Saturday, 11 January 2025

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Charles B. Griffith
Stars: Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph and Mel Welles

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen this little gem, though I revisited A Bucket of Blood a lot more recently, a thematic predecessor on whose sets it was shot. It was the first of four films Jack Nicholson made with Roger Corman in the director’s chair; Corman had produced his debut, The Cry Baby Killer. He isn’t the lead, but he does have a highly memorable role.

For a throwaway B-movie feature made on a budget of under $30,000 and shot in only two days (because that’s how long those sets were going to be up), The Little Shop of Horrors has found some major legs. It built a cult audience quickly, continued to build it on television (it’s in the public domain) and eventually exploded in popularity after it was given the Broadway musical treatment which was filmed in 1986 by Frank Oz. It even became an animated show on Fox Kids, horror removed.

I much prefer the original, not only because it isn’t a musical but because it does so much with so little. Corman didn’t give much effort to making the sets look grand, so Mushnick’s Florists has a sign reading “Lots Plants Cheap” and almost everything we see takes place in it, almost like a play. However, the screenplay, by regular Corman writer Charles B. Griffith, is darkly witty, full of New York Jewish dialect, black humour and malapropisms, and the big cast of character actors nail the delivery. “It’s a finger of speech!”

Mushnick’s is a sparsely populated florist in Skid Row that has to be on its last legs, run by a flustered Gravis Mushnick, last and least in a long line of florists. Mel Welles plays him as Jewish as they come. He can’t afford a pair of employees but they work for him anyway: both Audrey Fulquard, who’s cute, quiet and capable, and Seymour Krelboined, who isn’t.

He’s our lead and you likely know by now, even if you’ve only watched the musical or its adaptation, that he creates a new plant that he calls Audrey Jr. (Audrey II is the remake). It’s a cross between a butterwort and a Venus fly trap and, one accident in, Seymour learns that it likes the taste of blood. In fact, it grows with the intake of blood, prodigiously, and we soon find ourselves in A Bucket of Blood territory, the body count growing to benefit the MacGuffin of the movie, which happily talks.

While that’s the central thrust of the script, there’s so much going on in this picture that it almost doesn’t matter.

As you might imagine from the name of the plant, Seymour likes Audrey and, well, Audrey likes Seymour too. This could have easily been a romance or a sex comedy, but they’re naïve enough to keep that side of things a subplot.

Other than them, most of the characters are running jokes, who keep popping up to get in a fresh gag or six and then wander off again. Easily my favourite is Dick Miller as a quirky customer, Burson Fouch, who eats flowers for the taste. “I’ve got to get home. The wife’s making gardenias for dinner.” He’s frequent background, but he’s an important factor in the inept Krelboined both keeping his job and being able to bring Audrey Jr. into the store.

The rest are a varied bunch. Siddie Shiva is a Jewish grandma of the old school, who has a new death in the family every day. Barbara Fridl and Shirley Plump are college students working on a Rose Parade committee, which warrants lots of flowers. Winifred, Seymour’s mum, isn’t just an alcoholic hypochondriac; she could easily do it professionally. Hortense Feuchtwanger belongs to the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California. She’s going to give Mushnick a trophy for Audrey Jr.

All these show up in the shop, as do a couple of cops when the bodies start to mount up so that Audrey Jr. can be fed, though we do first meet them in a similarly sparse office. They’re Sgt. Joe Fink and Officer Frank Stoolie, who deliver clipped dialogue that’s a priceless take on Joe Friday of Dragnet. Every set is sparse.

Another is where we meet Nicholson, which is the office of dentist Dr. Phoebus Farb. This sadistic dentist has been a regular customer of Mushnick’s over the phone, refusing to bulk up a meagre order of two gladioli and a fern for his waiting room. Eventually, we meet him when Seymour needs to cure his toothache.

Dr. Farb tries to kill Seymour but this inept shop assistant manages to defend himself, so Dr. Farb becomes the next meal for Audrey Jr. and Seymour becomes Dr. Farb for the patient waiting to see him. And that’s Jack.

He’s Wilbur Force (no middle name) who’s an undertaker kept in business by Siddie Shiva and a real masochist. “No novocaine!” he tells Seymour. “It dulls the senses.” While I’m still a Dick Miller fan who relishes his more subdued if equally unhinged performance here, I have to admit that Nicholson does a fantastic job at trying to steal the entire picture.

He’s like a kid in a candy store who revels in every moment of the pain that Seymour puts him through. By not having any clue what he’s doing, Seymour is actually playing into what his zany patient is looking for. Wilbur outright giggles reading Pain magazine in the waiting room and he’s in bliss leaving, telling Seymour that he’ll recommend him to all his friends, his grin showcasing a checkerboard of teeth.

I think I still prefer A Bucket of Blood to The Little Shop of Horrors, but this is its silly but fun cousin. Not that the former took itself wildly seriously, but it did have more astute points to raise about art, as well as poets, beatniks, and the counterculture in general. This does some of that in passing but never seems to care that it’s doing it. Griffith was more interested in a continual play with language and a surrealistic take on comedy. He also has fun moonlighting as the voice of Audrey Jr.

He manages to sneak in a crazy chase and a sparing use of a handful of locations, with a succession of them used by a highly persistent hooker, in the form of Mel Welles’s wife Merri, who stubbornly places herself in the way of a man who’s been hypnotised by his own plant to bring him victims. Guess what happens?

There are films that you watch in order to be awed by cinematic technique, surprised by cunning twists or blown away by extravagant set pieces. This isn’t any of those things. It’s a quintessential example of how to do a lot with not a lot of anything, just willing actors and clever dialogue in threadbare sets.

But, if that’s what you’re in the mood for, it punches so far above its weight class it boggles the mind. Jack Nicholson at his most unhinged is a welcome bonus.

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