# Little Shop of Horrors, The (1960)

### reviewed by
Brian Koller

    The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

    Grade: 75

For those who like their comedy black, with no cream or sugar, "The Little Shop of Horrors" is for you. Made in two days with a cast of unknowns, with a script written in under a week, and featuring a story about a talking man-eating plant, the film is far better than it has any expectation of being.

Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) runs a struggling skid row florist shop. Other employees are clumsy fool Seymour (Jonathan Haze) and ebullient dimwit Audrey (Jackie Joseph). Seymour's hilariously hypocondriac mother is played by Myrle Vail. Seymour can only keep his pathetic job if he can nurse to health an unusual crowd-drawing plant, a plant that needs human blood in order to grow. Seymour sort-of commits a series of murders to feed the plant, which soon overruns the florist shop.

The legend behind "The Little Shop of Horrors" is that a studio executive gave low-budget director Roger Corman a challenge: to make a film using a storefront set before it was to be torn down. Necessity is the mother of art as well as invention, and "The Little Shop of Horrors" could be Corman's best film. Charles Griffith, who had previously collaborated with Corman on the cult classic "A Bucket of Blood", wrote the viciously funny script.

Ignored upon release, "The Little Shop of Horrors" slowly gained notoriety over the years. Its status of a cult film was helped by the presence of then- obscure Jack Nicholson, who has a small part as a lunatic masochistic dental patient. The film was remade as "Please Don't Eat My Mother" (1972) and the sequel was "Little Shop" (1991). It eventually become a Broadway musical, which became an excellent film version in 1986.

kollers@mpsi.net http://members.tripod.com/~Brian_Koller/movies.html

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews