A woman finds a surefire way to lose weight that comes at a heavy price.
Episode Summary
A woman named Betsy who desperately wants to lose weight gets a mysterious package from a company called “Your Weight Is Over” – inside is a hearing aid guaranteed to help cut down on food intake. Cool, right?
She puts it in and goes on a date with her old high school sweetheart who’s back in town.
In the restaurant she hears blood curdling screams when people eat their food. It becomes so unbearable that she passes out. Okay, maybe not cool.
Talking Fruit
The next day, she gets another package in the mail: a pair of glasses. But as soon as she puts them on, she starts seeing cute little faces on her food and they start talking to her like they’re living beings!
They implore her not to eat them and she’s torn between wanting to satiate her hunger and not wanting to kill her new friends. She chooses to sew her mouth shut and dies of starvation.
Thoughts
I’m glad the very first episode of Tales from the Darkside I ever saw was this one. Both memorable and hilarious, Love Hungry is also very disturbing (and a little frightening) when you think about it.
Betsy was a very sympathetic, likeable character. If a normal person was put in her situation, you can bet they would eat the freakin’ fruit without a second thought, but she didn’t. With her pure heart, she recognized them as living beings and preferred to die than hurt them. And the actress who played Betsy, Sharon Madden, did a remarkable job face acting; through the whole episode, she makes one horrified expression after another, and each one was totally different!
The food puppets looked cheap but fulfilled their purpose, and whatever imperfections they may have had were masked by their outstanding voices and accents: Southern belle, tough guy, intellectual. Everything they say and the way they say it will make you laugh out loud – I love this episode.
Rating
Agreed that this is a superior episode of TotDS. I wonder if it inspired the talking food one sometimes saw in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (notably the Christmas Special)?
Probably not, since this episode aired two years after Pee Wee’s Playhouse made its debut, but they do certainly look similar!
Annoying orange – have had to sit through hours of this in repeat by my son who’s autistic and obsessed with it! X