BA_Harrison On an expedition to a remote part of South America, Doctor Moran (George Coulouris) discovers a savage tribe who worship a carnivorous plant that feasts solely on young, beautiful, curvaceous women. No 'plain Janes', oldies, uglies, skinnies or fatties for this lean, green killing machine: it's only interested in attractive babes with impressive curves (quite how the plant has developed this discerning attitude towards its food is never explained).Having devoured it's prey, the plant produces a liquid that can purportedly restore life to the dead, something that greatly interests the doctor, who arranges for the ravenous shrub to be transported back to his home in England, along with one of the tribesmen, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughn), to help him with his work (quite how Moran came to this arrangement with the bloodthirsty natives is also never explained). Luring women back to his secure, basement laboratory, Moran sets about feeding the plant in an effort to create enough of the sap to revive the dead.Womaneater is made of the stuff that monster B-movie fans live for: there's the mad scientist with his creepy ethnic assistant, a ropey old tree creature with flailing limbs and tentacles, a bevy of buxom beauties in skimpy sacrificial robes, a pneumatic blonde heroine (sexy ex-funfair worker Sally, played by Vera Day), and a brave but chauvinistic mechanic hero, Jack Venner (Peter Wayn). As one might expect from a low budget '50s B-movie, the film is no Oscar winner, but what it lacks in logic or technical merit it sure makes up for in cheeze 'n' sleaze, with big helpings of both being served up by director Charles Saunders.The shonky monster is guaranteed to illicit more laughs than screams, as will the sight of Tanga in his adult-sized nappy banging the bongos; the seedier content includes Moran prowling the streets and bars of London for suitable victims and his misogynistic treatment of devoted ex-lover/housekeeper Margaret (Joyce Gregg).There's also an unexpectedly tacky moment when Sally helps Jack to fix a car: while Jack is in the foot-well, he eyes up Sally's impressive breasts (her '50s torpedo chest blatantly occupying the foreground), after which he rudely berates her for her inability to follow simple instructions. Considering how he has just asked her to marry him, the scene leaves the viewer wondering just how badly he might abuse her once the ring is actually on her finger.A fun finalé adds even more sleaziness, with sexy Sally narrowly avoiding becoming a meal for the monstrous weed, but not before her blouse has been torn to give viewers a tantalising glimpse of her bra (this being 1958, I imagine that's all audiences needed to get hot and flustered!).7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for the very lovely Vera Day as Sally.

MartinHafer IMPORTANT NOTE--Despite the title, this is not a pornographic film but a cheesy horror film. The title is unfortunate, nonetheless.George Coulouris was not a bad actor and he had a long string of credits to his name. In this film, his performance is pretty good--but this is about the only good thing about this stinking British horror film. How they roped him into starring in this stinky pile of cheese, I have no idea.The film begins with Coulouris going to the Amazon and experiencing some sort of horror--though the film blacks out--leaving the audience to wonder what happened. He's just suddenly back in merry old England several years later. Now he's spending all his time on his estate doing really stupid experiments that call for a native drummer from South America and a really, really silly tree that obviously has actors inside it. This tree was not the cute apple pie tree from McDonalds or the cranky tree like in the WIZARD OF OZ. No, it was a life-stealing, moving tree that was sure to elicit laughs from everyone seeing this film. How the film makers thought any of this could be scary or even that interesting is beyond me. I think their decision was perhaps based on the abuse of some drug or a head injury.Supposedly, the same tree that takes lives ultimately has the power to restore life--but the mad doctor spent so much time killing young women that he only had time to try out the life-giving properties at the end of the film. But, instead of working, the bad guys started trying to kill each other and the tree was set ablaze and the audience felt very thankful this stupid mad scientist film was finished!! Dumb and rather boring--this one isn't quite cheesy enough to elicit many laughs, so it's probably one best left to masochists like myself to watch.

ferbs54 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 two years earlier, as an Amazonian native at the opening of "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. IMDb viewers looking for a better killer-plant flick should investigate "Day of the Triffids" (1963); even the hilarious 1960 "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!

gavcrimson SPOILERS INCLUDEDThe Woman Eater was one of two cheap and cheerful horror films made by the producer-director duo of Guido Coen and Charles Saunders who usually specialised in second feature crime thrillers. The teams initial venture into this territory, The Man Without a Body is sadly a bore despite a plot which features Nostradamus' severed head being brought back to life and concludes with a mini-rampage from a monster that resembles a tall man with a pillow case on his head. Opening with location defining shots of the Thames, their second attempt at the genre is an equally ludicrous but much more fun and spirited example of B-movie horror. At the ‘explorer's club' Dr James Moran (George Coulouris, the lead in both the Saunders-Coen horrors) entertains young associate Colin with the tale of a tribe that can bring the dead back to life. Ignoring warnings that insanity runs in the Moran family, Colin joins the doctor on a trek to the Amazon cost cuttingly evoked by stock footage and a few jungle sets at Twickenham studios. Stumbling across the tribe performing a black magic ceremony involving a woman being fed to a monster tree, Colin makes an ill-fated attempt to halt the proceedings (`stop you devils') and ends up with a spear in the chest for his troubles. Moran is later found babbling and suffering from jungle fever. Five years later Moran has decamped to a sleepy village in England where hidden in his basement lies the bizarre spectacle of Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan) one of the tribe, hypnotizing various women in order to feed them to the monster tree. (Best not to question how Moran got both a tribesman and a carnivorous tree from the Amazon to provincial England without anyone noticing, especially say customs). Moran eases his conscience by ranting ‘she'll become part of the plant, she won't have died in vain' convinced the tree's juices can bring the dead back to life. ‘With this our people make live…the dead… master' remarks Tanga in his broken ‘native' English, a theory demonstrated by Moran injecting the juices into a pulsing heart which he keeps in a jar. In his search for tree food –the preferred victims being buxom women- Moran takes a furtive walk around Piccadilly Circus and Soho, ignoring prostitutes in favour of following a woman to a crummy late night watering hole. After he buys her a drink she asks him if he's a talent spotter for the movies then jadedly adds ‘all men are talent spotters in one way or another'. Soon after she's thrown to the monster tree who sports some barely mobile vines and oven glove like claws, the surreal effect suggests a man who has disguised himself as a Christmas tree in order to grope a passing starlet. Despite a brief running time of 71 minutes and a plot that drafts in a zombie woman on top of a monster tree and a mad doctor The Woman Eater does contain a fair deal of padding and plot diversions that hasn't endeared the film to many critics over the years. In fairness these moments aren't completely without interest though. 50's pin-up Vera Day a kind of proto Barbara Windsor, plays the heroine, an ex-hula hula dancer whose appearance in the village turns the heads of both the local mechanic and the mad doctor. ‘As a scientist I'm more interested in things with six legs rather than two' proclaims Moran at one point but soon changes his mind when he hires Vera to look after his house. Given their Butchers films backgrounds its no surprise that Coen and Saunders also have a tendency to dwell on the police investigation side of things with the forces of law and order quaintly represented by village detectives who wear trench coats and smoke pipes and a cheery copper who gets about on a pushbike. Saunders' chief claim to fame is that he would later direct Britain's first nudist camp film Nudist Paradise (1958) which was still playing in London as late as 1967 and also wound up as a visual gag in a Carry On film, while Coen would end his career producing sex comedies. You can see slight hints of what was to come in The Woman Eater, Coen and Saunders seem to enjoy flirting with salacious sights that never actually materialise, the heroine is introduced hula-hula dancing at a carnival as a barker promises we'll see ‘south sea island belles…all for a bob' and an advert for a West End play called Nude with Violin is used in a almost subliminal message way. Slightly more risqué is one of the film's few scenes played for a comedy in which Vera helps her mechanic boyfriend mend a car only for him to become distracted by staring at her chest. Less the censor suspect the hero (or the cameraman for that matter) is meant to be having amoral thoughts about Miss Day, moments later he's doing the honest thing and asking her to marry him, even though they've only ever met three times. It could all of course play on Sunday afternoon television today without anyone raising so much as an eyebrow but this was what a British exploitation film looked like in 1957. The Woman Eater also anticipates many a home-grown horror effort (usually the ones starring Michael Gough) in which dedicated mad doctors become distracted by something blond, half their age and in a tight sweater, leaving their repressed middle aged housekeeper fuming with envy and putting the spanner in the works that eventually causes everything to (literally) go up in smoke.