What’s it about?
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
Showing posts with label plant monster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plant monster. Show all posts
Monday, March 1, 2010
Thursday, May 28, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: THE LOST CONTINENT
What’s it about?
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1963: MATANGO
What’s it about?
Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.
The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.
Is it any good?
MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.
For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.
Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.
It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.
Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.
The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.
Is it any good?
MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.
For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.
Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.
It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1960: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
What’s it about?
A klutzy delivery boy at a flower shop is on the verge of being fired when he convinces his employer to give him one more chance -- but only if a rare plant he’s been growing at home becomes an attraction for the shop within a week. At first the plant (named “Audrey Jr” in honor of a pretty shop assistant the delivery boy has a crush on) looks small and sickly. But while sitting up and caring for Audrey Jr during the night, the delivery boy accidentally discovers that it perks up as soon as it gets a taste of blood. He feeds it first by pricking his fingers, but the plant quickly grows too big to be satisfied by mere drips and drops.
The nutrition problem is temporarily solved when the delivery boy inadvertently causes a man’s gruesome death at a train yard. Searching for a way to dispose of the body, he takes it back to the flower shop and feeds the dismembered pieces to Audrey Jr. Nourished by so much food, the plant quickly grows to an enormous size and becomes a prize attraction at the shop -- but each night it craves more and more human blood and the delivery boy is driven to increasingly desperate means to keep it alive.
Is it any good?
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is unlike any other sci-fi movie that I’ve seen from the years leading up to 1960. First and foremost, it’s a black comedy fueled by a mix of oddball characters, ethnic humor, deadpan jokes, and goofy sight gags. The horror is practically nonexistent -- partly because it’s constantly undercut by the humor, and partly because plants are just not that scary no matter how many people they eat. Despite the central presence of a carnivorous talking plant named Audrey Jr, the movie doesn’t feel very much like a sci-fi flick either. In fact, the movie it most reminded me of is another Roger Corman picture -- A BUCKET OF BLOOD from 1959, in which a hapless beatnik wannabe discovers the fame he seeks only when he accidentally encases a cat in plaster of Paris. Like the delivery boy in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, he too soon graduates to cheerily sacrificing humans to keep the fires of his success burning.
Weirdly, it’s impossible to feel anything but sympathy for either of Roger Corman’s murderous protagonists because they are both come off as such well-meaning (and borderline idiotic) innocents propelled to their acts by forces greater than themselves. To the extent that this is intentional satire, it’s more pointed in A BUCKET OF BLOOD, but there is still something strangely compelling (and, at least to my mind, hilarious) about following the exploits of a good-hearted murderer in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Even when the hero is feeding chunks of an undercover cop to his pet plant, I can’t help but root for him.
It’s also worth noting that the entire movie (except for a few exterior shots) was reportedly filmed in two days on existing sets for only $30,000. Yet, even though it’s clearly a low-budget B-movie, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS still feels far more like a visionary labor of love than the cheap-and-dirty quickie effort that it apparently was. (Roger Corman himself considered the final product so inconsequential that he didn’t even bother registering the copyright, which ultimately led to the movie falling into the public domain.) Although the ending is pretty weak, the rest of the script is efficient, funny, and sometimes even satirical. The special effects are not really all that special, but the homemade absurdity of Audrey Jr only adds to the humor -- especially once it starts talking in a hilariously un-plantlike voice. The oddball characters aren’t especially deep or well-developed, but they are almost always interesting. And one of them is played by a very young and exuberant Jack Nicholson. In other words, there are plenty of reasons to watch THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS even despite its many, many ragged edges.
Epilogue: No doubt as a result of being in the public domain, the movie was often shown on TV in the 1960s and 1970s (see also: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) and eventually became popular enough to inspire a stage musical in the early 1980s. This was then made into another film in 1986, starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin -- probably one of the first examples of the now increasingly common movie-based-on-a-musical-based-on-a-movie phenomenon.
A klutzy delivery boy at a flower shop is on the verge of being fired when he convinces his employer to give him one more chance -- but only if a rare plant he’s been growing at home becomes an attraction for the shop within a week. At first the plant (named “Audrey Jr” in honor of a pretty shop assistant the delivery boy has a crush on) looks small and sickly. But while sitting up and caring for Audrey Jr during the night, the delivery boy accidentally discovers that it perks up as soon as it gets a taste of blood. He feeds it first by pricking his fingers, but the plant quickly grows too big to be satisfied by mere drips and drops.
The nutrition problem is temporarily solved when the delivery boy inadvertently causes a man’s gruesome death at a train yard. Searching for a way to dispose of the body, he takes it back to the flower shop and feeds the dismembered pieces to Audrey Jr. Nourished by so much food, the plant quickly grows to an enormous size and becomes a prize attraction at the shop -- but each night it craves more and more human blood and the delivery boy is driven to increasingly desperate means to keep it alive.
 |  |
Is it any good?
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is unlike any other sci-fi movie that I’ve seen from the years leading up to 1960. First and foremost, it’s a black comedy fueled by a mix of oddball characters, ethnic humor, deadpan jokes, and goofy sight gags. The horror is practically nonexistent -- partly because it’s constantly undercut by the humor, and partly because plants are just not that scary no matter how many people they eat. Despite the central presence of a carnivorous talking plant named Audrey Jr, the movie doesn’t feel very much like a sci-fi flick either. In fact, the movie it most reminded me of is another Roger Corman picture -- A BUCKET OF BLOOD from 1959, in which a hapless beatnik wannabe discovers the fame he seeks only when he accidentally encases a cat in plaster of Paris. Like the delivery boy in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, he too soon graduates to cheerily sacrificing humans to keep the fires of his success burning.
Weirdly, it’s impossible to feel anything but sympathy for either of Roger Corman’s murderous protagonists because they are both come off as such well-meaning (and borderline idiotic) innocents propelled to their acts by forces greater than themselves. To the extent that this is intentional satire, it’s more pointed in A BUCKET OF BLOOD, but there is still something strangely compelling (and, at least to my mind, hilarious) about following the exploits of a good-hearted murderer in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Even when the hero is feeding chunks of an undercover cop to his pet plant, I can’t help but root for him.
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It’s also worth noting that the entire movie (except for a few exterior shots) was reportedly filmed in two days on existing sets for only $30,000. Yet, even though it’s clearly a low-budget B-movie, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS still feels far more like a visionary labor of love than the cheap-and-dirty quickie effort that it apparently was. (Roger Corman himself considered the final product so inconsequential that he didn’t even bother registering the copyright, which ultimately led to the movie falling into the public domain.) Although the ending is pretty weak, the rest of the script is efficient, funny, and sometimes even satirical. The special effects are not really all that special, but the homemade absurdity of Audrey Jr only adds to the humor -- especially once it starts talking in a hilariously un-plantlike voice. The oddball characters aren’t especially deep or well-developed, but they are almost always interesting. And one of them is played by a very young and exuberant Jack Nicholson. In other words, there are plenty of reasons to watch THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS even despite its many, many ragged edges.
Epilogue: No doubt as a result of being in the public domain, the movie was often shown on TV in the 1960s and 1970s (see also: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) and eventually became popular enough to inspire a stage musical in the early 1980s. This was then made into another film in 1986, starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin -- probably one of the first examples of the now increasingly common movie-based-on-a-musical-based-on-a-movie phenomenon.
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