n a sleepy '80s suburb, a dangerous venereal disease runs rampant among the adulterous housewives of the neighborhood. It turns the ladies into ravenous, fanged carnivores, intent on human flesh.
One teen, Rinaldi (Rosen), discovers what's happening when his difficult mom, Rita (Suzanne Erlich), calls him down from the bedroom where he's been banished for days to serve him a rich meal and insist that he drink several glasses of milk in rapid succession. As he obliges, she initiates a conversation about milk-fed veal, which is made by depriving baby calves of exercise and force-feeding them milk. Rinaldi says, "Oh, yeah?" while chugging another glass. Then she lunges.
Linda Douglas (Hecht) meets her boyfriend on a park bench and sobs that she just saw her dad kissing another woman. (In fact, he's the one whose extramarital activities have been spreading the virus.) Not only that, she mentions a second later, but she just saw her mother eating her baby sister. After a moment, she giggles. Beyond that, she doesn't seem all that upset. What a centered kid.
Zombie moms walk side by side through the night, searching for bodies to plunder while wondering aloud if they left the iron on. Kids say mildly concerned things like "She's never done anything like this before." And Joyce Shepard (Hubbard) watches her mom rip the flesh from another matron and reacts with a scandalized, "Oh, Mother, how could you!"
In the end, a dose of penicillin cures the moms, who reunite with their surviving children in happy embraces, somehow not too badly affected by memories of all the other people they've eaten.
It sucks ... but not too badly
Bad movies come in degrees. There are lame movies and bad movies and movies so bad that any five-minute section, chosen at random from any reel during the total running time, feels more like an hour and a half at the dentist's office. There's also a category known as So Bad They're Good, which Flesh Eating Mothers misses by a hair. But dang, it comes close. Elements like the doctor, whose office comes complete with a helpful chart of famous people like Idi Amin and Adolf Hitler who have suffered from venereal disease, and the eerie, at worst mildly peeved calm of 30-year-old actors playing teenagers who have just seen their younger siblings devoured by Mom, add to its appeal. Even the gore is bad: The blood looks more like tomato juice, the maulings are so awkwardly staged that some of the victims look like they're actively trying to avoid getting away, and the scene of two zombie moms ripping a cat in half clearly features a stuffed feline that in no way looks like it might have once been a real animal hunting mice on this planet.
You can give the movie credit for not trying to take itself seriously. The police commissioner responsible for the evil coverup is Richard M. Dixon. (Ha-ha.) The evil cop he uses as a hit man is Officer Hitchcock. (Ha-ha.) The diminutive medical examiner and the tall blond medical assistant fall spectacularly head-over-heels in love at first sight. The "milk-fed veal" scene is actually very funny, if poorly acted, and the view of the zombie virus, as seen through a microscope, is so deliberately third-rate it's downright defiant. One could imagine talented filmmakers making essentially the same story, with more laugh lines and a tweak to the horrific moments, and actually coming up with a first-rate camp comedy. (They could even make it a musical.)
Alas, these were not talented filmmakers. The energy is intermittent, the jokes that succeed do so in spite of themselves, and while no actors are good, there are one or two so very bad that they seem to be picking which words to emphasize entirely at random. They're among the stiffest, most unnatural performers I have ever, ever seen, as awful in their own way as the bit players employed by Ed Wood. True, that's a major statement, and true, their flounderings give the movie a certain odd appeal. It may even make you laugh out loud. But when you find yourself praising a movie for that reason, it's hard not to think of how many other films took the same elements, with or without a camp edge, and did it right.
