The Little Shop of Horrors in Color [Color/Black & White] [Blu-ray]

Overview

Perhaps the greatest movie ever shot in two days, Little Shop of Horrors was originally conceived as a followup to Roger Corman's black comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959). Jonathan Haze plays Seymour Krelboin, a schlemiel's schlemiel who works at the Skid Row flower shop of Mr. Mushnick (Mel Welles). Experimenting in his spare time, Seymour develops a new plant species that he hopes will lead him to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, the mutated plant -- named Audrey Junior, in honor of Seymour's girlfriend Audrey (Jackie Joseph) -- subsists on blood and human flesh. It also talks, or rather, commands: "Feed Me! FEEEEED ME!" Before long, the luckless Seymour has fed his plant the bodies of a railroad detective, a sadistic dentist, and a flashy trollop. Meanwhile, Mr. Mushnik, who has stumbled onto Seymour's secret, has inadvertently offered up a burglar (played by Charles Griffith, who also wrote the script and supplied the plant's voice) as a midnight snack for the voracious, ever-growing Audrey Junior. (When the plant blooms, the faces of its various victims are reproduced in its flowers.) Ignored on its initial release, Little Shop of Horrors began building up a cult following via repeated TV exposure in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, it had attained classic status, spawning a big-budget Broadway musical (and followup feature film) in the 1980s and a Saturday morning cartoon series in the 1990s. Enhancing the original Little Shop's reputation was the brief appearance by star-in-the-making Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient (Nicholson is often incorrectly referred to as the star of the film, though in fact he barely receives billing). Much as we love Nicholson, our vote for the most memorable Little Shop cast member goes to the ubiquitous Dick Miller ("No thanks, I'll eat it here").

Product Details

Release Date:	03/06/2012
UPC:	0844503002143
Original Release:	1960
Rating:	NR
Source:	Legend Films
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Language:	English
Time:	1:12:00

Special Features

Includes beautiful color version and restored black-and-white version; Commentary by Mike Nelson of Mystery Science Theater 3000

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Jonathan Haze	Seymour Krelboin
Jackie Joseph	Audrey
Mel Welles	Gravis Mushnik,Actor
Myrtle Vail	Winifred Krelboin
Jack Nicholson	Wilbur Force
Dick Miller	Fouch
Laiola Wendorf	Mrs. Shiva
Tammy Windsor	Teenage girl,Actor
Toby Michaels	Teenage girl
Leola Wendorff	Siddie Shiva
Lynn Storey	Mrs. Hortense Feuchtwanger
Wally Campo	Det. Sgt .Joe Fink/Narrator
Karyn Kupcinet	Actor
Jack Warford	Actor
John Herman Shaner	Dr. Phoebus Farb
Dodie Drake	Waitress
Robert Coogan	Tramp
Jack Griffin	Drunk
Ernst Von Theumer	Gravis Mushnick
Fred Katz	Composer

Technical Credits

Roger Corman

Charles B. Griffith

Roger Corman	Director,Producer,Screenwriter
Charles B. Griffith	Screenwriter
Philip Mitchell	Sound Effects,Sound/Sound Designer
Susan Olney	Executive Producer
Barry Sandrew	Executive Producer
David Martin	Executive Producer
Richie Chechilo	Executive Producer

Editorial Reviews

Roger Corman is a man with a Midas touch -- that's the only way to explain Little Shop of Horrors, a 1960 ultra-low budget horror movie/detective film satire that yielded a hit off-Broadway musical and a multi-million-dollar film version more than 20 years later. Corman had carved a niche for himself on Hollywood's Poverty Row as a producer-director of low-budget horror movies, mostly in association with American-International Pictures, which also specialized in teen exploitation titles, of which Corman did a few as well (Teenage Caveman, etc.). By 1960, the cycle had run its course, and one of the products was Little Shop of Horrors, which satirized the teen horror exploitation film, as well as various other elements of popular culture. Jonathan Haze's Seymour Krelboin is a delightful satire of the kind of nebbishy hero that Jerry Lewis was making millions out of playing at the time, and the two cops hunting for the "skid row killer" were a dig at Jack Webb's then-popular police shows and movies, most notably Dragnet. Corman's secret was to play it all -- the comedy, the cop sequences, the sight gags -- even more deadpan than Webb's work, so that the jokes were in the past once people tried to figure out what they had just seen. This was a style of comedy later perfected by the makers of Airplane and Police Squad and its offshoot, The Naked Gun movies, but Little Shop of Horrors is where it started; the ethnic jokes alone are a foot deep, and they slide past so fast that one has to watch the movie more than once just to catch them. It was a style of comedy that no one had done for movies before, and it took the rest of Hollywood 20 years to catch up -- just about the time that kids who knew Little Shop of Horrors were starting to make movies themselves.