The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
A hapless clerk at a skid-row flower shop breeds a talking plant that draws crowds and demands to be fed people. He starts supplying it, mostly by accident, while a customer who eats flowers and a masochist at the dentist wander through. Corman famously shot it in about two days on a leftover set.
Two days, one borrowed set, a carnivorous puppet — and, twenty years on, a hit off-Broadway musical grew out of it.
Background
The Little Shop of Horrors was written by Charles B. Griffith, who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, and Corman is said to have shot it in two days and a night on a set left over from another production. The cast is full of Corman regulars, including Jonathan Haze as Seymour, Mel Welles as the shop’s owner and Dick Miller as the flower-eating customer. A young Jack Nicholson plays Wilbur Force, the masochistic dental patient, in one of his earliest roles.
What to watch for
The film’s afterlife is remarkable. It inspired an off-Broadway musical with songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken in 1982, and that in turn was adapted into a 1986 film. Watch the original for its wit and its speed: the script is packed with jokes that hold up, and the plant, voiced by Griffith, delivers the film’s most famous line, “Feed me.” The production values are cheap, and the film is better for it.
