Horror Double Feature: Womaneater & Please Don’t Eat My Mother

In today’s Shocktober Double Feature, we will encounter Amazonian natives, a carnivorous tree, a man-eating houseplant and full-frontal nudity. It’s Womaneater and Please Don’t Eat My Mother!

WOMANEATER (1958)

For those of you wondering whether Pittsburgh-born beauty Marpessa Dawn ever made another film besides 1959’s classic Black Orpheus, here is your answer. She appeared one year earlier, as an Amazonian native at the opening of Charles Saunders’ Womaneater, being sacrificed to a carnivorous tree. That tree is stolen by English scientist George Coulouris, who finds it necessary to keep this houseplant well fed with curvaceous lassies in order to harvest the tree’s life-giving sap. Things get a bit complicated, however, when he falls in love with his new housekeeper, Vera Day… This picture is certainly pretty bad, objectively speaking, but I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot worse. The film looks like it cost around 200 pounds to make (although it probably cost twice as much!), and has a tawdry, sleazy aura hanging over it, but the acting isn’t all that atrocious, the script doesn’t waste our time with unnecessaries (the whole thing is a scant 70 minutes long), and Vera Day, almost looking here like a poor man’s Anne Francis, is pretty good as the bird in distress. The killer plant itself is certainly nowhere near as scary as those apple trees in The Wizard of Oz, however. Viewers looking for a better killer-plant flick should investigate Day of the Triffids (1963); even the late Roger Corman’s hilarious 1960 classic The Little Shop of Horrors offers more shocks and entertainment value. Womaneater (you’ve gotta love that title!) is decidedly a bargain basement affair; I suppose the producer’s name, Guido Coen (!), should have tipped me off. And speaking of tips, potential viewers should know that this picture DOES offer two salient high points: Vera Day looks absolutely smashing in her 1950s-style bullet bra!

PLEASE DON’T EAT MY MOTHER (1973)

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, produced and directed by Carl Monson, 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, once played a guy named Henry on CBS’ HOW I MET YOUR Mother?

COMING ATTRACTIONS: Knife murders, near nudity, a Parisian blood drainer, and Christopher Lee! It’s Violent Midnight and Theatre of Death, in the Shocktober Double Feature #5….