Little Shop of Horrors: The Catchiest Bad Decision You’ll Ever Watch

Little Shop of Horrors understands how easily a person can justify the next bad decision when the previous one finally brought some good news.

Seymour works in a struggling flower shop. He wants a better life, and he wants Audrey to see him as someone worth loving. An unusual plant brings attention to the shop. Keeping that attention requires feeding it.

The transaction becomes increasingly horrifying. The film keeps it entertaining.

Frank Oz’s 1986 adaptation draws on Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s stage musical, itself adapted from Roger Corman’s earlier film. That history helps explain its combination of compact plotting, theatrical exaggeration, and elaborate screen spectacle. BFI programme note.

Seymour’s weakness keeps the story moving

Rick Moranis gives Seymour enough awkwardness to make his early hopes understandable. He is accustomed to being overlooked. When customers arrive and the shop’s fortunes improve, it is easy to see why he wants the success to continue.

That sympathy makes his subsequent choices uncomfortable.

Seymour does not become interesting because he discovers an evil plant. He becomes interesting because he keeps negotiating with it. Each concession lets him postpone admitting what his success now depends on.

The creature offers him an opportunity. He supplies the excuses.

This is a stronger dramatic arrangement than making him an innocent victim throughout. His hesitation and complicity give the comedy something difficult to work against.

Audrey gives the spectacle a human scale

Ellen Greene’s Audrey wants a life that appears modest beside the plant’s expanding demands. Her performance makes those wishes matter.

“Somewhere That’s Green” imagines domestic safety through ordinary household comforts. Its specificity prevents Audrey’s desire from becoming a vague plea for happiness. She can picture the home. She can describe what would be in it.

The song is funny, but the performance allows the wish to remain serious.

That balance is essential. Without it, Audrey would become another comic fixture in the shop. Greene gives the audience a reason to care what happens when the spectacle starts consuming the people inside it.

A creature with persuasive timing

Audrey II’s physical presence is one of the film’s great pleasures. The mouth, movements, and increasingly assertive occupation of the shop give the creature weight within the scene.

Levi Stubbs’s voice adds another kind of force. The plant can persuade, threaten, and perform. Its musical confidence contrasts with Seymour’s uncertainty.

The songs carry the bargaining forward. They make temptation sound organised and convincing.

Steve Martin’s dentist provides a more openly grotesque form of cruelty. His broad performance suits the film’s exaggerated world, though the joke becomes darker when considered from Audrey’s position. The film asks the audience to enjoy the performance while recognising why she needs to escape the character.

The ending changes the judgement

The theatrical ending lets Seymour confront the plant and offers him and Audrey an escape. The director’s cut preserves a much bleaker outcome, with the plant’s appetite expanding into large-scale destruction. Both endings exist as distinct versions; the differences are more substantial than an added scene. BBFC release details, Ellen Greene’s discussion of the endings.

My preference is for the director’s cut.

Its consequences follow the bargain further. The appetite Seymour helped sustain cannot be confined to the flower shop. The spectacle becomes the result of choices the film has spent its running time making attractive.

The theatrical cut offers stronger emotional relief. It allows affection for Seymour and Audrey to outweigh a harsher accounting of how the disaster developed. That is a defensible choice, but it softens the film’s treatment of complicity.

Neither version makes the songs less enjoyable. The difference appears after the enjoyment: what, exactly, has the audience been allowed to forgive?

Verdict

Little Shop of Horrors remains an unusually effective horror comedy because its pleasures are specific: Greene’s emotional precision, Moranis’s nervous bargaining, Stubbs’s vocal authority, and a creature that commands physical space.

Its sharpest idea is equally concrete. Seymour receives rewards for maintaining something he knows is dangerous. Stopping means surrendering those rewards.

Watch the theatrical cut for the romantic release. Choose the director’s cut for the consequences.