Little Shop of Horrors

1996 musical black comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: For the most part, it's the same as this one. Only this version has songs and probably took longer than two days to film. There's also more cleavage, less Jack Nicholson, more black people, and more color.

I had a "Guess This Movie" contest with the winner getting pick the next movie that I watched, and this is the movie that was sort of chosen for that. It was on the queue anyway, so this guy really didn't win anything. Sucker!

The only other time I saw this was in the theater. I was a big Rick Moranis fan, and since this was PG-13, I thought there might be a little partial nudity. I already liked puppets, but I wonder if this sparked an interest in cult black comedies. I can't think of any that I would have seen before seeing this. It was an interesting theater experience for me. I remember during "Suddenly Seymour" not being able to peel my eyes from Ellen Greene's cleavage, and I was perplexed and strangely aroused by the hermaphroditic Audrey II. When Audrey II assaults Audrey I (a scene that completes a 2012 "tentacle rape" trifecta for me, by the way), I got stiff and hoped my date--the pudgy and red-haired Cassandra, a girl who may or may not actually exist--didn't notice. When Audrey II depantsed Rick Moranis, I climaxed, and I wasn't ashamed of it then and am not ashamed to admit it now. Also--and this made the Brazil Times so you can verify it--during the scene where Audrey is crying because her boyfriend was just smashed by the demolished building and the music rumbled to life and played "Suddenly Seymour" and then Seymour emerges from all the smoke, the theater crowd erupted with cheers. People started disrobing and having sexual intercourse right in the theater aisles, somebody started a small fire and started throwing trash into it, a person a few seats next to me fell to his knees and started eating through the cushion of the chair he had been sitting on, somebody stood a few inches from the screen and screamed The Kaddish. Sure, the songs in this are memorable enough, but all the extracurriculars made this a movie experience I will never forget. The songs in this, all intentionally corny, aren't bad, but they're dated more from the bass lines than they are the doo-wop doo-wops provided by the trio of background singers. I like them, by the way, like a dramatic chorus. Not sure why they were murmuring "summertime" during the scene when Seymour's boss gets eaten. [Edit: Ah, it was "suppertime," not "summertime." That makes more sense.] Rick Moranis, a guy who ruined what could have been one of the greatest careers in movie history by deciding to focus on his family, isn't a bad singer, but he's out-performed by Ellen Greene, sometimes comically. Either she's overdoing things or he's underdoing them. And then there's Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops whose performance would have been better if he didn't have such stupid things to sing. "I'm just a mean green mother from outer space, and I'm bad." "Would you like a Cadillac car? Or a guest shot on Jack Paar? How about a date with Hedy Lamarr?" Ick. He does get to use one of my all-time favorite phrases--"No shit, Sherlock"--so it's not a total loss. Back to Ellen Greene and her cleavage. She's got an impressive singing voice, but the Olive Oyl screeching voice thing drove me nuts. She made up for it by riding side-straddle on the back of Steve Martin's motorbike though. Hot! Steve Martin is delightfully over the top, part-Elvis and part-Marquis de Sade, and I especially enjoyed seeing him from the perspective of a uvula. And I had completely forgotten that Bill Murray was in this in Jack Nicholson's role. That's still a completely pointless scene. The stylized setting looks great, and the puppet work is amazing. No, I never believed there was really a man-eating plant in the room, but I also couldn't figure out how exactly that many parts of Audrey II moved around like that. As my five and a half regular blog readers know, I'm easily impressed by puppets though. A couple gags that I really liked: John Candy's radio show that apparently shows his listeners weird things. How would that work on the radio? And waiting to be interviewed after Rick Moranis was a little person with a saxophone-playing nun ventriloquist dummy. I tried to find the little person's name, but I can't even find evidence on the Internet that that scene exists. It's possible that I hallucinated again.