Director: Carl Monson

Starring: Buck Kartalian, Lynn Lundgren, a load of other people shagging

HENRY – “Well, that’s murder or something!”
EVE – “Never heard of a plant getting arrested, have you?”

Henry Fudd (which is an even more appropriate name in Scotland) is a weird bastard. He spends his lunch break spying on couples having sex, then after work he goes back home, where he lives with his possessive mother, and locks himself in his room, the walls of which are covered with pages of porno magazines. Oh, and he has a plant called Eve that eats people.

Please Don’t Eat My Mother is essentially a low-budget rip-off of Little Shop Of Horrors, only (as it’s produced by “Sexploitation King” Harry Novak) with more porn and less quality. Eve starts off as a tiny sapling that Henry feeds normal plant food, but before too long she’s grown dramatically and adopted a sexy woman’s voice. The plant asks Henry to bring him increasingly larger food, starting with flies and upgrading to frogs, dogs and eventually people, including – you guessed it – Henry’s mother.

It’s a story that might have been more interesting had it been handled better (of course, it already had), but Please Don’t Eat My Mother is a bucket of pish. Buck Kartalian is a bizarre actor to watch – it’s clear the film is supposed to be a cheesy comedy he makes some truly odd facial expressions, chewing the scenery… literally, at times.

The ‘special effects’ (and I mean special in a different way than usual) are the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a school play. The plant looks like a ridiculous papier-mâché creation and its movement is so limited (its mouth moves and that’s it) that it always eats its victims off-camera (complete with over-the-top slurping sound effects and unconvincing whimpers from the victim).

Distractingly, it also seems to think it’s a porno too. There are constantly people shagging in this film for seemingly no reason, and it goes surprisingly far too (you see a half-hearted hand-job at one point). It contributes nothing to the plot whatsoever, meaning we have to keep seeing shots of Henry watching them every ten seconds, gurning and grinning like a five-year old watching Iron Man.

Ultimately, this is the worst thing about Please Don’t Eat My Mother. It tries to be a number of different types of movie and essentially fails on all counts. When it’s trying to be a comedy it suffers by not actually being very funny. When it’s trying to be a horror film it suffers because it’s not scary in the slightest. And when it’s trying to be a porno it doesn’t actually show the stuff you’d expect to see in a porno, and it keeps cutting to an imbecile acting like a pervert so anyone looking for that sort of thing will be disappointed too (I’d imagine).

This is sadly another case of a low-budget film that doesn’t live up to its brilliant title. Whatever you do, don’t pay money to see it, because unlike its plant monster and some of the sans-clothes “actresses” who star in it, you’ll find it hard to swallow.

HOW CAN I SEE IT?
Please Don’t Eat My Mother is only available in the UK as part of The Harry Novak Collection Vol 3 along with The Pigkeeper’s Daughter and The Sinful Dwarf (that guy knew how to name a film). In the US it’s on DVD courtesy of Something Weird Video, who have packed the disc with trailers and other short films as they usually do.