Eaten Alive! (1980)

You know how it is: it's a blustery Sunday afternoon and you decide that what you need in your life right now is a dose of Italian cannibal action.  Next thing you know, you find yourself watching Umberto Lenzi's Eaten Alive! (1980).  Whilst not up there in the first rank of the sub-genre, with the likes of Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox, Lenzi's film is, nonetheless, an enjoyable pot-boiler which mixes a Jim Jones style cult into the plot for good measure.  Films of this type generally use one of two formats: in the first, they adopt a Mondo style, presenting themselves as 'found footage', in the second, they are presented as jungle adventure stories, much in vein of Indiana Jones, but with lots of gore, nudity and sex. Eaten Alive! very much falls into the latter category, following the pretty much standard plot device of a party of white westerners forced into a cannibal infested jungle in search of someone, or something.  In this instance we have US heiress Sheila (Janet Agren) travelling from New York to the jungles of New Guinea in search of her sister, Diana (Paola Senatore), who has joined a cult led by Jonas Melvin (Ivan Rassimov), which has ensconced itself deep in cannibal territory in the jungle.  To guide her, Sheila engages the services of Vietnam deserter turned soldier of fortune Mark (Robert Kerman). 

Like many Italian exploitation films of the era, (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Contamination and Zombie Holocaust, for instance), Eaten Alive! features a New York shot prologue, before moving its action to New Guinea, (actually Sri Lanka, which also stood in for New Guinea in Sergio Martino's Mountain of the Cannibal God).  It actually gets off to a cracking start in New York, with a series of murders-by-blowpipe, the assassin being New Guinea native eliminating some of Jonas' enemies.  Which segues us into the plot proper, as the police investigation intersects with Sheila's search for her sister, as she learns from Mel Ferrer's anthroplogist, that Jonas and his group have decamped to New Guinea.  Most of the film's main narrative focuses on Sheila, Mark and Diana's attempts to escape the clutches of Jonas' 'purification cult', with the cannibals being a peripheral presence until the film's climactic escape sequences, when the protagonists swap the perils of the cult for the dangers of running the gauntlet of the cannibals.  Inevitably, some of them get eaten alive in some extremely gory sequences, before the authorities turn up to rescue the others.  Jonas, meanwhile, gets the rest of the cult members to commit mass suicide, before vanishing.

In common with several other Italian exploitation films, Eaten Alive! tries, rather half heartedly, to weld a sub-text about exploitation to its narrative.  In this case, it attempts to create an historical thread linking Jonas' exploitation of his acolytes for profit with Sheila's family's historical exploitation of slaves, (she and her sister being the heirs to the family fortune accrued from cotton plantations).  All the while, of course, (and with no apparent sense of irony), the film exploits the 'primitive' natives of New Guinea for the entertainment of a western audience, depicting them as blood thirsty cannibals.  Not to mention its exploitation of the female cast, with nudity, ritual rapes and their ultimate objectification as various of them have their breasts and buttocks sliced off and eaten, (sometimes after being raped - the ultimate sexual consumption of women by men).  On top of all this, the audience is also subjected to the usual parade of animal cruelty, as various jungle animals are gorily slaughtered on screen.  This latter aspect is 'justified' as it demonstrates the savagery of nature, which Jonas' cult is mirroring in its 'purification' rituals.  In order to be 'purified' of the contamination of civilisation, its acolytes must endure various painful primitive rites which supposedly bring them closer to nature.

It has to be said that Eaten Alive! packs a lot of incident into ninety or so minutes.  Despite its token attempts at a sub text, it is pure exploitation, but, under veteran Lenzi's direction, technically well made and well paced exploitation.  While its shocks are crude and obvious, they aren't overplayed, with the most extensive cannibal sequences being confined to the last ten to fifteen minutes, (although we have beheadings, rapes and various tortures prior to this).  Moreover, like most Italian films from the eighties, while the gore is extensive, it is never really that realistic, eliciting, for the most part, disbelieving laughs rather than nausea.  The cast, in the main, are adequate for this sort of thing, with Rassimov making an imposing and suitably sinister cult leader, in turns charismatic and cruel, his performance never quite topples over into parody.  The film's biggest weaknesses are those common to this entire sub genre: the reduction of native peoples to crude, racist, stereotypes of the sort popularised during the age of imperialism and the objectification of women.  The locations, both in New York and Sri Lanka are well used, the the dense jungle of the latter echoing the concrete canyons of the former.  The biggest problem with the location work being that Sri Lanka isn't New Guinea and the local extras simply don't look like New Guinea natives.  But what the heck, it was tropical and exotic and the people dark skinned which, in exploitation film terms, was close enough.  After all, Sri Lanka also stood in for Africa in Sergio Martino's The Great Crocodile, despite being part of an entirely different continent.  As I said, Eaten Alive! isn't top rank Italian cannibal mayhem, being an obvious cash in on the success of Cannibal Holocaust, but it neatly encapsulates all of the main tropes of the genre in a mindlessly entertaining package.