The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) - film review

Gravis Mushnick is the mean-spirited owner of a cheap florist’s shop in Skid Row, New York.   He has two assistants, the simple-minded Audrey and the inept Seymour, but even with their combined efforts he has difficulty attracting customers.   To impress Audrey, Seymour creates a new plant by cross-breeding a Venus flytrap with a butterwort.  Gravis is unimpressed by this sickly hybrid, which is even more anaemic than Seymour.  One evening, Seymour accidentally cuts himself and drips some blood onto the plant.  To his amazement, the plant suddenly perks up.  The following night, Seymour is even more astonished when the plant speaks to him, asking to be fed.  Unsure what to do, Seymour goes out for a walk, and accidentally kills a railway employee.  How is he to dispose of the body?  Seymour finds the answer when, having dragged the body back to the shop, the plant demands to be fed.   The next morning, Gravis Mushnick is astonished by how large Seymour’s plant has grown and wonders what his assistant has been feeding it...

Roger Corman built his reputation on turning out popular films quickly and on a low budget, and the film that best exemplifies his flair for doing just this is The Little Shop of Horrors, the maddest and jolliest of his penny-pinching cinema exploits.  Made on a budget of around thirty thousand dollars (which was minuscule, even for Corman) and shot in a matter of days, the film is a miracle of shoestring economy and inventiveness.  It is now an enduring classic, widely regarded as the funniest black comedy ever made.

The reason why Corman was able to make the film so cheaply was because he had access to sets left over from a previous production, but he only had two studio days into which to shoot all the sequences on these sets.   Working with screenwriter Griffith, he knocked out a script in a week, although much of the comedy in the final product is believed to have been improvised on the day of the shoot.  The unhinged plot about an intelligent man-eating plant is the result of Corman’s idea of making a film noir parody and Griffith’s concept for a horror spoof.   One suspects that liquid refreshment (with a high alcohol content) may have been involved in the screenwriting process, and quite a bit of it.

All of the actors who appeared in the film had recently worked with Corman, including a young Jack Nicholson, who puts in a brilliant cameo as a masochistic dental patient whose idea of nirvana is to have his teeth extracted without an anaesthetic.  Stealing the focus in this ensemble piece is Jonathan Haze, who is hilarious as the unfortunate amateur botanist Seymour.  Yes, things do get a little silly in some places, but the ebullient performances and endless stream of laugh-out-loud gags prevent us from realising just how daft the idea of a talking man-eating plant is.  

Whilst The Little Shop of Horrors did not perform spectacularly well on its first release (no one, least of all Corman, expected that it would), its reputation has grown massively since (not unlike the homicidal plant it features).   Today, it is one of the all-time cult classics of American cinema.  It inspired the 1982 stage musical, which proved to be such a hit that this was itself made into a film in 1986, but on a budget of millions rather than thousands.  This is what happens when you give into plants that shout "Feeeeed meeeeeee!"  They grow, and grow and grow – and then they eat you.

© James Travers 2009

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