Little Shop of Horrors (1986) - film review

Mr Mushnik is the owner of a far from thriving florist shop in Skid Row, a less than salubrious district of New York.  He tyrannises his two employees, Seymour Krelborn and Audrey Fulquard, but knows he is heading for ruin.  Seymour comes to his rescue when he suggests putting in the window a strange plant that he has been cultivating in the basement, a plant unlike any on Earth.  No one who passes the shop can resist going inside for a closer look at the strange plant and soon Mushnik is raking in the cash.  But, to keep his plant (christened Audrey II) alive, Seymour has to feed it with his own blood.   Soon the plant is so big that it requires something more nourishing than a few drops of blood - it needs to devour a whole human body.   Against his better nature, Seymour is persuaded by his little green friend to make plant food of the man he hates most in the world, Audrey’s sadistic boyfriend.  After this tasty snack, the plant grows so large that it almost fills the entire shop.  It is at this point that Seymour discovers its true intention - to spore and devour the entire human race...

Possibly the weirdest film musical you are ever likely to see, Little Shop of Horrors delights as much with its off-the-wall black comedy and garish comic book design as with its irresistibly funny musical numbers.  The film is a stage-to-screen adaptation of a popular off-Broadway musical of the early 1980s, which was itself inspired by Roger Corman’s 1960 comedy The Little Shop Of Horrors.  Whereas Corman reputedly shot his film in two or three days on a budget of 30,000 dollars, the more extravagant musical version cost 30 million dollars and is a lavish production, although it still manages to be every bit as idiosyncratic and stylishly creepy as Corman’s film.

A large chunk of the budget went on the man-eating plant Audrey II, the star of the film.  This was realised as a series of elaborate puppets, the largest of which weighed one ton and required sixty people to operate it.  The biggest challenge was to lip sync the puppet to the dialogue spoken and sung by Levi Stubbs (of The Four Tops).  So convincing is the Audrey II creation that it out-stages the entire cast and steals the show when it gets to its rendition of the film’s best number, Mean Green Mother from Outer Space, which was nominated for an Oscar. 

The human protagonists are played with just as much vigour and fun by talented performers such as Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, with Steve Martin turning in what is possibly the funniest performance of his career as the psychopathic dentist who ends up as a substitute for Baby Bio.  Directed by Frank Oz with gusto, flair and a certain amount of inspired insanity, Little Shop of Horrors is a frenzied musical comedy gem that will most probably put you off gardening for life.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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