The dirty little secret about The Little Shop of Horrors, a 1960 movie produced and directed by Roger Corman and written by Charles B. Griffith, is just how good a movie it actually is. Corman, the legendary auteur behind hundreds of low-budget genre movies spanning decades, shot the movie in less than five days (according to legend, two days and one night, give or take) on sets left over from not one, but two previous films. While no one is going to mistake The Little Shop for high art, its cast of stock players (including a young Jack Nicholson), Griffith’s sharp, witty dialogue, and the surreal nature of the whole piece have made this horror-comedy one of the most memorable films Corman has ever directed.
But don’t take our word for it: filmmakers and critics embraced it over the years as it developed a late-night cult following, and it was eventually adapted as an Off-Broadway musical (later making the leap to Broadway), which itself was turned into a hit 1986 film. The show and the 1986 film have a different, somewhat more mainstream tone; what continues to make the original movie so watchable is just how oddball it is.
