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Anthropomorphic vegetables!

When I was really into Belgian/French comics in the early 1970s, I discovered Nikita Mandryka’s “The Culinary Adventures of the Masked Cucumber”, a satire on American costumed heroes. Today the Masked Cucumber has his own website: http://www.leconcombre.com

Although it is not anthropomorphized, I always felt that “The Little Shop of Horrors” with the carnivorous Audrey Jr./II – the 1960 movie, the 1982 musical, and the 1986 movie -- was not as funny as the 1978 Czech live-action feature “Adéla ješt? neve?e?ela”, a.k.a. “Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet”. It was shown at the FILMEX Los Angeles International Film Festival, and I thought it was hilarious. Wikipedia’s plot synopsis: “It is the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The Prague police commissar Ledvina asks the famous New York detective Nick Carter, who is on a visit to Prague, for assistance to solve the strange case of a missing dog. Mysterious murder cases happen during the investigations, done by the malicious botanist Baron von Kratzmar and his carnivorous plant Adele. Von Kratzmar kidnapps his victims, binds them and whenever he plays a gramophone with the melody "Schlafe, mein Prinzchen" (a lullaby by Bernhard Flies but previously associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) it is the time for Adele to awaken and eat her victims for dinner. Baron von Kratzmar considers himself a misjudged genius and wants to take revenge on one of his former professors. He calls himself "the Gardener", a notorious criminal, who Nick Carter thought had died in the swamps years ago. With the help of bizarre inventions, Ledvina and Carter succeed in catching von Kratzmar and delivering him to the legal authorities.”

The only clip on YouTube doesn’t show Adele at all – just the Czech Ledvina introducing the American Nick Carter to Czech beer. It looks more like an adv’t for Czech beer and pretzels! Boo, hiss!

http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/20087-ad-la-je-t-neve-e-ela
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2YWUpcPGzg

Fred Patten

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