Little Shop of Horrors
Frank Oz’s “Little Shop of Horrors” has been a favorite since childhood. It’d actually be a pretty good introduction point to horror for kids, in fact; there’s only implied violence, which is entirely bloodless, and it’s firmly within the realm of fantasy. Yes, Audrey II is, essentially, a Venus Flytrap, but as soon as he begins singing “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” it’s safe to say any semblance of realism is out the window.
One of my favorite pieces of trivia ever associated with movies is how Michael Eisner, who had just become the head of Disney, watched the Howard Ashman/Alan Menken off-Broadway musical version of this, and decided to tap them to come up with the songbook and score for “The Little Mermaid,” kicking off the Disney Golden Age of animation that would culminate in “The Lion King.” I get it, though, because Ashman and Menken had a wonderful alchemy for taking fantastic stories and grounding them emotionally through music. Looking at “Little Shop of Horrors,” you kind of wish they had been given the chance to do something darker with Disney than “Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast” before Ashman died of AIDs, but Oz’s film is sufficient to illustrate their gifts towards dark comedy and scarier stories, even if it does change the bleaker ending from the stage version.
Ashman and Menken’s work is based on a 1960 Roger Corman dark comedy few people remember, and fewer people saw, about a florist on Skid Row in the 1950s who finds a strange and unusual plant that makes him famous. The florist is Seymour (Rick Moranis), and the plant he found was discovered after a recent solar eclipse. At first, it’s a cute little thing that fits in a coffee can, but after Seymour discovers the secret food it eats, things get weird really fast, and even with the success and fame that Seymour gets, he starts to have to do some unsavory things to keep growing Audrey II, all the while pining for Audrey (Ellen Greene), his coworker who longs to get our of the city for a house with a white picket fence.
There’s an awful lot going on in this film. It’s a look at city life in the ’50s that subverts the image movies of the time gave us of the era, while also being slyly satirical of the commercialism of the 1980s when Audrey II gets popular, and he puts himself in a position to be the next big thing (“Bigger than hula hoops,” it is said). The original ending went even further down this road, but after disastrous test screenings, Oz reshot a happier ending that works much better for the film. I’ve seen the original ending, and yes, it’s ambitious and crazy and fun, but we have so much investment in Seymour and Audrey that we need the more cliched “happy” ending we get in the film, and Oz nails it. (Plus, Oz is able to plant the seeds that this story might not be done just yet with one simple camera shot that points to the original ending.)
I’ve probably watched Oz’s film a dozen times over the years. Watching it for this review, I saw something I had not noticed before when it comes to Audrey. Even as a kid, you catch on to the fact that Audrey is the victim in an abusive relationship with Steve Martin’s Orin Scrivello, the sadistic dentist; the first time we see her, she has tried to use makeup to cover up a shiner Orin has given her, and when they come back from a date during “Feed Me,” we see how violent he can be to her emotionally and verbally, as well, making the choice Seymour makes to try and kill him for Audrey II to get his blood an easy one. Early in the film, however, I noticed a detail I hadn’t seen before in how Audrey tries to use a black silk scarf as a sling for her arm. Audrey is portrayed as a birdbrain, with Greene’s voice making her seem like more of a ditz, but listening to her belt “Somewhere That’s Green” and “Suddenly Seymour,” and even her part in “Skid Row,” my God do we feel for Audrey as a character. Greene, who played the role on the stage, is note perfect in a performance that could have been pure caricature, but in her acting and the way Ashman writes Audrey, we have so much sympathy for her that we look beyond her exterior, and see a human being in pain. She was a crush as a kid for her physical appearance; she’s a full-fledged emotional being rewatching this as an adult, and I love her in this film. Please tell me Greene won awards for her performance?
This movie is a great dividing point between Oz as a filmmaker working with puppets and visual effects and Oz as a director of actors and performances, and he nails a balance here that makes “Little Shop of Horrors” one of my very favorite films. When you watch the performances by Moranis (who is perfect as Seymour), Greene, Martin (in one of my favorite performances of his), Bill Murray (as a dental patient who is up for Orin’s sadistic ways), Vincent Gardenia as Mr. Mushnik (the owner of the flower shop), John Candy in a brief role as DJ Wink Wilkinson, and Levi Stubbs as the voice of Audrey II. If someone ever thinks to remake “Little Shop of Horrors,” they better keep Audrey II as a puppet, because the performance the puppeteers give here is on par with anything in the Muppet films or “The Dark Crystal.” Stubbs’s vocal performance is the icing on the cake of a fully-formed character performance we believe entirely. How that is possible for a character that must stay in a single place is the miracle of filmmaking, and Oz is an unheralded great. Oh, and give it up for Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks and Tisha Campbell as Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon, the “greek chorus” who provide exposition and back-up during the songs in this wonderful and dark comedy.
