When I bought 1986's Little Shop of Horrors on DVD at Wal-Mart, Dave the cashier commented, "Great movie." He's not wrong. Little Shop of Horrors is a musical horror comedy. How often do you see that combination? Not often enough!
Directed by Yoda puppeteer Frank Oz, Little Shop of Horrors is a screen version of the 1980 off-Broadway musical, which was inspired by the 1960 Roger Corman B movie. In true low-budget horror tradition, Corman's film was shot in two days and a night! The 1986 version stars Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, who reprises her role from the off-Broadway play. She squeaks her dialog, making her singing more dynamic. Vincent Gardenia plays Gravis Mushnik, the owner of the little shop in question. According to Internet Movie Database, "Vincent Gardenia insisted that he was chosen as Musnick 'because Frank Oz liked my name.'" (Because a gardenia is a flower. It took me two days to make that connection.)
Mushnick's Flower Shop is on hard times, and that's saying something considering it's on Skid Row. (Why is a specialty shop located in the ghetto? The rent must be cheap.) But customers flood the store when Seymour (Moranis), one of Mr. Mushnick's employees, displays a weird plant in the window. The vegetation appeared mysteriously at Seymour's favorite Chinese flower shop, following a solar eclipse. It would be an ill-spent $1.75.
Seymour names the plant Audrey II, after the flower-shop's bombshell employee (Greene). The little thing quickly grows out of a Maxwell House can to twelve-and-a-half feet tall, generating enormous fame on the shop and Seymour in particular. But the accolades come at a cost: Audrey II has a voracious appetite for human blood, and it's up to Seymour to provide it. At first, he can nurse the plant by pricking his own finger, but as Audrey II grows, so does the body count. How will Seymour escape the mess of his own making, especially when Audrey II starts calling the shots?
Little Shop of Horrors has a look all its own: Paying homage to the Corman classic, it's set in New York City and is a 1960 period piece, accurate down to the vintage garbage cans: Per the DVD's special features, set director Tessa Davies drove around NYC in a truck, offering to swap out people's old garbage cans for new ones. "People thought I was crazy," she said. (I created a 1986 period piece, so I appreciate her efforts.) But despite the period accuracy, everything looks fake! It's an intentional aesthetic: Writer Howard Ashman told Frank Oz, "This is supposed to be stupid."
Along those lines, you can easily tell that Little Shop of Horrors was filmed on a huge, extremely-detailed set. It was England's Pinewood Studios, which at the time was the world's largest soundstage. Yep, those garbage cans were shipped overseas! Frank Oz dubbed the look "heightened reality," and it's a tribute to the stage production.
Concerning this movie adaptation of the stage musical (of the original movie!), Frank Oz called it "deceptive." He believed there was a thin line to be balanced, stating, "If we played it too camp, the audience wouldn't care about the characters. If we were too straight, we'd veer towards melodrama. There are no dizzying overhead crane shots. No irrelevant dance numbers. Nothing to overwhelm what is basically the simple story of a boy, a girl and a man-eating plant."
Guest appearances are made by John Candy, Steve Martin, Bill Murray and James Belushi. Being a John Candy fan, I wish his wacky disc jockey character had been in the movie a bit longer. Martin and Murray are phenomenally funny in this film! Martin plays a sadistic dentist, and Murray (reprising Jack Nicholson's debut role in the Corman original) is his masochistic patient. In this reviewer's opinion, their scenes together in Little Shop of Horrors are some of the best work either of them has produced. This is the only movie in which they appear together, and their chemistry is great. In true Murray style, much of his material is ad-libbed, which posed a continuity challenge when it came time to edit.
When Bill Murray was offered this role, he was financially set after Ghostbusters, and had been considering retirement. That seems unthinkable now, with many of Murray's most popular films (Scrooged; What about Bob?; Groundhog Day) coming after Little Shop of Horrors. Murray would work with Frank Oz again during the production of 1991's What About Bob?.
The medical tools in Steve Martin's dentist office also appear in The Joker's plastic surgery scene in 1989's Batman: This is because both films were made at Pinewood Studios. So Little Shop of Horrors has a Batman connection through these props (and by extension, Jack Nicholson); a Planes, Trains and Automobiles connection with Steve Martin and John Candy, and a Ghostbusters connection through Rick Moranis and Bill Murray.
Without a doubt, the real star of Little Shop of Horrors is Audrey II, the talking and singing plant! This "mean, green mother from outer space" is voiced by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, in true '60s fashion. As we've learned from The Blob (1988), when something comes from outer space, it's automatically bad.
The Audrey II puppet in Oz's production weighed over a ton and took more than forty operators to animate. The nefarious plant was designed by Lyle Conway, a longtime associate of Jim Henson. Audrey II's lips (patterned after Ellen Greene's) are synched with its dialog, and it has a surprising range of movement via its vines. You can't take your eyes off of this puppet! Seeing movies with such incredible practical effects makes me sad that CGI has killed cinema.
Although I've owned my Dollar Tree DVD of the Roger Corman original since 2005, I'd never before seen the 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors on DVD. I'd caught the film before on TV before, but it's been decades. Being a physical media junkie, I couldn't pass it up for five bucks. My wife and I watched it that night, and except for the few seconds of Rick Moranis draining his finger of blood, she loved the movie.
Little Shop of Horrors is a brilliant dark comedy, and I've been seeing some love for it lately, with the play being staged by a local drama club. Also, some plants bearing more than a passing resemblance to Audrey II sprouted around Halloween.
The original ending to Oz's Little Shop of Horrors was much darker. Here it is! You may want to watch the film first, because you won't be able to forget this conclusion.
Five million dollars was spent to produce the original ending, only to have it end up on the cutting room floor. Test audiences hated seeing the leads die, so a happy ending was written and shot, putting the film over budget and beyond schedule. Oz was against the rewrite, but Warner Bros. threatened to scrap the movie otherwise, fearing a flop based on the test screenings. Long thought lost, the original footage was located in 2011 and pieced together to make a post-production, Frank Oz-approved "director's cut" DVD, which won a Saturn Award in 2013.
The stage play does in fact end with the plant eating Seymour and Audrey. But as Oz noted in an interview with Collider, "In a movie, the character does not come back for a bow. That character is dead, and because they loved Ellen and Rick so much they were very upset at the end. It's not that they didn't like the movie, it's the end they didn't like. They hated the fact that we killed our stars." Which ending do you like better? Let the world know in the comment box below!
Finally, Little Shop of Horrors spawned a thirteen-episode, 1991 cartoon. Titled Little Shop, it aired on FOX, and featured a "kinder and gentler" sentient plant. I saw this show when I was ten, and because I lacked knowledge of the source material, the animated musical felt like a fever dream.
In Little Shop, Audrey II has been sup-planted (sorry) by Junior, who is basically Audrey II with eyes. The character is voiced by Buddy Lewis, who occasionally throws down the '90s rap vibes. ("M.C. Planter"! I'll be here all week.) The show's intro is a few notches below the "Don't Copy that Floppy" rap.
Beetlejuice, Rambo and Robocop got cartoons, why not this? Little Shop's intro is so '90s edgy, it reminds me of Poochie, from when The Simpsons was great. You may not be old enough to remember that.
Thanks for reading my review of this schlocky gem. When I picked up the DVD on that fateful Walmart trip, I never anticipated writing about Little Shop of Horrors, but that's how life and blogging goes.
If you're into offbeat, fun movies set to music, you'll want to check out Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, the first entries into Retro Injection's "Musicals that Aren't Lame." There may be more to come! Xanadu, anyone?
Check out all of our film reviews here, including my personal favorite, "Ten Underrated '80s Horror Movies, with Special Guest Michael Myers." And what's a garden without slugs?
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