Eaten Alive Special Edition

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Eaten Alive Special Edition Review

Good god, I love Media Blasters! Every time you turn around, these guys are unleashing yet another depraved classic from years gone past. It seems that most of the stuff they release are Japanese anime flicks, a genre I haven't gotten into in a serious way yet, but they also make sure to release tons of gooey gorefests that send horror fans into paroxysms of joy. And they go out of their way (usually) to stuff the disc with plenty of supplemental materials like trailers, interviews, and commentaries. That doesn't sound like a big deal since lots of DVDs today contain extras, but it's a lot easier to find someone like Oliver Stone than it is to uncover the whereabouts of Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi. Heck, these guys actually locate cult favorites like George Eastman and Ivan Rassimov in order to interview them on camera! If you love films that delve deep into the inner recesses of shock cinema, Media Blasters is the place for you. And one film that definitely plumbs the depths is Umberto Lenzi's 1980 gutmuncher "Mangiati Vivi," better known as "Eaten Alive." Forget about Tobe Hooper's lame alligator flick of the same name; this one is the real deal.

"Eaten Alive" is one of the sicker entries in the much beloved cannibal genre. Helmed by the director responsible for the massively entertaining giallo "Seven Blood-Stained Orchids," "Mangiati Vivi" follows the exploits of one Sheila Morris (Janet Agren) as she attempts to find out what happened to her sister Diana (Paola Senatore). Dear Diana fell in with a Jim Jones knock off named Jonas (Ivan Rassimov) and fled to New Guinea with all of her money. At first, we don't know anything about Morris's dilemma, but we do know something isn't quite right in New York City. The film opens with stock footage of the Big Apple as we see a native assassinate some guy with a blow dart coated in poison. A few more poor souls eventually suffer the same fate, which stymies the best efforts of New York's finest. Then Morris arrives on the scene and hooks up with Professor Carter (Mel Ferrer, who also appeared in Hooper's "Eaten Alive"! What are the chances?), a guy who seems to know all about natives, poison darts, and Jonas. He directs Sheila to Jonas's compound somewhere in Asia, and also puts her in contact with American expatriate Mark (Robert Kerman), a guy who will help find Diana Morris for the right price.

What follows is pure Italian sleaze as Mark and Sheila tramp through the jungle to find Jonas's compound. After a short stop off at an abandoned village, where the two nearly perish in a nasty encounter with a cobra, they finally stumble into Jonas's "purification village." Then the film gets nasty. It doesn't take too long to discover that Jonas is an unbalanced cult leader who will stop at nothing to protect his flock from outsiders. There's also a tribe of dangerous cannibals nearby, a tribe that nearly finished off Mark and Sheila on their journey into the village. Jonas and the cannibals don't get along at all, but there is a benefit to having a bunch of flesh eaters hovering around the perimeter; they keep the followers in a perpetual state of fear, which keeps them inside the camp for further mind control fun and games. How does Jonas keep his followers in line? He makes them drink some sort of juice that turns them into mindless automatons, for starters, and then moves to the tried and true methods of torture, murder, and banishment of dissenters into the cannibal camp. Soon, Sheila Morris falls under Jonas's wicked enchantments, leaving it up to Mark and Diana to plan the inevitable escape.

It's a bit frustrating to review a film like "Mangiati Vivi" because you can't talk in depth about the atrocities. Lenzi throws out a bit of everything, not only recreating the Jim Jones massacre on a small scale, grape kool aid and all, but also subjecting us to cannibal atrocities. The final scenes, with Diana Morris and cannibal film regular Me Me Lai falling prey to the cannibals, ranks right up there with anything you see in Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust." And for good reason--because Lenzi STOLE chunks of it from Deodato's "Jungle Holocaust" feature. He also borrowed footage from Sergio Martino's "Slave of the Cannibal God." Oops. Plagiarism aside, this stuff is so deeply disturbing and shockingly realistic, at least in certain parts, that one boggles over how something like this ever got made. The answer probably lies in the fact that these movies largely appeared in the 1970s, a time when almost anything went in cinema. There's no way something like "Mangiati Vivi" would play in theaters today, and definitely no way that Lenzi could secure financing for such an extreme film. If anybody in Hollywood tried to pass this one off on a studio, his or her career would permanently suffer.

Extras on the disc include interviews with Robert Kerman, Ivan Rassimov, and Umberto Lenzi; poster and film stills; and five awesome trailers for such schlock classics as Bruno Mattei's "Zombi 3," "Zombi Holocaust," "Jungle Holocaust," "Zombie 4," and "Mangiati Vivi." Listening to these interviews is a lot of fun, especially Robert Kerman's. I would never have suspected that he went on to a lengthy career in the adult film business after this movie! Unfortunately, Rassimov's talk is less interesting because he doesn't seem to remember much about making the movie. If you feel like jumping into the gory cannibal genre, you will find plenty here to wet your whistle. Make sure to watch "Cannibal Holocaust," "Jungle Holocaust," and the tamer "Slave of the Cannibal God" soon after.

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