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.