THE REVENGE OF DR. X is a very obscure and low grade US/Japanese exploitation horror flick about a mad scientist who creates in his laboratory a man-size flesh-devouring plant very much like a Venus Flytrap. The main character is American but he heads off to Japan early on and gets a Japanese assistant and supporting cast. This is a Z-grade trash classic with poor picture quality that's only suitable to be laughed at. The killer plant is an obvious man in a suit and looks ansolutely hilrious - a masterpiece of design. The script was written by an uncredited Ed Wood by all accounts, but the whole thing is confused by credits stolen from THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND. There's a random scene of gratuitous nudity and lots of cheese. The British B-flick THE MUTATIONS is a much more fun version of this story.

"Venus Flytrap" AKA "Revenge of Doctor X" AKA "Body of the Prey".What an awful film but it is strangely entertaining! I couldn't help but to get a few giggles out of this one. The first hour or so of the film you will find "Dr. X" going to Japan & meeting his new beautiful female Japanese assistant who's father has several resorts but one that is abandoned with a greenhouse way up in the mountains. He and his assistant move into the resort and start building the greenhouse back up again. He has a Venus Flytrap that he carried with him from the U.S. and he decides to cross it or hybridize with another Flytrap that lives in the ocean in order to prove that all life, including mankind, has come from the ocean from evolution! In the meantime he and his assistant are falling in-love. It's the last half hour in Frankenstein style that "Dr. X" brings energy to the plant via lightening and that is when we get to see the Plant Creature! The creature can walk and ends up terrorizing a local village. This is where the film will remind you more of Frankenstein: the villagers go after the creature with torches! The film is simply fun and sometimes funny. When the film first started, I thought I was either going to turn it off or fast-forward to watch it but I got caught up in the movie - I found it oddly entertaining yet awful at the same time.6/10

Watching an actual plant grow from a seed into a colorful flower would be far more exciting than struggling through this horribly inane and ultimately boring movie about an overworked rocket scientist transforming into a deranged and mad-raving horticulturist during his vacation in Tokyo. Okay, say what now? I kid you not, "The Revenge of Dr. X" – most inaccurate title ever, by the way – revolves on a NASA professor who's forced to take some time off whilst his latest missile project floats around in outer space. Dr. Bragain reluctantly accepts a holiday in Japan, but not before picking up a near-dead Venus Flytrap he intends curing. Along with his personal assistant (a woman who never should have even considered starting an acting career) he looks after the sickly plant, but it quickly becomes a new obsession. Dr. Bragain turns into a loony amateur Frankenstein when he wants to offer his plant a human mind and uses thunder and lightening to achieve this. The only remotely fun and oddly curious moments in this movie are the opening credits … since they belong to another film! See the trivia-section for more details but, unfortunately, Eddie Romero wasn't involved in this production. It was no one less than Ed Wood who penned down this crazed Fauna & Flora adventure, and that actually makes sense because who else could have come up with such nonsense? The "monster" resembles an exploded banana-tree, the dialogs and particularly James Craig's one-liners are horrendous and 99% of the sequences are just plain boring. One to avoid at all costs.

This is a must-see for Ed Wood fans. For those ambivalent or unconvinced, or the non-initiate, this is not a good place to start. Anyone unfamiliar with Wood's oeuvre needs to start with his masterpiece, PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE.The reason I like this film so much is that I prefer his monster/horror outings. Not all of Wood's projects were horror films: of course, there's GLEN OR GLENDA also a few crime films like JAILBAIT and THE SINISTER URGE, as well as his considerable "erotic" output. So a "lost" Ed Wood monster movie is extremely welcome! While this could be considered a "mad scientist" movie along the lines of his BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, it really is closest in feel to a Japanese "kaiju" movie like GODZILLA, or perhaps a better metaphor would be THE MANSTER crossed with DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. In spite of what many have written, this was filmed not in Japan but in the Philippines. So this was closest Ed got to Japan since World War II. The whacked-out scenario and bizarrely crafted dialog puts Ed's peculiar thumbprint all over this bad boy: this is an Ed Wood film all the way, just as sure as THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (also written by Ed but not directed by him) bears his cracked stamp.Not sure if Ed made the trip over to the Philippines for the filming (probably not) but American actor James Craig did, and turns in a scenery-chewing performance par excellence in the lead role as the obsessed mad scientist. Around this time Craig also appeared in THE TORMENTORS, another great exploitation film directed by David L. Hewitt, another low-budget cinema legend. (A Tough to find one.) The visuals of the guy in the rubber plant costume are not to be believed as the out-of-control herb monster destroys the lab and goes on a rampage, wreaking havoc on the countryside. Well-worth seeking out for Ed Wood fans or rubber-suit monster fanatics. Anyone else will be rolling their eyes, scratching their heads, or reaching for the remote.