Little Shop of Horrors in Color

UPC: 844503002143

Studio: Legend Films

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:[Violence, Adult Situations, Questionable for Children]

Summary: Perhaps the greatest movie ever shot in two days, Little Shop of Horrors was originally conceived as a followup to Roger Corman's black comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959). Jonathan Haze plays Seymour Krelboin, a schlemiel's schlemiel who works at the Skid Row flower shop of Mr. Mushnick (Mel Welles). Experimenting in his spare time, Seymour develops a new plant species that he hopes will lead him to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, the mutated plant -- named Audrey Junior, in honor of Seymour's girlfriend Audrey (Jackie Joseph) -- subsists on blood and human flesh. It also talks, or rather, commands: "Feed Me! FEEEEED ME!" Before long, the luckless Seymour has fed his plant the bodies of a railroad detective, a sadistic dentist, and a flashy trollop. Meanwhile, Mr. Mushnik, who has stumbled onto Seymour's secret, has inadvertently offered up a burglar (played by Charles Griffith, who also wrote the script and supplied the plant's voice) as a midnight snack for the voracious, ever-growing Audrey Junior. (When the plant blooms, the faces of its various victims are reproduced in its flowers.) Ignored on its initial release, Little Shop of Horrors began building up a cult following via repeated TV exposure in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, it had attained classic status, spawning a big-budget Broadway musical (and followup feature film) in the 1980s and a Saturday morning cartoon series in the 1990s. Enhancing the original Little Shop's reputation was the brief appearance by star-in-the-making Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient (Nicholson is often incorrectly referred to as the star of the film, though in fact he barely receives billing). Much as we love Nicholson, our vote for the most memorable Little Shop cast member goes to the ubiquitous Dick Miller ("No thanks, I'll eat it here"). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Category: Horror

Features: Includes beautiful color version and restored black-and-white version
Commentary by Mike Nelson of Mystery Science Theater 3000

Little Shop of Horrors in Color

Format: Blu-ray

Release Date: 03/06/2012

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Pre-1954 Standard

Audio: DDM2.0 Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono

Runtime: 72 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Language(s) English

Region: Blu-ray region A (North America, Central America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia)

Bruce Eder

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, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Toby Michaels  Actor 
Marie Windsor  Actor 
Wally Campo  Actor 
Ernst R. von Theumer  Actor 
Roger Corman  Director 
Roger Corman  Producer 
Charles B. Griffith  Screenwriter 
Fred Katz  Composer (Music Score) 
David G. Martin  Executive Producer 
Barry Sandrew  Executive Producer 
Susan Olney  Executive Producer 
Richie Chechilo  Executive Producer 
Lindsay Luecht  Producer 
Jonathan Haze  Actor 
Jackie Joseph  Actor 
Mel Welles  Actor 
Myrtle Vail  Actor 
Dick Miller  Actor 
Laiola Wendorff  Actor 
Jack Nicholson  Actor 

Country: USA