La plante qui aimait les femmes

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 ****

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.

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!

Please Don't Eat My Mother! (1972)

** (out of 4)

Softcore remake of Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors manages to show a lot of skin as well as turn out to be a smart spoof in its own right. Buck Kartalian (from Planet of the Apes) plays a loser who lives with his mom and hasn't even been with a woman. One day he buys a plant, which turns out to have a sexy female voice but even weirder is that the plant needs live food to stay alive. There's no question that this one here is more sex than horror but as far as these Something Weird type films goes this one is pretty good. There are quite a few funny scenes with our loser trying to comfort the plant who is dying of hunger. There are even better scenes of him battling with his mother who hears the female plant's voice and thinks that her virgin son has a real woman in his bed. There are countless sex scenes and I was rather shocked at how far one went but for the most part they are fairly harmless and not too erotic.

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.