(Trailer.) Rest assured, the movie is not a zombie Blaxploitation flick. No, this super-low-budget 1988 anti-sex flesh-eating mutant film is much more a cannibalistic version of Desperate Housewives, the big difference being that all the housewives actually look like frumpy, unattractive suburban mothers with bad haircuts and unattractive clothes and not like fuckable semi-anorexic Hollywood starlets with Brazilian waxes, tit jobs and a wardrobe bought on Rodeo Drive.Flesh Eating Mothers, the directorial debut of James Aviles Martin, was preceded by one writing credit (for I Was A Teenage Zombie [1987/trailer]) and followed in 2003 with Artwatch, a film about the shortcomings of art restoration (!). According to the press release to Martin's still unreleased Latino drama ¡DIEGA! (2007), Flesh Eating Mothers was directed while the "auteur" was still in film school. And although the movie does indeed play like a student film, it does have its special geeky charms that help make it enjoyable on a certain level, particularly if you don't have any high expectations in the first place. 
Starring absolutely no one you have ever heard of or ever will hear of — most of those involved unsurprisingly have no other film credit to their name — the acting is as stiff as the direction is static, but the resulting unintentional laughs meld well with the intentional ones to coalesce into a relatively painless, mildly entertaining and funny atrocity. Much like The Boneyard (1991) or Blood Diner (1987), Flesh Eating Mothers is enjoyable despite itself…
(Spoilers — as if it matters any.) The film opens with a rather funny scene of a hunter running through the woods who, in no short order, first discovers that he’s missing an arm and then shoots a woman. Fast forward a few years, and the said hunter is now nothing less than Commissioner Dixon (Ken Eaton), the asshole who heads the police force is Suburbia, Somewhere, USA. Roddy Douglas (Louis Homyak), a particularly hairy Suburban husband lothario is bed-hopping between the frumpy, bored and unsatisfied housewives of the town, spreading a sexually transmitted virus that leaves the host male unaffected but mutates women who have had children into voraciously hungry cannibals. 
Officer McDormick (Mickey Ross) walks in on his alcoholic ex-wife Lois (Marie Michaels) eating their son Billy (Scott Lerner), and when she goes after McDormick he shoots her through the forehead. Everyone on the force, however, thinks he simply went postal — an assumption that Dixon facilitates by stealing important evidence. The town’s midget coroner knows the truth, but before he can do anything Dixon has Officer Hitchcock (Morty Kleidermacher) kill McDormick; Dixon also sets Hitchcock onto the coroner, but before Hitchcock can complete the job he gets eaten. Meantime, the various kids that have seen their mothers eat their brothers or dads gather together to calmly complain about their mothers' extreme PMS problems. The good coroner teams up with Felicia Dodd 
(Carolyn Gratsch), the tall, hot and blonde assistant of the town doctor (who only treats syph and gonorrhoea, it seems) to try to come up with a solution, and she actually does so. The kids run after their given mothers, injecting them with the slow-acting cure. Before it can take effect, the still-hungry moms corner Dixon in an alley, an event that the coroner takes advantage of the force Dixon into revealing the truth about why he framed McDormick and wants to cover everything up: he himself is a carrier. The mothers change back to normal and Dixon goes to jail, while somewhere across town Roddy Douglas gets his nose chomped off by the housewife he just bonked…
The cheesy dialog is rather funny at times — the scene in which two mutated mothers talk housewife shop as they search for food is a gas, for example — as is some of the third-rate acting. But in all truth, the script is incredibly sloppy and the director often doesn’t really seem to know what to do with his characters. Likewise, the film does feel a bit too long towards its rather dully executed finale. Still, Flesh Eating Mothers is so thoroughly idiotic and ridiculous that any fan of intellectually empty filmic trash will probably enjoy the movie, despite its slightly moral stance of extramarital sex = death. The occasional bursts of blood and gore act as a nice added attraction, and luckily James Aviles Martin never has any of the mothers do a nude scene — now that would truly have been horrific.
The film also has a rather nice song entitled Suburbia to its opening credits sequence, which is available on the compilation Rollercoaster of Death 2: The Final Sacrifice at The Manchester Morgue. It is sung by one "Sherri Lamar" who, under her real name Sherri Ehrlich released a children’s CD in 2000 entitled Around the World in Song, which can be found on Amazon.
Starring absolutely no one you have ever heard of or ever will hear of — most of those involved unsurprisingly have no other film credit to their name — the acting is as stiff as the direction is static, but the resulting unintentional laughs meld well with the intentional ones to coalesce into a relatively painless, mildly entertaining and funny atrocity. Much like The Boneyard (1991) or Blood Diner (1987), Flesh Eating Mothers is enjoyable despite itself…
(Spoilers — as if it matters any.) The film opens with a rather funny scene of a hunter running through the woods who, in no short order, first discovers that he’s missing an arm and then shoots a woman. Fast forward a few years, and the said hunter is now nothing less than Commissioner Dixon (Ken Eaton), the asshole who heads the police force is Suburbia, Somewhere, USA. Roddy Douglas (Louis Homyak), a particularly hairy Suburban husband lothario is bed-hopping between the frumpy, bored and unsatisfied housewives of the town, spreading a sexually transmitted virus that leaves the host male unaffected but mutates women who have had children into voraciously hungry cannibals. 
Officer McDormick (Mickey Ross) walks in on his alcoholic ex-wife Lois (Marie Michaels) eating their son Billy (Scott Lerner), and when she goes after McDormick he shoots her through the forehead. Everyone on the force, however, thinks he simply went postal — an assumption that Dixon facilitates by stealing important evidence. The town’s midget coroner knows the truth, but before he can do anything Dixon has Officer Hitchcock (Morty Kleidermacher) kill McDormick; Dixon also sets Hitchcock onto the coroner, but before Hitchcock can complete the job he gets eaten. Meantime, the various kids that have seen their mothers eat their brothers or dads gather together to calmly complain about their mothers' extreme PMS problems. The good coroner teams up with Felicia Dodd 
(Carolyn Gratsch), the tall, hot and blonde assistant of the town doctor (who only treats syph and gonorrhoea, it seems) to try to come up with a solution, and she actually does so. The kids run after their given mothers, injecting them with the slow-acting cure. Before it can take effect, the still-hungry moms corner Dixon in an alley, an event that the coroner takes advantage of the force Dixon into revealing the truth about why he framed McDormick and wants to cover everything up: he himself is a carrier. The mothers change back to normal and Dixon goes to jail, while somewhere across town Roddy Douglas gets his nose chomped off by the housewife he just bonked…
The cheesy dialog is rather funny at times — the scene in which two mutated mothers talk housewife shop as they search for food is a gas, for example — as is some of the third-rate acting. But in all truth, the script is incredibly sloppy and the director often doesn’t really seem to know what to do with his characters. Likewise, the film does feel a bit too long towards its rather dully executed finale. Still, Flesh Eating Mothers is so thoroughly idiotic and ridiculous that any fan of intellectually empty filmic trash will probably enjoy the movie, despite its slightly moral stance of extramarital sex = death. The occasional bursts of blood and gore act as a nice added attraction, and luckily James Aviles Martin never has any of the mothers do a nude scene — now that would truly have been horrific.
The film also has a rather nice song entitled Suburbia to its opening credits sequence, which is available on the compilation Rollercoaster of Death 2: The Final Sacrifice at The Manchester Morgue. It is sung by one "Sherri Lamar" who, under her real name Sherri Ehrlich released a children’s CD in 2000 entitled Around the World in Song, which can be found on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment