User Reviews

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.

SPOILERS INCLUDED The little seen A Scream in the Streets is arguably the late Carl Monson's finest moment, on the other hand reading about and seeing stills from his Please Don't Eat My Mother is actually better than watching the film itself. A cinematic jack of all trades Monson had a background in LA theatre and in this capacity met Hollywood actor Buck Kartalian sometime in the late Sixties. A legit actor (Cool Hand Luke,Stay Away Joe) Kartalian appears in several Monson related sex pictures never participating in the sex scenes and always under a nom-de-plume(‘Bucky Buck'). Under his real name Kartalian plays the lead in ‘Please Don't'-produced under the aegis of nudie-film Czar Harry Novak. ‘A simple tale of a simple man' said simple man is Henry Fudd (Kartalian) a 43 year old virgin who lives with a grotesquery of a mother Henry's only friend in the world is a burping plant that he picked up in a flower shop, eventually the plant starts to grow and talk in a female voice. Happy to have any female company Henry willingly feeds her/it toads, cats, dogs and (inadvertently) his mother. The plant and Henry share a common interest- girls, Henry likes to stick pictures of them on his wall and is something of a peeping tom, while the plant just likes to eat them. When most of suburbia's good looking women start disappearing down the plants throat, an overweight, cigar chomping cop (played by ‘frustrated actor' Monson) starts noseying around-only to end up supplying the plant with its dinner and Henry with a gun that he uses to ‘politely' kidnap a couple having sex. Henry's also hot for the plant and tries to hump it, but is eventually persuaded to get her/it a male plant companion (who comes across as the plant-world's answer to Allen Garfield). Two's company and three's a crowd so Henry's soon back to his old voyeur ways peeping in on his married-neighbours played by Ric Lutze and Rene Bond (a real life couple who appeared together in amongst other things Ed Wood's swansong Necromania and the unforgettably sick Girl in a Basket). They've been to see a dirty movie, and are soon re-enacting the film together, much to Henry's delight. Afterwards the couple have an argument that comes to an abrupt conclusion when Rene ‘accidentally' guns him down. Ever the ‘good neighbour' Henry offers his unique man-eating plant service to get rid of dead hubby. The not-so-grieving widow is so grateful to Henry, that (egged on by the male plant) she's soon tearing his clothes off and attempting to ‘de-virginize' him. But much to Henry's disappointment the object of his would-be-affection stands too close to the plant and ends up plant-food too. Depressed Henry contemplates suicide, but there's a happy ending as the plant falls pregnant, and Chez Fudd soon hears the patter of tiny feet (or whatever plants have). The novelty value of remaking Little Shop of Horrors in ‘adults only' terms offers some noteworthy revisions (‘Gravis Mushnick' is now a comic relief old queen and the plant is more foul mouthed than in either of its Little Shop incarnations) but Please Don't loses its appeal long before the final ‘gulp'. Corny, dumb and eventually just a bore the film apparently evolved from a script two pages long with the plot pencilled in as filming went on. Hence story-wise this is very thin gruel; ‘comedy' routines between Henry and his mother are repetitious and at close to 100 minutes the film is something of an endurance test these days. As in many Novak productions of the period the film maybe softcore but several of the sex scenes look to be anything but. For a horror comedy though, there's precariously little horror on offer here (possibly out of concern for the wobbly plant prop most of the cast are eaten off-screen) and despite the odd witty line and gnome like Kartalian's charisma Please Don't is sadly about as funny as it is politically correct- i.e. not very much. While the film is a dud, the recent DVD release is a silk purse made from a sow's ear, pumped full of colour the film looks excellent, there's also a commentary track from Harry Novak and multiple Novak related trailers- including 2 for ‘Please Don't'. Both trailers contain what looks to be outtake footage as well as a scene with Henry holding a girl at gunpoint (and her four letter protest) that never made it into the final edit. Supplement features chart the extra-curricular activities of its leads-‘Rene Bond Bound' is a b/w bondage loop for those that like they're hipster icons err….tied to a chair. More relevant to Please Don't is ‘The Voyeur', a Novak distributed short starring Kartalian in what is essentially a reprise of his Henry Fudd character. Fairly meaningless, but in-just over five minutes The Voyeur does manage to recreate Please Don'ts key themes (near-the-knuckle sex, peeping tomism, Henry's dreadful jumper) sans plant, and could have easily been sliced into the main feature without anyone being the wiser. Although better movies emerged from the offices of Boxoffice-International, few appear to have had the longevity of Please Don't Eat My Mother. Under various guises (‘Sexpot Swingers' ‘The Hungry Pets') Please Don't apparently played well into the early Eighties, a time when Novak had gone hardcore and Rene Bond had disappeared from both the film-world, and save for an appearance on ‘Break the Bank' and sending Christmas cards to her softcore agent Hal Guthu every year, off the face of the planet as well. Ever wondered what the Little Shop of Horrors people made of Please Don't Eat My Mother?-well….I couldn't help bringing the subject up with one of the original cast recently and while none of the ‘Corman camp' had actually seen the movie in question, make no mistake they were quite aware of it, and far from amused at this unauthorized sexpo attempt ‘re-capitalizing' on their man-eating plant gravy train. So now you know.

*Spoiler/plot- Hungry Pets (Please don't Eat my Mother) 1973.

*Special Stars- Buck Katalian, Lynn Lundgren, Rene Bond, Ric Lutze.

*Theme- Sheltered people with low social skills need to grow.

*Trivia/location/goofs- soft core porn, Spin-off of 'Little Shop of Horrors'.

*Emotion- This film tells a sadly re-used plot with sexual scenes provided for just raunchy titillation to break up the boring sameness. Mr. Katalian is watchable because of his total commitment to playing his naive 'peeper' character well. The other performers are 'phoning-in' their acting and are mostly forgettable. Little drama, acting, or visual beauty; just a rehash with sex.

*Based On- loosely based on Roger Corman's 'Little Shop of Horrors'.