Review: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material including comic horror violence, substance abuse, language and sex references

Score: 4 out of 5

Adapted from a 1982 off-Broadway musical comedy that was itself a parody of a 1960 Roger Corman B-movie, Little Shop of Horrors is one of the great horror-comedies from a decade that had no shortage of them, an affectionate homage to '50s sci-fi monster movies and '60s Motown with a great cast, even better songs, outstanding special effects and production design, and (in the director's cut that I watched) a gutsy ending that, together, help it overcome the rougher spots like uneven pacing. It's the kind of movie that's best experienced with a crowd, as I did courtesy of Popcorn Frights this past weekend, but it's also a movie I could happily watch at home and sing along to, especially when the monster opens its big mouth and joins in on the sing-along. And if I ever have kids, I also imagine that it'd be a movie that they'd love and would probably get them into horror, between its cool plant monster, the fact that one of the bad guys is a dentist, and the fact that, while it is rated PG-13, its great special effects don't involve the gore typical of '80s horror movies. It's a movie that still holds up nearly forty years later, a kooky and family-friendly throwback that put a big smile on my face.

Set sometime during the Kennedy administration on the skid row of an unnamed city, our protagonist Seymour Krelborn is an utter dweeb who works at a struggling flower shop whose grumpy owner Mr. Mushnik pays him in room and board. He has a crush on his co-worker Audrey, who's dating a man named Orin Scrivello who's at once a handsome, upwardly-mobile dentist and also a leather-clad biker and all-around lout who abuses her. Mr. Mushnik is ready to close the shop for good due to lack of business, only for Seymour to turn things around with a mysterious carnivorous plant that he discovered at a Chinese flower shop during a solar eclipse, which he names "Audrey II" after his co-worker and crush. Business starts booming as passersby see Audrey II in the window and step into the store intrigued, turning Seymour into a local celebrity. Unfortunately, not only does Audrey II turn out to be intelligent, but he subsists on a diet of flesh and blood, and while he's initially content with just a few drops from Seymour's finger, as he grows he demands far more, forcing Seymour down an increasingly dark path to feed this mean, green mother from outer space.

The first thing you need to ask about any musical is whether or not the music is any good, and this movie delivers in spades. From the moment we meet our Greek chorus of three women who look and sound like a Motown girl group, we get a soundtrack rich with homages to classic R&B, soul, and rock & roll from the '50s and '60s. The whole cast are great singers, even those actors who I knew mainly for their non-musical comedies, but the standout was undoubtedly Audrey II himself, voiced by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops as a smooth yet intimidating villain who felt like he was very much enjoying himself as he grew, literally and figuratively, to take over Seymour's life. The production design wisely leaned into the artifice that I've always felt was necessary to take a movie where the cast regularly bursts into song and made it work, crafting a mid-century urban slum that felt not quite real but still quite lived-in and interesting to watch on screen. Nowhere was this more apparent than with the effects for Audrey II, a masterpiece of practical puppetry where you can immediately tell where most of this film's budget went. Once Audrey II starts to grow, he looks and feels like as much a character as any of the humans around him, a massive presence where you can readily figure out why Seymour wants to keep him happy even discounting the fact that he lives in the same building as this thing. This is the kind of elaborate effect where you know that, if they made it today, they'd use CGI because it's the kind of thing you supposedly can't do practically. When it came to both the music and the visuals, I was frequently impressed by what this film was able to pull off.

That's not to say it's all flash and razzle-dazzle without any substance to back it up, though. I was often especially intrigued by Seymour, a character whose lovelorn motivations, combined with the directions that the film takes him, make him a very dark take on the archetypal nerd heroes we often see in movies. His obsession with Audrey, paired with his hatred of her abusive boyfriend Orin who he sees as somebody she's too good for, could've played out in an extremely questionable manner that inadvertently celebrated a particular type of bitter "nice guy" attitude towards women, but without going into details, this film depicts his attitude as a key part of the reason why everything goes wrong and the thing that enables him to start chipping away at his soul to appease Audrey II, while also showing why Audrey, who's spent most of her life poor, would see a loutish-yet-wealthy man like Orin as her ticket out of the ghetto even if she secretly longs for a guy like Seymour. It's here where I prefer the director's cut (which Popcorn Frights showed), as it shows Seymour suffering a real comeuppance for how he's spent the entire movie doing increasingly horrible things, even if he feels bad about them later. The theatrical ending, by contrast, ended things a bit too neatly and happily from what I've read of it. Also, the director's cut gives a great homage at the end to classic monster movies, one that ended the film on a high note and sent me home smiling.

The Bottom Line

Little Shop of Horrors is at once an entertaining monster movie and a very enjoyable musical parody thereof, one that I'd recommend to fans of musicals, fans of mid-century pop music, people who want to see some outstanding effects work (and the kind you can show your kids), or anybody who just wants to have a good time with a movie.