I’ve always been fascinated with origins. I guess I’m a kid who never grew up. Now that I’ve turned my attention to movies, I sometimes wonder about the origin of the story. For example, The Little Shop of Horrors. I first saw the musical movie version of 1986. It was cute, and employed horror themes like the Rocky Horror Picture Show from the previous decade. Then, when Roger Corman died, I read that he’d filmed the story back in 1960. Curiosity compelled me to watch the original. Like its remakes, it’s comedy horror, or horror comedy. But beyond that it’s a literal farce. Roger Corman was a showman, and that means he tried different things to entertain. One of them was Little Shop. The idea of the plot you probably know, but I couldn’t remember the ending as I sat down to view it. After all, it’s not meant to be taken seriously.
I have to say that the music makes it better in the remake. The endless malapropisms and burlesque humor are funny, but really in the original they are presented as low comedy. The Jewish humor was early on I feared might be anti-semitic, although not intended that way. I empathize with Corman. It took him nine months to find a company to release the film. Ironically, it attained cult status after being double-billed as the B movie with Black Sunday, which was a quite serious attempt at horror. Camp has a way of living on in cult status. Of course, the early bit part for Jack Nicholson didn’t hurt. It isn’t bad for a bad movie.
The idea of people-eating plants is a reasonable approach for a horror story. (I’ve used it myself.) Plants move very slowly, however, which is one reason that the idea’s hard to accept. Even The Land Unknown had used the idea three years earlier. But the seed was planted. The idea of the film lead to an Off-Broadway show, which led to the more famous movie. Then it reopened off-Broadway and a reboot was planned (but currently seems to be on ice). Not bad for a movie based on a desire to reuse a set that was scheduled to be torn down, and then shot in two days. Classic Corman. The result was a bad film that is still fun to watch all these years later. I did miss the musical numbers, however. When you plant seeds, you never know what might grow.
