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.

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"?

The films I've sat through, honestly. I sometimes try to describe them to family & friends who aren't into these types of films & they look at me like I'm from another planet, how on Earth would I even begin to describe Please Don't Eat My Mother to these people?! A bit like this probably... Our peculiar tale starts with a momma's boy & all round loser named Henry Fudd (Buck Kartalian) walking down the street minding his own business. He is distracted by a strange noise, he investigates & finds the source is a little plant in a shop, well it's meant to be a shop but it more closely resembles a shed in someones front garden. Henry buys the plant for $1 & takes it home. The plant, which looks like a badly painted foam Venus fly trap, starts to talk to Henry in a sexy female voice & asks Henry to feed her. At first all she want's to eat are flies which is fine, but she begins to grow (it's flower pot must also have the ability to grow as well) & quickly moves onto frogs, then it's dogs from the local pound. She then decides she want's to eat a person & promptly eats Henry's overbearing, annoying & dominating Mother. The plant continues to eat people that Henry brings her & that's just about the entire plot of Please Don't Eat My Mother apart from the various sex scenes edited between the female talking plant eating things which have absolutely nothing to do with the overall story in the slightest.Produced & directed by Carl Monson who also has an uncredited cameo in the film as Officer O'Columbus who is eaten by the plant, I couldn't quite believe what I was watching as the hour & forty odd minutes that it took to watch it ebbed away. Please Don't Eat My Mother has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the script by Eric Norden is awful & has no dramatic worth at all. It makes no attempt to develop any of the characters, then again the only significant character in the entire film is Henry. It periodically switches from comedy horror to porno. The sex scenes seem to go on & on forever, they are at times quite strong with actual masturbation & fellatio although these scenes are brief while at other times they consist of nothing more than two people kissing for what seems like an eternity. It's almost as if two different films have been edited together, these sex scenes are worked into the plot with the ingenious reason that Henry is a pervert who likes to look at people having sex. In fact Henry is quite lucky to keep finding naked couples in public who are having full penetrative sex on which to spy. Why don't things like this ever happen to me, I've never found any of this sort of thing going on around where I live & work, some people have all the luck eh? The dialogue is wretched, the story makes no sense & Please Don't Eat My Mother is slow because of those sex scenes which break the main story up to much & for too long. Technically Please Don't Eat My Mother is an absolute mess of a film, the acting is of amateur level, the special effects are terrible as the plant looks like it's made of paper mache by five year old children & their mates obviously composed the music which seems like various instruments randomly playing at the same time, the cinematography is as basic, bland & static as I've ever seen & the direction is unimaginative failing to inject any personality, charm, entertainment, humour or pace into an already very thin concept. I still can't quite believe that a film like Please Don't Eat My Mother exists, who was the intended target audience? The sex scenes aren't going to keep the raincoat brigade happy because they are for the most part pretty soft & dull, the horror elements just aren't there as there's no tension, atmosphere, shocks & there isn't a single drop of blood in the entire thing. The supposed comedy doesn't work & frankly Please Don't Eat My Mother is about as funny as being sacked. But surely there's something by which to recommend Please Don't Eat My Mother, after all I gave it 2 starts & not a rock bottom 1. Well, there is I suppose, any film that features a giant plant that eats people & has a sexy voice can't be all bad, can it? Oh, & I love the artwork on the video/DVD box, yes the one on the main IMDb page for Please Don't Eat My Mother & it looks even better & even more colourful in reality. I just wish there was an actual film to go with it & don't be fooled by this cool artwork as the actual plant in Please Don't Eat My Mother looks nothing like the one on the cover in any way, it just goes to prove you can't judge a film by it's cover or something like that. For masochists only.

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!