Film International, “The Houses That Hooper Built – American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper”

“This juxtaposition between some admittedly cheesy films and their serious thematic undercurrents can be jarring, and nowhere is this effect more evident than in Mike Thorn’s ‘Lizard Brain Ouroboros: Human Antiexceptionalism in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive and Crocodile.’ These films are not the director’s best by a longshot (although the former, his 1976 follow-up to Texas Chain Saw, has enjoyed a cult following), but Thorn skillfully dissects how they illustrate ‘the [triune brain] theory…that human cognition’s roots can be traced to the nonhuman animal world’ (106). The boundary separating these worlds dissolves, and viewers may find themselves rooting more for the so-called ‘monsters’ than the oblivious humans exploiting them.”

Read the full review.