Corman thought he was sooooooo slick doing this exact same plot again with Little Shop of Horrors
Nerdy Walter Paisley, a maladroit busboy at a beatnik café who doesn't fit in with the cool scene around him, attempts to woo his beautiful co-worker, Carla, by making a bust of her. When his klutziness results in the death of his landlady's cat, he panics and hides its body under a layer of plaster. But when Carla and her friends enthuse over the resulting artwork, Walter decides to create some bigger and more elaborate pieces using the same artistic process.
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Corman thought he was sooooooo slick doing this exact same plot again with Little Shop of Horrors
I actually think this is sort of beautiful. You can feel Corman connecting to this material on a level it doesn't ask but that makes the whole thing richer than the lightly satirical horror-comedy it is on paper. That might be a little much but fuck you.Obviously Dick Miller is amazing in this. He's never anything less than great but he's really doing something special here. You can see how Walter's aw gee whiz bashfulness curdles into bitter, psychotic entitlement in a way that not only makes sense but feels inevitable. I guess nerds have always been like that.That guy playing the beatnik with the beard is so funny. Holy shit. Honestly he's doing a really good impression of some of you on here and you weren't even born yet when this came out. I'm almost glad he's not in more stuff so he he can stay frozen in this movie like one of Walter's murder sculptures.
A man who was just hit by a car is lying on the sidewalk. He pleads to a passing beatnik, "Call me an ambulance!" The beatnik snaps his fingers and says, "Like, you're an a ambulance, man!" and goes on his way. So the old joke goes... and this movie contains both the spirit of that joke and a darker one that's somewhere between BEING THERE and TAXI DRIVER about a lonely man-child who shoots up the social ladder of a hermetic, elitist art scene exposing its falseness and inherent absurdity. I was not expecting this to be so riotously funny, and (broken record, alert, I've written this often here), unlike modern horror-comedy, it works because it plays it straight, never resorting to winking and nudging the audience to make sure they know it's all a goof. Credit so much to the gaggle of character actors including a wonderful, wonderful lead turn by Dick Miller (the way he makes saying "Hi!" and raising his hand as he enters a room hilarious is magical). You see him in a lot of movies, and think, "I love Dick, but there's just not enough Dick here to satisfy me!" This movie has a lot of Dick.
A clumsy café busboy accidentally creates a sensation in the local beatnik art scene by covering a dead cat in plaster, leading him to commit actual murders to sustain his newfound fame.
Roger Corman directed the 1959 horror comedy, known for his prolific output of fast, low-budget genre films.
While it did not receive major mainstream festival awards upon release, it has since achieved canonical status as a foundational cult classic.
