The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
There’s a moment early in Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors that perfectly exemplifies the kind of film it was intended to be. It happens in a financially struggling florist shop in the middle of Skid Row, Los Angeles. A man (Dick Miller) enters the shop looking to buy a couple dozen carnations. The shop owner retrieves them and offers to have them wrapped. “That’s okay,” replies the man. “I’ll eat them here.” He takes the carnations from the stunned owner and begins to chow down, seasoning them with salt from a shaker he just happened to be carrying in his coat pocket. When asked if they’re good, he says that he has had better. It doesn’t seem to bother him too much, though; he explains that, because the big, fancy florist shops raise flowers solely for their scent and decorative properties, they’re bound to lose some of their food value.
This could, perhaps, serve as a counterpoint to what puts the horror into this little shop: A talking plant that feeds on human blood. According to its creator, the clumsy and hopelessly shy Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan Haze), it’s a crossbreed between a butterwort and a Venus flytrap. It looks more like a hollow coconut stuffed with quilt batting, but never mind. When Seymour brings it to the shop in the hopes of impressing his stodgy and very Jewish boss Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles), it’s a small, sickly thing. Initially, Seymour had no idea what to do with it apart from feeding it water and plant food. It wasn’t until he cut his finger moving a pot and noticed the plant’s trap madly flapping open and shut that he realized what it lived on. It soon began to grow, attracting patrons to the shop. Out of puppy love for his coworker, the very simple-minded Audrey (Jackie Joseph), Seymour dubbed the plant Audrey Junior.
One night, the plant reveals it has a voice, and it uses it to greedily scream for more food. Seymour, a little anemic after pricking all ten fingers, can’t draw any more blood. In frustration, he wanders the streets of Downtown Los Angeles. He eventually makes his way to a rail yard, where he accidentally kills a drunken man after throwing a rock at him and causing him to fall onto a set of tracks just as a freight train is speeding through. Seymour can’t find a place to dispose of the body, so he takes it back to the shop, and that’s when he puts two and two together. Audrey Junior’s midnight snack of severed limbs causes it to grow even bigger, and wouldn’t you know, it draws even bigger crowds to the shop. “It grows,” says Mushnick proudly, “like a cold sore from the lip!” In his revelry, he insists that Seymour call him Dad.
As all this is being established, we meet an assortment of colorful characters. There’s Seymour’s mother (Myrtle Vail), an incessant hypochondriac who drinks bottles of alcohol-based tonics like sodas and uses cough syrups and various medicinal oils in her cooking. There are two high school girls (Tammy Windsor and Toby Michaels) who literally finish each other’s sentences; they’re both on their school’s committee to build a float for the next Rose Parade, and they have a $2,000 budget for flowers. There’s a sadistic dentist named Dr. Farb (John Shaner), who’s first seen drilling on a patient’s teeth without any anesthesia. There’s Mrs. Shiva (Leola Wendorff), who always enters the shop with tearful news about a relative’s death. And then there are the Dragnet-style cop parodies, who both catch wind of recent disappearances and begin sniffing around the shop. One is Detective Frank Stoolie (Jack Warford). The other is Detective Sergeant Joe Fink (Wally Campo), who, through his voiceover narration, informs us that he’s a fink.
I honestly don’t know what Corman and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith are driving at. All I do know is that the film is filled with these kinds of ridiculous witticisms, and they inexplicably redeem the material. The same can be said for the incompetent plot, performances that wouldn’t pass muster in an amateur high school play, and production values that would adequately satiate the cultish bottom feeders of B-movie trash. It makes perfect sense to me that the film looks as cheap as the concept truly is. If Corman had been granted a million-dollar budget, the space and time to build elaborate sets, and a talented special effects crew, it would merely be bad. As it is, it achieves a bizarre level of watchability – a movie that, like countless other midnight offerings, is so bad that it’s good.
It’s not, however, as humorously subversive as one of Corman’s previous efforts, A Bucket of Blood, an amusing satire of Beatnik culture and art criticism. Essentially, The Little Shop of Horrors is a farce, having no subtext apart from the need to be as silly as possible. The tone is utilized most effectively in a scene where Seymour, pretending to be Dr. Farb, goes to work on a masochistic young undertaker (Jack Nicholson) who has borderline orgasmic reactions to having his teeth drilled and pulled without any anesthesia. He skulks around the office with a frightening smile on his face, muttering his words and giggling insanely as if he were channeling Peter Lorre. The standout moment is when he reads aloud from a magazine called Pain, which he does with the same restrained intensity of a pervert reading a smut novel.
