ravis Mushnick's flower shop does awful business, even by the standards of its Skid Row neighborhood. Maybe it's the location. And maybe it's because he openly hates flowers. He has two employees, a salesgirl named Audrey and a nebbishy cleanup kid named Seymour. They usually outnumber the customers, who are a bunch of weirdoes anyway—among them a guy who likes to come in and munch on gardenias and a sadistic dentist who enjoys torturing his patients. As a result, he just can't see the point of continuing to employ Seymour, who's terrible at arranging flowers and can't seem to walk two steps without tripping over himself.
But Seymour turns out to be an amateur horticulturist who has been raising an odd little plant of his own. He brings it in on the theory that it might improve business. Named Audrey Jr. after his fellow employee, it so fascinates customers that the old man declares Seymour a son ... until a few minutes later, when its health starts to fail. That's when Mushnick tells Seymour that his job depends on nursing the plant back to health.
Alas, the only thing that satisfies Audrey Jr. is human blood ... and the bigger it grows, the more it craves. Developing the ability to speak, it demands, "Feed me!" Seymour, a nice kid who really doesn't mean anybody any harm, finds this difficult ... but then he starts accidentally killing people in a series of freak accidents, and, hey, it's a shame to let so much free plant food go to waste ...
Low in everything but laughs
The release of a big-budget, all-star musical remake, several decades later, meant that the title of Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors would
now forever be preceded by the phrase "The Original."
And so it is. A throwaway production, reportedly shot in two days using a crew and film stock left over from another movie that wrapped early, it's filled with manic comic energy and the joy of creators doing something silly just for the sheer fun of it. Nobody could have expected it to be a classic ... but its admirers adore it so very much that some regard the remake as outright sacrilege.
It works as well as it does because of a script driven by bizarre characterizations and staccato verbal wit. Both Audrey (the woman, not the plant) and Gravis Mushnick mangle the English language with more violence than any bloodshed actually committed by the plant. There's also Mrs. Shiva, the customer who shows up weeping each and every day to announce the tragic death of yet another relative. There's Seymour's mom, a hypochondriac who lives on (and gets drunk on) patent medicines. There's the guy played by Dick Miller, who loves to munch on flowers and carries around a salt shaker to bring out the flavor. There's the pair of homicide cops who speak in sentences so clipped, with attitudes so deadpan, that even Sgt. Joe Friday would urge them to loosen up. There's the maniacal, malevolent dentist who lives to punish anybody unlucky enough to wander into his office ... and a masochistic patient (played by a very young Jack Nicholson) who arrives beside himself with glee as he anticipates the agony he expects the doctor to provide. Next to all this, the arrival of a murderous houseplant capable of chomping down on one dead body after another is practically reduced to a grace note.
The Little Shop of Horrors may falter in its last few minutes, when it seems to run out of ideas ... but it recovers in the very last scene, with a last image and last line that qualify as sick, hilarious and perversely sad. No wonder the end product exerts such a strange fascination. If the history of film is filled with zillion-dollar productions where everything went wrong, then at least that's a little offset by the existence of films like this one, which look as though they cost about $1.50, if that much, but where everything, perversely, went right.
