Little Shop of Horrors

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. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide