Even the posters have an accent. Attention to detail!
Little Shop of Horrors (1960), a Roger Corman production, is an enlightening surprise. Opening with some interesting hand drawings of the locale of the story, southern California, as part of the credit sequence, we meet young man Seymour, chronic klutz and amateur horticulturist, his employer, the ethnic Mr. Mushnick, and his love interest, Audrey, as Mushnick’s skid row flower shop struggles along.
Seymour’s backroom project, if only he can survive himself, is a cross of a Venus fly trap with … something else. Teetering on the edge of unemployment, an accident leads to blood making its way onto his project’s leaves, jolting its growth rate, and the next day it’s vocally begging for more food, much to Seymour’s befuddlement.
When Seymour delivers flowers to the local sadistic dentist, he discovers a handy way to feed his plant – kill your dentist in mistaken self-defense and take the body home. This is also an opportunity for a soon-to-be famous actor to demonstrate his chops as the masochistic patient du jour with whom Seymour must put up a masquerade.
Audrey Jr, named after the lovely lady who works at the flower shop alongside him, is soon moved to the premises and is attracting phenomenal traffic, both alive and -ahem- dead. But when the cops come by, who appear to be modeled on Joe Friday and one of his sidekicks, to see just what’s going on at this nondescript flower shop, the action becomes frenetic, from the chase, the hooker, to the unfortunate denouement.
The neat part of this movie is that each scene appears to be well thought out and plumbed for the quirkiness which can be inserted, the sum of the parts being a certain sense of surrealism by the time we discover just how the food items consumed by Audrey, Jr., are remembered for us. The stylizations required by the script may be a trifle overdone, but only a bit, the plot seems organic, and I particularly enjoyed that virtually every character seems to have a life and vision at the heart of their beings, rather than little squares of cardboard. I particularly liked Seymour’s mother, played by the grandmother of the scriptwriter.
It’s not entirely satisfactory, of course, as the print we viewed is black and white, when color could have been more fun, and sometimes the audio was a little off, but it was a surprisingly entertaining and absorbing show. Plaudits!
