Director: Frank Oz
Screenplay: Howard Ashman
Starring: Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin
Release Date: December 21st, 1986
Today I’m going to change things up a bit and instead of reviewing a movie I have never seen before, I am going to talk about a brand new version of a film that I have pretty much been watching my whole life. In this instance I’m going to discuss the director’s cut of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS that was released on blu ray last week.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is director Frank Oz’s adaptation of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s hit off-Broadway musical, which was itself an adaptation of the no-budget 1960 Roger Corman film of the same name. The film tells the Faust-ian tale of Seymour Krelborn (Moranis), a nerdy florist working in Mr. Mushnik’s (Gardenia) flower shop who acquires a strange venus flytrap-like plant during a sudden total eclipse of the sun. He names the plant Audrey II, in honor of his co-worker and secret crush Audrey (Greene). Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks and Tisha Campbell) are the three background onlookers who form a Motown-inspired Greek chorus, musically weaving their way throughout the story as Seymour discovers the tiny plant’s horrifying secret: it needs blood to survive. As Audrey II and Seymour’s fame grows, so too does the carnivorous plant’s appetite, as it breaks into song (courtesy of the diabolical voice of Levi Stubbs) demanding to be fed fresh meat. It convinces Seymour to feed it hapless victims, and in exchange Audrey II will bring Seymour all of the fame and attention he’s always craved, in particular that of Audrey, who is in an abusive relationship with the her sadistic dentist boyfriend Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Martin). As Audrey II says, “A lotta folks deserve to die!”, and so, after conveniently asphyxiating on his own laughing gas when Seymour wimpishly attempts to off him, winds up as plant food. In the aftermath Seymour’s romance with Audrey blossoms, but with blood on his hands and a guilty conscience Seymour begins to crack under the pressure. Will the two lovers successfully elope and escape to a life “Somewhere That’s Green”? Or will Seymour’s deal with the devil blow up in his face as Audrey II comes to collect it’s dues?
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is a movie I first saw around the age of five, and it has been a consistent part of my life ever since. I absolutely adored this movie as a kid, and it’s giant-monster movie sensibilities were perfectly in line with the stuff I was into at the time. Watching it as an adult I can see how it shaped my morbid sense of humor and future appreciation of dark comedies and horror comedies in general. It definitely helped for my appreciation for musicals and helped pave the way for my love of the similarly B-movie inspired THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. As a kid the movie worked because, hey, I fucking loved giant man-eating monsters, and Audrey II was probably the coolest giant monster I had ever seen! And damn could it sing! The special effects utilized to create Audrey II were an landmark for their time all achieved in-camera, with absolutely no optical compositing or blue screens. Even twenty six later, the damned thing still looks real, and is honestly one of the best-realized special effects I have ever seen. I also remember identifying strongly with Seymour and his yearning to get the girl of his dreams. Ellen Greene’s Audrey was my first movie crush, but it was in a sweetly protective, I don’t want to see anything bad happen to her kind of way. The movie was immensely re-watchable and though I was always disappointed to see Audrey II destroyed by electrocution after belting out the show-stopping “Mean Green Mother (From Outer Space)”, the flick’s happy ending with the heroic Seymour carrying his new bride Audrey across the lawn of their picture-perfect new home always made me smile.
As I got older and reality set in the movie began to lose esteem in my eyes due to a rather large inconvenience in the plot. Even as a kid I noticed how the movie went from cuddly and sweet in it’s opening scenes and gradually darker and somewhat creepier as the story unfolded, only to suddenly revert back to sickening sweetness in it’s closing moments. Seymour and Audrey are two extremely likeable leads, but when you get right down to it Seymour commits some truly heinous acts over the course of the film and ultimately never has to answer for his crimes. In fact, Audrey just kinda unbelievably shrugs them off. Of course, having never seen the play on which it was based, I had no idea about the film’s original ending, and it wasn’t until the advent of the internet in the late-90’s that I first heard about a long-lost unhappy ending to the film that immediately piqued my interest.
Upon completion of principal photography in early 1986 Warner Bros., producer David Geffen and director Frank Oz screened a rough cut of the film for two different audiences in order to get a feel for how the film would play for the general public in it’s then-current form. For the first hour and change the screenings were both rousing successes, with the audience laughing and cheering in all of the right places and delivering standing ovations for each musical number. To the excited filmmakers and studio it looked like they had a solid blockbuster on their hands. That is, until the film’s final twenty minutes played out, at which point the entire audience seemingly turned on the film en mass. So poisonous were the review scores coming out of those screenings and so venomous the reaction to the ending that Frank Oz and screenwriter Howard Menken were forced to make the difficult and costly decision to completely scrap the ending as initially conceived in order to hastily concoct and reshoot an all-new happy ending, which is the version I grew up watching and everyone is familiar with. The film was delayed six months and with it’s new ending went on to do modest business over Chrismas 1986, returning $34 million on it’s $25 million budget. It wasn’t the blockbuster the studio expected, but nobody lost their shirts, and the film of course went on to become a beloved cult classic on home video.
But as the years passed the rumors of the content of that original ending never went away. Numerous magazine articles and a set of trading cards from the time of the film’s release offered a few tantalizing images of LITTLE SHOP’s intended climax, and a Special Edition DVD released in 1998 finally offered fans a chance to view it in the form of an extremely poor-quality black and white work print, with unfinished visual and sound effects. When the DVD was suddenly pulled from shelves a scant three days later at the behest of David Geffen, it went on to become the most coveted disc amongst collectors in the formats’ entire lifespan, sometimes fetching hundreds of dollars on eBay. Though Geffen claimed possess a finished print of the ending in full color that he intended to release theatrically, it never materialized, and rumors that the negative had been lost in a fire at the studio lot further cemented it’s legendary status among movie buffs. For over a decade it seemed like the only way we’d be able to see Frank Oz’s original vision for the film was by watching a horribly pixilated rip of the DVD on YouTube. And then earlier this year film restoration specialist Kurt Galvao, the man behind the restoration of BLADE RUNNER a few years back, announced that Warner Bros. had finally given him the go-ahead to dig up the long-missing elements and finally offer fans the chance to see LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS as it was always intended. With the release of this new version on blu ray last week I finally got the chance to see something I had been waiting to see for over a decade. Was it worth the wait? Abso-fucking-lutely!
Just like in the play on which it was based, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT concludes as the Faustian morality tale it was obviously building towards in the first two acts. Seymour Krelborn might be a nice guy with big dreams, but he does some fairly awful things in order to achieve those goals. Sure, he might not have directly murdered Orin or Mr. Mushnik, but he certainly DID chop up Orin’s corpse with an axe, and he had no problem backing Mushnik into the gaping maw of Audrey II. However badly he might feel about his misdeeds, he was a willing accomplice in their demises and so must be punished. The real tragedy in the new ending is that Audrey suffers as a result of Seymour’s selfishness.
The director’s cut is pretty much the exact same movie we’ve seen a million times right up until the point where Audrey II lures Audrey I into the flower shop alone and attempts to devour her. In the theatrical cut Seymour arrives in time to pull her from the monster’s jaws relatively unscathed, but in this version she winds up dying in the arms of a horrified Seymour, but not before she sings a heartbreaking reprise of “Somewhere That’s Green” in which she requests that Seymour feed her dead body to Audrey II so that she can be part of the plant, keeping it healthy and growing, and in a way she’ll always be with him. I’m not embarrassed to admit that, despite knowing for years that this was how things would play out, finally seeing it nearly destroyed me. I actually sobbed watching Audrey die, as it was like watching an old childhood friend pass away. I was shocked at how powerful Greene’s performance was in this scene, and though I disagree with the way they turned on the film I can totally understand how the test audience in 1986 would have been utterly horrified by this turn of events, especially after having spent then entire preceding hour and ten minutes growing to love Audrey. But unfortunately for that group of wusses, it only got worse.
Utterly devastated, a tearful Seymour carries Audrey’s corpse, still wearing the gown they were supposed to be married in, back into the shop as a funereal reprise of “Downtown” plays on the soundtrack. He places her body into maw of Audrey II, who swallows her whole. Seymour then runs out of the shop and climbs to the roof of a neighboring building to commit suicide, when he is approached by Patrick Martin (Paul Dooley), a representative from a marketing agency who has taken leaf cuttings from Audrey II and has grown pods of his own, which he plans to sell in stores all over the nation. Realizing the implications of what he has done, Seymour returns to the shop to confront Audrey II. This segment plays out almost exactly as it does in the theatrical cut, with the plant erupting from the confines of it’s pot and singing “Mean Green Mother”. However now, when the plant literally brings the roof of the shop down at the end of the number, Seymour crawls from out of the rubble and is immediately ensnared by the vines of Audrey II, who slowly and cruelly pulls him, screaming his heart out, into it’s mouth and devours him in one gulp, spitting out his glasses into the camera.
We then cut to Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon decked out in funereal gowns, standing in front of an American flag is somber music plays in the background. Thus begins the epic finale, a rousing song entitled “Don’t Feed The Plants”, in which the musical trio explains that in the aftermath of Seymour and Audrey’s demise, tiny spawns of Audrey II went on sale all over the country and were bought up by millions of people who were sweet-talked into feeding them blood. Cut to a massive, Godzilla-sized Audrey II, cackling maniacally as it sits astride a swaying Brooklyn bridge. Panicked civilians flee from the carnage, only to be confronted by an entire army of the carnivorous flora rampaging through the streets of the city, crashing through buildings, flinging cars wildly through the air, devouring entire subway trains, and in my favorite bit blowing down the smokestack of a factory, causing the entire building to explode. The sequence is huge and epic and employs the use of insanely intricate and realistic miniatures and a huge cast of extras fleeing for their lives from the chaos. It all culminates with the Army arriving and futilely firing all at the plants to no avail, as a triumphant Audrey II clings triumphantly to the top of the Statue of Liberty, before finally bursting through the movie screen to devour the audience.
I am so glad I finally got to see Audrey II reach it's full world-ending potential, but I’m equally glad to see all of the hard work of the artists and craftsmen, under the supervision of Richard Conway, finally see the light of day in all of it’s apocalyptic glory. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS was nominated for an Oscar for it’s effects work in 1987, but ended up losing out to ALIENS. One can only imagine that the inclusion of this scene would have probably guaranteed the effects team a win. Seeing the work print of this scene was one thing, but the work Galvao and his team restoring the visual and sound effects in this scene is to be applauded. It looks and sounds incredible, and the five year old version of my would have shit his pants with glee if he had seen this version of the movie first.
While many will find this new ending tonally jarring and downright depressing (the test audience sure as hell did), the restoration of this version of the film has catapulted it back onto my list of top five favorite movies. While it was always nice to see Seymour and Audrey escape Skid Row and live happily ever after, that version of the movie always rang false to me. This new ending is heartbreaking and exhilarating and fully pays off the arc of Seymour’s character to it’s inevitable ending. It completely changes the tone of the rest of the film for me from being a slightly dark yet ultimately light-hearted crowd-pleaser, to a truly tongue-in-cheek, darkly horrific tale in which no bad deed go unpunished. It feels like watching an entirely new movie, one that is in every way superior to the version Frank Oz was forced to deliver in 1986. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: THE DIRECTORS’S CUT is a movie I cannot wait to watch again and share with others.
My Rating: 10/10
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