two movies back-to-back: Nightmare City (1980) and David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975). These two films made for a fantastic and appropriate double-bill because they both provide an interesting spin on the Zombie flick.

 



Umberto Lenzi is credited with establishing the Italian Cannibal genre with 1972’s Deep River Savages (aka The Man from Deep River) but, in-between two other Cannibal romps – Eaten Alive! (1980) and the notorious Cannibal Ferox (1981) – he tried his hand at the Zombie film. The plot goes like this: after an unidentified plane exposed to radiation lands at the airport of an unnamed city, a horde of zombies emerge and go on a rampage, attacking anything in their way.

 



This film is different from a lot of the other Walking Dead movies from around the time. The creatures in Nightmare City are not the same as George Romero’s undead or of other Italian gore films like Zombie Flesh Eaters or Zombie Holocaust. Lenzi’s ‘Zombies’ are not the dead rising from the grave, but living people who have mutated after being exposed to radiation which has enhanced their strength but also given them an insatiable thirst for blood. These, as Lenzi puts it, ‘infected people’ are not living corpses, shuffling about, relying on impulse; no, they can run and retain the mental capacity to use weapons and even communicate with each other. They do, however, retain some of the hallmarks of Romero’s flesh eaters: they can infect a victim with a bite and can only be stopped by a gunshot to the head.

 

The movie plays on a common theme in 1980s horror flicks: fear of the dangers of nuclear power. The people on the plane were exposed to high levels of radiation and thus became mutated and developed a taste for human flesh. The film also briefly explores themes such as freedom of the press, the military industrial complex and human-kind’s tendency to play God.

 

  Nightmare City is a fun film to watch and is (ahem) a feast for the gore-hounds out there. It’s an orgy of over-the-top violence as the Zombies, sorry ‘infected people’, rampage through the city. Necks are bitten, guts are chewed, eyes are gouged and there’s even a scene of a woman’s breast being ripped off! It’s a spectacularly awesome Italian exploitation flick; with loads of action and thrills. People who love this sort of movie will have a blast.