FLESH EATING MOTHERS

HORNY MOMS TURN INTO HUNGRY CANNIBALS

★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)

Director: James Aviles Martin

1988

No, this movie’s not about flesh eating anyone’s mother. The missing hyphen in the title hints at the quality in store for you in this movie about a venereal disease making the rounds among desperate housewives, turning them into ravenous zombie…hybrids? I’m not sure what happened, all I can say is that I had a blast watching it. Flesh Eating Mothers moves fast, gives us enough character development to keep up, and attempts body horror on a $10,000 budget.

I respect the film not because it moves in so-good-it’s-bad territory (it does), but because nothing is forbidden, upping the stakes as I wondered which kid was going to end up in their mother’s digestive tract. As PTA members nosh on limbs and heads, we watch the cheating, diseased husband/Patient Zero sneak out for yet another tryst. Flesh Eating Mothers is the grownup’s version of It Follows, a morality tale about keeping it in one’s dad jeans.

After the script does a good job introducing us to the inhabitants of a middle-class suburb, problems arise when some of the moms get sick, exhibiting strange symptoms such as overeating and deformity. Little do they or our hero teens know that the women have been exposed to an STD that is dormant in men. Part of the fun is figuring out who the neighborhood Don Juan slept with as we watch mother after mother fall ill, and their children and husbands turn into prey. When an innocent police officer is arrested for the crimes in a ridiculous scenario that makes no sense, our teenage protagonists work to solve the mystery with the help of a goofy coroner and his love interest.

After one teen girl catches her mom nibbling on kid sister’s body parts, she runs out of the house and into town instead of calling the police or going to a neighbor, and she keeps running until she’s stopped by a buddy who sits her down to have a nice, breezy conversation about how weird everyone’s been acting lately. Eventually, the girl who just lost her sibling casually mentions her mother’s fleshy snack. End scene. No one’s decisions resemble those of a human being with their cognitive functions, but the unintentional hilarity makes it enjoyable to watch.

The police are kept in the dark and the male tramp continues to poison the well thanks to the film’s antagonist. Flesh Eating Mothers does a great job highlighting this villain with an industrial spotlight; there’s no mistaking who it is, the bad guy isn’t thinly painted. You’ll loathe the man or woman letting the disease spread, using his/her mulleted toadie (who is not “Weird Al” Yankovic) to silence witnesses. We can’t wait for the jerk to get their just desserts, or rather, for them to be dessert.

Most vintage B movies are forgettable nap opportunities, and not just because of the shoddy scenery and script. There are usually low or no stakes and you don’t have anyone to hate or root for unless they use cheap tricks, like endangering children for emotional quan. Flesh Eating Mothers may be of poor-quality and have bad actors and kill off kids left and right, but it entertains. Aviles Martin hired musicians from a coffeehouse (I assume) to compose some snappy music…he injected animation in the movie when none is called for…the memorable makeup on the zombie mothers is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone… I appreciate the effort. Don’t add Flesh Eating Mothers to the list of lazy horror movies. This is one bad mother.

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Nicolina Torres has never used and will never use A.I. to write or help write her stories or reviews. NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (Substack.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of her work on Substack for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.