Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge (1999)

 

Director: Gary Whitson

Cast: Debbie D as Stacey; Barbara Joyce as Trish; Tina Krause as Lisa; Dean Paul as Dr. Baines; Sunny as the Dirty Blonde

Ephemeral Waves

 

I wanted to verify you were prettier than me.

Slighted because her boss Trish (Barbara Joyce) felt the most attractive female staff member was needed to talk to their male clientele, Stacy (Debbie D) is not impressed, armed with a shrink and growth ray, thus bringing us vore fetish before this was a known thing. Anyone who has no idea what “vore” means, well, Stacy realises that one has to eat her way up the corporate ladder to get anywhere...

This is a W.A.V.E. Production, which begins with two women getting wet t-shirts for their promo image, openly showing that this company was making softcore. This was an idiosyncratic one thought as, from New Jersey, W.A.V.E from their 1987 had their scripts written by fans, and were fan funded, producing mail ordered ultra-low budget films which catered to their idiosyncratic obsessions. As a result, Eaten Alive is going to be a bizarre experience for so many, in which a male scientist, with a British accent, creates a ray gun able to grow or shrink objects which Stacy uses to her advantage. Among its stilted amounts of dialogue, you get the first moments of this begin something exceptionally strange when the first victim, a W.A.V.E regular and a director in her own right, Tina Kraus, is shrunk and you witness, through video toaster effects and weird positioning of Debbie D's head, a nude woman the size of Tom Thumb being eaten by another. Clearly, this was someone who had a fetish who wrote this, a trendsetter in fact, but the result including the stock screams in the soundtrack and how low budget the sequence is makes it even stranger.

Whilst at least one (clothed) English man is eaten, the fetishishtic nature of this short clear in how all the victims are depicted naked, as Stacy develops a perverse ritual for this. There is even an extended scene of trying on bikinis with an extensive lack of music; this becomes more curious in how modest this production still is in terms of explicit context as, baring Krause being more comfortable with her scene, all the nudity here is the equivalent of a sixties softcore film, topless only, shot as an ultra-low budget film decades after. It is both, as a result, very tame but because of the context kinkier in paradox. It is, absolutely, strange to witness, one of those productions whose history, for those who knew of it, is matched by the fact that all its effects have to be completed with very cheap green screen and digital editing to pull this off, literally splicing the actresses awkwardly in place when they are shrunk. That is not an insult either, as W.A.V.E Productions were clearly a group whose work were made proudly aware they literally had shoestring budgets to these titles, working off their fan base’ interest in them.

That side does make this weirder too, knowing the script’s dialogue is made from a normal person unleashing his idiosyncratic obsessions, like entering the id of a person’s brain tapped into like a beer keg, and I include here for all the jokes I have made within this review no kink shaming, or shaming at all if it was not a kink at all but something that they wanted to see onscreen. It does admittedly produce one of the strangest moments I have probably witnessed in a film – a scene inside Stacy’s gullet, with a naked actress sprayed with water, with slowed down moans and a heart beat on the soundtrack - which is filthier than porn, but it was and so weird it was inspire. Including seven minutes of outtakes as an extra, this comes from this side of independent cinema which is entirely alien for many, as alien to the mainstream view of cinema as you could get, and it is admirable in this, how strange and out-there it is. Certainly, this feels like outsiders to cinema, people you normally do not find even in some softcore cinema despite the casts' careers. It is meaningful in seeing something closer to the world of the film viewer himself or herself rather than something fabricated, more so when time has passed and we can look back on this for that reason and a gleefully (and purposely) bizarre production.