The key to a feelgood movie, beyond the necessary rewatchability, is familiarity – the real kind that lets you look away or fall asleep without doubting your affection. Musicals are perfectly suited to this particular subgenre since the majority of them, especially the classic ones adapted for film, atrophy with second-act problems. That’s where writers suddenly remember the plot they had introduced and drop all that singing and dancing to arrive at some type of conclusion.
The first act of Funny Girl? A near-flawless parade of showstoppers, Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice having the time of her life falling in love. I’ve probably seen it 200 times.
The second act … well, who ever cared about her husband’s gambling addiction? At just 94 minutes, Frank Oz’s film of Little Shop of Horrors doesn’t suffer from that sharp of a drop-off. The cult 1982 musical that translates to the screen is already a pretty perfect piece; a hilarious send-up of B-movies with glorious songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the duo whose music would soon ignite the Disney Renaissance.
The whole thing is a miracle of dumpster diving: adapting an almost-forgotten 1960 movie by indie legend Roger Corman, who didn’t even bother to copyright his low-budget horror comedy. Little Shop, the movie, begins, and you’re there: Skid Row, the derelict, richly detailed cityscape with the lovingly obvious soundstage feel that most art departments left behind sometime in the 90s in favor of realism. The son of puppeteers and the first to perform both Yoda and Miss Piggy, Oz had individuality and scene-setting in his DNA.
It’s there we meet Seymour (Rick Moranis), a perennially orphaned adult who works alongside the ditzy bombshell Audrey (Ellen Greene) at a run-down flower shop owned by the miserly Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia). Their dreams of a better life arrive quickly, when a mysterious plant Seymour has been secretly nurturing grows into a national sensation. His trouble, of course, is that the plant – named Audrey II, due to Seymour’s simping after his co-worker – feeds exclusively on human blood.
In classic Michigan J Frog fashion, the anthropomorphic Audrey II (voiced by the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs), only voices its carnivorous needs to Seymour, who’s left alone to decide whether success (and human Audrey’s love) are worth the carnage. In the simplicity of its plot and the spectacle of Oz’s puppetry, the film is sensational. Greene, a holdover from the original stage production, gives an all-time weirdo performance that is massive, intimate and memorable, with pipes to make the celluloid rattle.
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