Hands down, Roger Corman’s wildest and funniest film. He shot this in only TWO DAYS with $30,000, which cements his place as the greatest low-budget filmmaker of all time. The sets from Corman’s A Bucket of Blood were about to be torn down. While they still stood though, Corman saw it as an opportunity to use them for a whole other movie and this film was hatched. The Little Shop of Horrors is a companion to A Bucket of Blood in other ways, too. Both were written by Charles B. Griffith and both are about comical nebbishes who achieve respect and attention, but they have to secretly kill people to get it. In A Bucket of Blood, busboy Dick Miller becomes a celebrated artist due to sculptures that are actually fresh corpses encased in clay. In this film, lowly flower shop worker Jonathan Haze becomes famous for owning and maintaining a rare Venus Flytrap-like plant that quietly feeds on human blood.
The pace here is frantic, the look is gloriously cheap and seedy, and the humor ranges from subtle to broad to bizarre. There isn’t one normal person in the entire film. Among the memorable running jokes are Dick Miller’s supporting role as a man who buys flowers because he likes to eat them, a woman who’s a frequent customer at the flower shop because her relatives keep dying, and Jewish immigrant Mel Welles (as the constantly exasperated owner of the shop) and his butchered English. Let’s also mention Jack Nicholson in his famous single scene here as a masochist whose hobby is painful trips to the dentist.
It’s one of the great horror-comedies. Two decades later, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman retooled it as a stage and screen musical, but nothing tops the insanity of the original.