Formerly called Slaughterhouse Hotel, and by any other name would smell as much. This is Tobe Hooper's encore to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and to this point the director still seems a run-of-the-mill caricaturist of redneck moronism and animalism. Certainly the roads leading into his horrific situations are traversable only by utter numbskulls. Here, the main menace is a Neanderthal hotel keeper (Neville Brand), who has shoulder-length gray hair, a wooden leg, a scythe for a weapon, and a crocodile for a pet ("Together they make the greatest team in the history of mass slaughter," boasts the promotion). His vacant hotel sits in a permanent sepia smog and is in such an advanced stage of dilapidation that no passerby in his right mind would come within a scream of the place. Nevertheless, a vacationing family is willing to make a pit stop in order to use the restrooms, and after the little girl in the group discovers a deceased monkey in a cage on the porch and then witnesses her pet puppy swallowed whole by the croc, the distraught family is persuaded by their slobberingly apologetic host to stay the night. They deserve what they get. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.