Medium to light spoilers here, by my standards, though I am careful to avoid going into detail on the different endings

The thing about Alan Menken music is that I am INSTANT GOOSEBUMPED. And I didn’t know that in Little Shop of Horrors, I would have the opportunity to be goosebumped by Alan Menken compositions in a Howard Ashman penned non-Disney property, very much a non-Disney property, music & lyrics by Menken & Ashman coming right out the gate with a Greek chorus of ‘60s gals singing to the camera about how you better look out, because things are about to get WILD.

Oh my god I loved Little Shop of Horrors! Every choice is delicious. A space-scroll Voice of God prologue about an eclipse— putting an elevated train in downtown New York City just for the hell of it— Ellen Greene’s breathless smitten squeaks— the way Rick Moranis swings his arms as he long-strolls down the sidewalk in his flashback— “Oh my gosh it’s peculiar!”

It’s so jokey, it’s blithe it’s stylized it’s a musical, but yet I felt real affection for these people, and that’s what I ask for in my comedies. Characters to be strange and funny but also engender genuine pathos in me as they topple around this incredible set of Skid Row, Fantasy New York, that they built entire on a huge soundstage, because you can leave the off-Broadway theater but the off-Broadway theater doesn’t always leave you, and neither do we want it to sometimes!

Although in fact, those elements did transpire to give this movie a curious place in film history, as part of the select club of those with alternate original endings. This was actually one of the few things I did know about Little Shop of Horrors beforehand, because I was so fascinated when I read this that it embedded in my brain even though I knew nothing else about the show. The story goes: when they played the movie for test audiences, the ending from the stage show, which had been a hit with the theater crowd, went over terribly at the test screenings. The theory of the movie’s director, puppetry legend Frank Oz, is that the more fatalistic (in…every sense) ending was easier on the theater audiences, because they got to see those characters they loved again when the actors came out for the bow, got to cheer them a farewell—a moment they didn’t get from the movie version. There is a further fascinating theory that the nearest corollary film has to what the curtain call gives theater audiences psychologically, is the blooper reel, but that’s another story. In our story, Oz and Ashman write up a new ending, a happier one, and this plays much better and is what the movie is released with in cinemas in 1986, and subsequently on VHS, where the movie’s popularity really takes off.

The footage of that original conclusion was still out there though, and in 2012, a Director’s Cut of Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors with the stage musical ending fully restored was officially released by the studio. When I streamed Little Shop of Horrors (HBO has it at time of publishing), the entire Director’s Cut version was linked to the theatrical release as a “special feature,” so I was able to watch the shorter theatrical cut first, and then go on an extended journey with the more macabre ending I OBVIOUSLY preferred, being who I am. But beyond just my taste for stories that end very um, finally, the ending that this show was originally written with, to no surprise, has just gobs more thematic & narrative resolution. It is better in absolutely every way!

I’m avoiding specificity for those who haven’t seen any version of Little Shop before, but a few of the elements that are perfectly brought to fruition (PLANT PUN INTENDED), include:

The premise of this story, which I cannot believe I am just now getting to: a sincere, be-shambled flower shop worker buys a small unusual plant he finds on the street, and thanks to a prick on his finger from a rose thorn (!), discovers that the plant eats human blood. The whole notion of this man Seymour—a wonderfully endearing Rick Moranis, no matter how dark his storyline gets—feeding this plant with his own blood is a concept I found frankly RIVETING, on its own merits but also for its intriguing position near but askew from the classic vampire story. The nature of the power differential and the motivations here are different from how how your usual Dracula-type tales go, but there are echos of the visual motifs and attendant emotional elements in things like seeing little bandages multiplying on his gradually more enervated fingers.

Though the arrangement does quickly start, ahem, growing (I’LL NOT STOP, apparently), and in what is in sound and structure absolutely the seduction song of the musical, the plant, which we should mention he has named Audrey II, after his coworker crush—wacky willowy genius Ellen Green, voice work insane—develops a hell of a baritone and begins cajoling him with the Jareth the Goblin King tack of promising to be your slave if you’ll only do what they say and sacrifice things to them. “Feed me, Seymour,” Levi Stubbs drawls, “Feed me aaallll night long.”

The pronounced psychosexual undertones introduced from really the moment Audrey II first started doing anything have definitely graduated to FULL OVERTONES by the time we meet eager masochist Bill Murray, who appears midway through to have a one-sided yet transparently erotic experience at the hands of sadistic dentist Steve Martin, but I’VE SAID TOO MUCH ALREADY.

Anyway perhaps the worst thing about the way I’ve structured this review, is that it’s only here at the end that I bring up that ultimately this musical is an overt allegory for the evils of capitalism. With everything that has come before that line there is really no way for that to not sound like a joke, but it is in fact true! Audrey II, a “mean, green” menace, represents capitalist enterprise growing ever bigger feeding off the blood of the people, and whose greatest weapon is in convincing you that you that your own path to success is only through becoming complicit in its growth and helping it drain those around you. But again, I’ve already said too much..!

So if you’re looking for a creature feature this October, watch Little Shop of Horrors, the charming, kinky, 94-minute (depending) plant-based dark comedy whose second song is a banger about economic disparity! It’s great!!

★★★★★