The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) on Netflix
Seymour Krelboyne works in Gravis Mushnick's rundown flower shop on skid row. He has grown a strange plant he calls Audry Jr., and it feeds on blood.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb6.2/1021,504 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Seymour Krelboyne spoils a floral arrangement belonging to a customer, and Gravis Mushnick, who owns a rundown flower shop on skid row, is ready to let him go. Seymour asks for another chance by describing a plant he raised from seeds, a hybrid he has named Audry Jr., and his co-worker Audry Fulquard likes the name. Mushnick is not impressed when he finally sees it, but gives Seymour one week to bring it back to health. Ordinary plant food leaves it unchanged; when Seymour pricks a finger, he finds the plant wants blood, and fed on his blood it begins to grow. Customers come in to look at it, and the shop's takings rise. The plant begins to speak and demands to be fed, and Seymour, now anemic, has to find it more.
Cast
- Jack Warfordas Officer Frank Stoolie
Show all 19 cast
- John Herman Shaneras Dr. Phoebus Farb (as John Shaner)
- Dodie Drakeas Waitress
- Jack Griffinas Drunk (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Roger Corman rushed The Little Shop of Horrors into production in the last week of December 1959 to beat new rules, effective January 1, 1960, that would have required producers to pay actors residuals on every future release.
- Exteriors were shot over two successive weekends with $279 of rented equipment; Charles B. Griffith and Mel Welles paid children five cents each to run out of a subway tunnel, and homeless alcoholics ten cents each to appear as extras.
- For those exteriors, Griffith and Welles got a funeral home to donate a hearse and coffin containing a real corpse, and used a nearby Southern Pacific rail yard for a whole evening for the price of two bottles of scotch.
- Dick Miller, who had starred as the protagonist of Corman's earlier A Bucket of Blood, was offered the part of Seymour Krelborn in The Little Shop of Horrors but turned it down, taking the smaller role of Burson Fouch instead.
- The score by cellist Fred Katz had first been written for Corman's A Bucket of Blood; Mark Thomas McGee writes that Katz sold Corman the same score again as new music, and Katz said it was pieced together by a music editor from his other Corman soundtracks.
- Some distributors, including American International Pictures, would not take The Little Shop of Horrors because they felt the characters Gravis Mushnick and Siddie Shiva would be read as anti-Semitic; Corman's own company, The Filmgroup, finally released it nine months after completion.
- Expecting little money from The Little Shop of Horrors after its first run, Roger Corman never copyrighted it, so the film fell into the public domain and now circulates in copies of varying quality.
- In the dentist scene, Jonathan Haze's leg knocked over the rented dental machinery; Roger Corman jumped onto the set to grab the tilting machine and said "Next set, that's a wrap" without ever calling cut.
