O.K., this trauma is a weird one.
I remember a sci-fi movie (from the '60s or '70s) where people would stand before a ruler or monarch and if they were found guilty, the floor would open and they would fall into a pit occupied by what looked like a huge bunch of cabbage leaves (reddish leaves, if my memory serves me right.) When they fell in they would scream and basically be eaten by the giant mass of cabbage. The idea a being eaten by a cabbage patch somehow terrified me beyond all measure. To this day I have an irrational hatred of salad. No joke.
Also, I believe their civilization might have lived underground, but I can't say for sure. It's a weird one, but I STILL have nightmares about it. Perhaps confronting that cabbage while eating some coleslaw, a little corned-beef and a giant hot-dog with sauerkraut will free me from this cruciferous cage.
—bdwilcox
UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to reader Tim Tylor who lettuce know the answer with THE LOST CONTINENT!
Wondering if it might be The Lost Continent. I remember the evil people-in-charge dropping people down a hatch into the carnivorous seaweed.
That's it! You can see a tight shot of the carnivorous cabbage at 1:47 here (there's a wider shot if it in the movie where it looks much leafier):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ3oQMLMBnk
I also totally forgot about the balloons they wore, the pirates and the Spanish Grand Inquisitor in his KKK garb (you can't Torquemada anything…)
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It's odd that so many of my childhood traumas are remembered as visual traumas, but the accompanying sounds turn out to be what makes the visuals so creepy. I totally forgot about the sound the carnivorous cabbage made, but upon hearing it I freaked out again all these years later.
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Man, I wish they made movies like this now. The craptacular monsters, over the top acting and poor film stock lent a synergy and magic to these films that today's films lack, for the most part. 🙁
Kindertrauma and Tim Tylor, thanks again for the therapy session and mental cleansing.
That's funny!
I totally recognised this as The Lost Continent – a very crazy but entertaining movie. And very odd for a Hammer film. I remember watching this on tv years ago when i was a kid!
Thanks for the memories!
Cyberschizoid  🙂
I saw this when I was about 13. Went to a movie matinee with my two younger sisters. The lineup was as follows: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, The Lost Continent, and The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit. How messed up was that? I remember the people walking with those balloons and, as bdwilcox said, the sound the carnivorous cabbage made as it squeezed the bloody life out of the characters. I was sure that a patch of that cabbage had formed under my bed that night. What I also found scary was the fact that the person throwing people into the cabbage pit was a child.