Please Don't Eat My Mother!

A 40-something mama's boy (Buck Kartalian in a starring role!) is still a virgin and can't get any girls, so he obtains a plant which he keeps locked in his bedroom. The damn thing speaks in a sexy woman's voice and grows to huge proportions as it keeps asking its owner for more and more food - starting out with flies, but gradually moving on to humans. This is a completely ridiculous and crazy comedy that's reminiscent of Roger Corman's LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS, and the main reason it gets one star is because Buck Kartalian is actually perfect for such a wacky part. It's very strange seeing him, an actor of many trades who's been in movies such as PLANET OF THE APES and COOL HAND Luke, headlining a thing like this. When he's not trying to secure victims for plant food he's got a habit of being a voyeur who watches couples having sex - and I mean bordering on hardcore pornography, with even male frontal nudity as well as the females. This is pretty much a tiring film after awhile, and though it shouldn't have been more than 70 or 80 minutes, the damn thing stretches on for nearly 100. * out of ****

There's almost no point in describing the plot here. It's basically a re-make of "The Little Shop of Horrors" where a socially inept loser buys a talking mutant plant and eventually starts feeding people to it as it grows bigger and bigger. The only real difference is the guy here is a voyeur who is constantly watching other people have sex, and he eventually starts kidnapping some of these people and feeding them to the plant. The sex in this movie is about halfway between softcore and hardcore (there is an unsimulated "hand-job" at one point and a long shot of what is obviously actual penetration). Unfortunately, the production values (the script, the acting, the cinematography, and pretty much anything else of interest other than the sex)are also halfway between the two, they are much lower than those usually found in softcore sexploitation movies and approach the abysmal depths of hardcore porn where a "movie" becomes mere masturbation fodder.

The best scene in this features cult 70's porn star Rene Bond and her"suitcase pimp"/ real-life boyfriend Ric Lutze. They play a couple who the protagonist watches having sex. They get in a hilarious post-coital fight--he calls her a "bitch" and hits her with a pillow, so she pulls out a gun and shoots him dead! The voyeur then offers to help her dispose of the body by feeding it to the plant. She is so grateful that she offers to finally pop the cherry of this fifty-year-old virgin, but it all goes horribly, horribly awry. . . This scene stands on its own as entertaining, but it doesn't really make up for the rest of the movie.

From what I've read about this movie I was expecting a softcore version of Corman's "Little Shop Of Horrors". Instead I've got a retarded almost hardcore horror comedy which has none of the wit or plot of Corman's classic. Yes, there's a maneating plant (with a sexy female voice) and a lonely geek/voyeur, Buck Kartalian, who kinda looks like Mel Brooks' goofy twinbrother! I'm huge sleazefan but 2/3 of "Please Don't.." is one sex scene after another (the last one incl. XXX-veteran Rene Bond). The plant DO get to eat, first frogs & dogs then humans. Well, It IS kinda fascinating to see Buck - who acted with Heston, Eastwood & Elvis! - in this Harry ("Sinful Dwarf", "Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman!" etc.) Novak produced mess, you wonder which kind of audience would go for this. The monsterplant is ultracheaply made but funny in a braindrainin' sort of way. The end is pretty neat, though. Check out this Something Weird Video release at your own risk!

Roger Corman's "The Little Shop of Horrors" (1960) was filmed in under five days with the teensiest of budgets, yet it is a very funny, consistently entertaining little gem of a movie. The 1972 soft-core remake, "Please Don't Eat My Mother," looks to have a practically nonexistent budget, too, but it is hardly ever funny and something of a chore to sit through. In this cheesy cheapie, we meet Henry Fudd, a middle-aged Jewish voyeur who lives with his kvetching mother and basically spends his time ogling horny couples "doing it" in the great outdoors of L.A. He comes into possession of a plant with an alluring female voice and, like Seymour Krelboin in Corman's original, soon finds himself procuring ever-larger animal species for it to consume and grow on. This houseplant is soon around 8' tall, and pretty hard to conceal from Mom in his bedroom.... Anyway, this film has absolutely no FX to speak of; the monster plant looks like a 4th grade papier-mache project. We never even get to see the plant attack its human victims; how they wind up inside the plant at all is a mystery to me. But why even critique this movie like a regular film? The flick is essentially just an excuse to show some fairly boring simulated sex scenes, strung together by a very silly story. I must say that it is very strange to see these X-rated scenes, with full male and female frontal, alternating with juvenile-humor vignettes. I can't imagine who this picture would appeal to today, in this age of XXX-rated DVDs and sci-fi/horror films with top-notch FX. If you want to see what the poor raincoat crowd had to settle for back when, I guess check it out. Beyond the awesome title, there's little of interest here. By the way, isn't it strange that Buck Kartalian, the film's star, recently played a guy named Henry on CBS' "HOW I MET YOUR Mother"?

If you're of the opinion that Roger Corman's 1960 cult classic The Little Shop of Horrors would have benefited from sex and full frontal nudity, then this is the film for you: the basic plot is virtually identical to The Little Shop of Horrors, but much of the film's runtime is devoted to softcore rumpy pumpy (occasionally teetering on hardcore), as middle-aged virgin Henry Fudd (Buck Kartalian, who looks a bit like Corman regular Dick Miller) takes time out from tending to his talking, female, carnivorous plant in order to spy on young couples getting jiggy.

To keep his hungry plant happy, Henry supplies it with food, starting with fertiliser and flies, then frogs, followed by dogs, and eventually humans, abducting young lovers at gunpoint.

Produced by exploitation legend Harry H. Novak, and clearly filmed on a budget that even Corman might have struggled with, Please Don't Eat My Mother is badly written, poorly acted nonsense with an embarrassingly bad flesh-eating plant. The frequent saucy scenes feature some attractive young women in the altogether, including prolific '70s pornstar Rene Bond, but they are shot in an unimaginative and repetitive manner which soon becomes tiresome.

3/10. Just about worth a watch if really trashy movies are your thing.