PLEASE DON’T EAT MY MOTHER (1973)
Article 3679 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-26-2011
Posting Date: 9-10-2011
Directed by Carl Monson
Featuring Buck Kartalian, Lynn Lundgren, Art Hedburg
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy horror sexploitation

A middle-aged voyeur who lives with his mother buys a talking plant with a sexy voice that has an ever-increasing appetite, finally settling on human beings as its choice food.

Between the original Corman version of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and the big-budget musical remake of the eighties, we have this uncredited remake that adds a bunch of sex and nudity into the mix. It manages to add the sex by simply making the Seymour character (here named Henry Fudd) a voyeur, so every once in a while he goes into a wooded area and watches couples having sex. Once again, I’m not going to comment on the sex scenes except to point out that besides their obvious primary purpose in the movie, they do serve at least one useful secondary purpose; they distract us from the comedy and plot, which are, in a word, abysmal. The original version is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen; this one, despite occasionally hovering near some potentially humorous ideas, doesn’t net a single laugh. Then there’s the crappy special effects; the plant looks like nothing more than a tacky puppet, and though it’s tempting to blame this on the movie’s no-doubt extreme low budget, I suspect that the budget wasn’t significantly lower than Corman’s original, and the plant passed muster there. But then, the comedy and horror were the primary elements in the Corman original; here, they’re supposed to play second fiddle to the sex scenes. This movie is truly horrid. Still, a couple of side notes. Since I do some acting on the side, I hope that I never fall so low as to play a voyeur in a movie like this, as the acting in such a role requires little more than being able to stare straight ahead and grin like a maniac. Secondly, there are some movie titles that I just feel embarrassed to mention or write out, and the tacky, tasteless title of this one is one of them.