Here we are at the end of a month of Cormania, so it’s fitting to talk about what is maybe the quintessential Roger Corman monster movie. The Little Shop of Horrors checks all the boxes: it’s a low-budget dark comedy with an unusual premise, shot in under three days, starring a combination of Corman regulars and at least one rising star. It’s such a direct follow-up to Corman’s previous comedy-horror movie A Bucket of Blood that it reused the same sets just before they were supposed to be torn down. It embodies most of what Corman has been known for in the black-and-white movie days—and is basically a fount of film history trivia because of that—but it’s also one of those weirdly influential movies that people often forget about (beyond the fact that it later inspired a beloved stage/movie musical), which is the kind of thing I really like to dig into. Every depiction of a monster plant in media is in the shadow of this movie, which is not the kind of legacy that gets crowed about much, but it’s entirely true—you don’t get Piranha Plants in Super Mario Bros. without Audrey Jr.’s voracious, home-made interpretation of a Venus flytrap. As with Corman’s other horror-themed comedies, however, a ridiculous monster may be the draw, but it exists in an equally ridiculous world filled with equally ridiculous people, and the performances of those ridiculous people are what elevate this movie and kept it in circulation among cult filmgoers.
Part of what makes this movie feel unique is the specificity of the skid row setting, featuring caricatures of the sorts of people you might find in the impoverished parts of any major city (much as Bucket of Blood caricatured beatniks and the art scene.) Although rendered farcical by the actual events, there is some power in a plot about poor people sacrificing morality for economic uplift, so one cannot say that Corman and Charles B. Griffith (who isn’t just writing this one, but also appears in it as a robber) are just making fun. As we all know, the story revolves around Seymour (Jonathan Haze), employee at a floral shop owned by Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles, whose old country Jewish accent in this is even more over-the-top than his French one in Attack of the Crab Monsters) and a guy who is well-meaning but so hapless that the audience can go from sympathizing to hating him multiple times over the course of a single scene. With his job on the line, Seymour brings in a mysterious plant he cultivated from imported seeds bought from a Japanese gardener (back when “foreign country” might as well have been “outer space”) to attract business, named Audrey Jr. after his co-worker and sweetheart Audrey (Jackie Joseph, who plays her role as so angelically kind and supportive of Seymour in particular that it becomes cartoonish), but has no idea how to make it thrive until he accidentally bleeds on it and realizes that it has carnivorous tendencies. Things escalate when Audrey Jr. begins talking and making demands (voiced by Charles Griffith himself), and Seymour accidentally causes multiple deaths and feeds the bodies to the plant until it grows giant-sized, getting the flower shop attention from the public but also rousing the suspicions of Mushnick, and later a pair of homicide detectives.
This is built around scene after scene of these wacky characters and their conversations—which, given this movie is basically a bunch of mostly static shots of boxed-in sets, like a sitcom, is really the only way it could go. Aside from the core group plus talking plant, we also get to see a lot of Seymour’s hypochondriac mother (played by vaudeville/radio veteran Myrtle Vail, who was also Griffith’s grandmother—the rest of his family appears in bit parts), a local immigrant woman who comes into the shop daily to haggle for merchandise because another relative has died, a sadistic dentist, and the aforementioned cops, a clear parody of the stars of Dragnet (a difficult task, as there are few ways a parody can be funnier than Dragnet unintentionally was.) A special MVP commendation should be given to Dick Miller (a Corman regular who would later appear in every movie and TV show Joe Dante ever directed, and even appeared alongside Jackie Joseph in Gremlins), who gives a hilarious performance as a regular customer of Mushnick’s with a taste for flowers mainly because he is not going over-the-top—he just plays him as a regular guy who just happens to eat flowers, which would explain his mysterious trip to Holland. While shot in a very stage-y way (which probably helped the people putting together the stage musical decades later), the personalities on display in all these performances shine through and makes this slice of skid row feel populated, offering a greater variety of comical characters thanCreature from the Haunted Sea, its follow-up, which while similar in tone also basically features three Seymours.
Then comes a particular scene after Seymour has accidentally killed the dentist (getting into a short duel with a drill), where an oddly familiar-looking young man wearing a suit that looks like he pilfered it from a ventriloquist dummy walks in giggling, and, gasp, it’s Jack Nicholson! Corman had basically given Nicholson his start as an actor, and he had appeared in Corman movies before and after this one (in The Raven, he got to play Peter Lorre’s son—just imagine being an actor in your twenties and playing Peter Lorre’s son), but his appearance here is probably one of his more famous pre-fame appearances. I don’t want to make it sound like this is only notable because “who would have thought one of Hollywood’s most respected actors was in this?”, though, because Nicholson is actually really funny in this scene, playing up the unnerving glee of his out-and-proud masochism in ways that are consistently hilarious (just him reading a magazine is great.) It’s interesting from a movie history perspective, but it’s also just an entertaining section that highlights Little Shop at its best.
I said this in the opening paragraph, but I want to emphasize it again that I really love the fact that this is ostensibly a movie about a talking, man-eating plant that also features characters like Miller and Nicholson’s, or the dentist, or Seymour’s mother, or the Dragnet parodies. Much of the time, the notion is that the monster has to be the one absurd thing in an otherwise normal world so that it feels appropriately “other”, which is probably one of the reasons why so many monster movies are unwilling to include human characters with many unique personality quirks (Attack of the Crab Monsters took that to its logical extreme.) That’s definitely not the case here. On one hand, at times that kind of means that despite being central to the plot, Audrey Jr. (and its goofy-sounding cries of “FEED ME!”) is not really the most entertaining presence in the movie, at least compared to the some of the weirdos who hang around, and is as low-budget a special effect as can be found in any of Corman’s movies (which, again, probably made it easy to adapt to stage.) On the other hand, as just one weird component in an entirely weird universe (and clearly had some lasting impact anyway), it benefits the tone—it’s much easier to accept one broad piece of comedy if everything is a broad piece of comedy. Plus, it means that pretty much every scene has something amusing happening in it, even if it’s ultimately tangential to the plot (like the scene with Nicholson), and there’s not a lot of obvious filler—I remember when I first saw the movie years ago, I thought the on-foot chase sequence near the end of the movie went on for a long time, but it’s really only a few minutes, and is full of intentionally silly moments like when Seymour and his pursuers emerge from the subway and are followed by a gaggle of children, and ends with him hiding in a toilet in a junkyard.
From all that, you would be led to believe that this movie is all fun and games—and you’d be right. But I think the slapstick tone works for it in other ways, especially the dark comedy aspects. The ways Seymour and Mushnick play into the Audrey Jr. stuff is a good example of that, with their horror at this thing they’ve accidentally unleashed being palpable (see the early scene where Seymour is sob-singing Christmas carols while feeding severed body parts to the plant), but their inability/unwillingness to stop giving in to it is still being played for laughs, as is their troubled worker-boss relationship (when the plant brings in business, Mushnick suddenly deciding to start calling Seymour “son” leads to some funny moments.) There is a core of a good morality play in this (it even has a tragic ending), with both characters more or less having their lives ruined even as they become more famous (although I enjoy the subtle detail that the people who come into the store to see Audrey Jr. aren’t necessarily buying anything), and I think later versions of the story delve into that more. Still, the moral culpability of both of them is played as kind of mushy (Seymour never intentionally murders anyone until Audrey Jr uses its out-of-nowhere mind control powers, and Mushnick only does it once out of self-defence), a choice that was probably made to allow you to laugh at the gruesome displays without making either character truly reprehensible.
Like pretty much every Corman movie I’ve written about, The Little Shop of Horrors is a thing that wears its chintzy nature on its sleeve—it’s not particularly hard for anyone to see that this was filmed very quickly, and doesn’t even benefit from the location shoots that were used in the three other movies. It’s a very domestic sort of monster movie, but maybe that’s one of the reasons it stuck out—on a conceptual level, more people can identify with a story about trying to keep your job rather than one dealing with radioactive abominations. It’s just as heightened as everything else Corman did, but the specificity of its setting and the ways it plays off very specific types of people (brought to life by actors who have a firm grasp of what this movie is going for) still feels unique, and the type of thing that no one else would bother to make at any budget. This was the magic of Roger Corman at his height: for all the obvious deficiencies of many of his movies, they all had panache and a willingness to use their inconspicuous status to go places no one else would.
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