Creature Classic Companion: The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

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.

Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961)

By the early sixties, much of the movie industry had moved on from creature features, and Roger Corman was no different—he had already started the Poe cycle (with The Pit and the Pendulum premiering just two months after this post’s subject), which are the more highly-regarded among his directorial efforts. Still, while in this transition period, Corman was experimenting with his horror movies, and starting with 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, we started to see them become out and out comedies with a ghoulish or monstrous twist. Creature From the Haunted Sea is the last of these horror-comedies, and the one that is the most like a parody of his own low budget B-movies from the fifties, which could probably be chalked up to the fact that it more or less reuses the story from the 1959 movie Beast From Haunted Cave, which he produced (and itself was more or less recycled from a non-monster movie Naked Paradise—all three variations written by Attack of the Crab Monsters‘ Charles B. Griffith), with a different setting, monster, and with added comedy. Also, like most of Corman’s movies, it had a low budget, was filmed extremely quickly (five days!), and was made basically because they had extra time during their Puerto Rico location shoots for two other movies. Although mostly an underground phenomenon since its release, you may recognize this movie and the titular googly-eyed monster from its cameo appearance in the opening of Malcolm in the Middle. But as goofy-looking as the monster is, the movie is pretty consistently funny even when it’s not around, showcasing a dialogue-based absurdity that overcomes the obvious budgetary limitations.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Where the previous Roger Corman movie I wrote about benefited from a more character-based approach that made up for a fitful distribution of monster scenes, its follow-up goes in the complete opposite direction, intentionally paring the script down to primarily scenes about the monster at its centre and simplifying characters so they are defined only by their jobs, genders, or accents (hilariously, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, a frequent Corman collaborator who will be showing up in future posts, explained that “[Corman] said it was an experiment. ‘I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.’ His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”) At around 63 minutes, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely makes feature length (but is even more perfect as part of a double feature), and while maintaining much of the feel of a fifties creature feature, its maniacal pace and devotion to “suspense and action” makes itself felt off the hop—we get a decapitation within the first five minutes, after all. Even aside from that, what would seemingly be a typical example of one of the fundamental types of narrative conflict—man against man, man against self, man against giant radioactive crab—is complicated by said giant radioactive crabs acquiring some truly bizarre characteristics, giving them an unexpected presence throughout the movie. This is a case of something appearing routine on the surface but having a truly peculiar imagination when you peer into the tidal pool.