LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) ****

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on November 4th, 2009)

The Little Shop of Horrors is one of director Roger Corman’s finest hours.  After directing dozens of unintentionally hilarious movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters, this was his first intentionally funny horror film.  It also happens to be a searing indictment of the small-time businessman and the lengths he will go to in order to be successful.

 

Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) works for his overbearing boss Mushnik (Mel Welles) at his Skid Row flower shop where he pines for the pretty (but dumb as a bag of hammers) Audrey (Jackie Joseph).  Seymour creates a mutant Venus Fly Trap, which he names Audrey Jr. that drinks human blood to live.  The more Audrey Jr. grows, the busier the shop becomes, which makes Mushnik very happy.  As Audrey Jr. gets bigger, so does her appetite, and eventually Seymour takes to killing hobos and hookers in order to feed her.

 

The Little Shop of Horrors is famous for a lot of reasons.  First, it was shot in two days, which is pretty amazing.  Secondly, it kinda gained a second life after the 1986 musical remake.  Thirdly, it’s a public domain movie, so everybody’s probably seen it.  And perhaps the best reason is because it features Jack Nicholson in one of his greatest roles.  His performance as Wilbur Force, the masochistic dental patient has to be seen to be believed.  With his hair parted down the middle, he reads Pain Magazine and says shit like, “No Novocain!  It dulls the senses!”  He’s almost as nuts here as he was in The Shining.

 

This flick is chockfull of bizarre little bits and entertaining black humor.  The Dragnet style cops are hilarious and some of their banter will leave you in stitches.  The scenes of Seymour feeding Audrey Jr. disembodied hands and feet while the plant screams “FEEEEED MEEEEE!” are also pretty great.  And not only does the movie features a man-eating plant, but also a plant-eating man played by the always awesome Dick Miller.  (“I’ve got to get home; my wife’s making gardenias for dinner!”)  The Little Shop of Horrors is rife with weird touches like this that makes it so much fun.

 

Incredibly, Corman also managed to churn out Ski Troop Attack, Fall of the House of Usher, and Last Woman on Earth the same year.

 

Audrey Sr. gets the best line of the movie when she says, “I’m so hungry; I could eat a hearse!”

 

The Little Shop of Horrors is Number 3 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1960 which places it just below The Magnificent Seven and right above Peeping Tom.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 17th, 2007)

In this fun horror/comedy from director Roger Corman, Dick Miller plays his best role as Walter Paisley, a meager busboy in a hep cat bohemian nightclub who someday dreams of being a famous beatnik artist. He tries sculpting but is no good at it until he accidentally kills his cat and decides to sculpt over its carcass. When his “Dead Cat” sculpture is an unexpected hit, he soon has to turn to murder to find willing “subjects”. Miller gives a great performance and Corman balances the chills and the chuckles nicely. It would make a good double feature with Corman’s better known Little Shop of Horrors (also with Miller) which came out the following year. Co-starring a young Bert Convy as a victim. Remade in 1995 with Anthony Michael Hall.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:  

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

Director Roger Corman directed this back-to-back-to-back with The Battle of Blood Island and Last Woman on Earth. It has a lot in common with his classic Little Shop of Horrors:  It was filmed in a few days, it was written by Charles B. Griffith, and it has cartoony opening credits. It’s nowhere near as good as Shop, but it has its moments.

A bumbling spy stows away on a gangster’s boat who kills off his passengers and tries to blame it on the local legendary sea monster. Unfortunately for him, there really IS a monster on the loose! One of the crew members makes (obviously dubbed in) and the other, “Edward Wain” is actually future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert (Chinatown) Towne. The tone is really out of whack and wildly uneven but Corman completists will wanna check it out.

Best line: “It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down.”

Watch fast for Corman using a telephone.

WANTED MAN (2024) **

Dolph Lundgren plays a disgraced cop who gets caught on camera beating up a Mexican suspect.  As sort of a half-assed PR stunt, he is sent to Mexico to pick up two hookers.  And by “pick up two hookers”, I mean “Extradite them as they are potential eyewitnesses to a drug deal gone wrong that resulted in several deaths, including some undercover cops”, and not like, “pick them up, pick them up”.  That wouldn’t be much of a PR stunt, if you ask me. 

Anyway, while transporting the witnesses they are ambushed and one of the women is shot and killed.  Together, Dolph and the other survivor go into hiding and try not to get killed by the crooked cops who are on their trail. 

Dolph gets to play his age a little bit in this one.  He walks with a noticeable limp and characters comment that he needs ankle surgery, but I have a suspicion he really did need ankle surgery, and they just wrote his injury into the script.  There’s even a subplot where he gets shot and spends much of the second act in bed healing up and watching telenovelas. 

When you’re someone as prolific as Dolph is, you have to make sure there are slight variations on the usual fare to keep your films from feeling interchangeable.  In this one, he plays a racist, although to be fair his character is more of the “drunk uncle” variety than a “card carrying member of the KKK”.  Five years from now when I’m trying to remember the recent Dolph films I’ve seen, I’ll remember this one by saying, “Oh, right that was the racist Dolph one.”  (Alternatively, I may think of it as the one where he spends a third of the movie in bed.)  I’m not saying Wanted Man is entirely forgettable, but I’m not sure just how long it will be seared into my brain.  Granted, I appreciate the attempt to mirror real world events, such as racism in the police force and all, but it feels more like an attempt by the screenwriters to give his character a unique backstory rather than be a genuine look at race and society. 

Dolph also directed the film.  He does a competent job for the most part.  It’s thoroughly middle of the road by Dolph standards, but die-hard fans like me probably won’t care.  Middle of the road is where us fans tend to be most of the time. 

Kelsey Grammer and Michael Pare also turn up playing Dolph’s drinking buddies.

This summer I was a guest on Matt’s Direct to Video Connoisseur Podcast and we discussed the film in depth.  You can check out our entire chat here: DTVC Podcast 168, "Wanted Man" by DTVC Podcast (spotify.com)

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SPOOKS RUN WILD (1941) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on February 7th, 2008)

The East Side Kids/Bowery Boys were always best when they had real talent to play off of.  When they worked for Warner Brothers studios, the boys starred alongside the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and John Garfield.  When they were relegated to the poverty row Monogram studios, the biggest star they could get was Bela Lugosi.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see a Lugosi movie than anything Bogart was in. 

 

Lugosi plays Nardo, a vampire like “monster” who hangs out in a decrepit mansion in the middle of nowhere along with his midget sidekick (Angelo Rossitto).  The boys stumble upon the mansion and have to stay the night.  Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Glimpy (Huntz Hall) and Danny (Bobby Jordan) contend with giant spiders, floating skulls and suits of armor that move around all by themselves.  In the end, we learn Lugosi is really a swell guy after all and he helps the boys capture the “real” monster. 

 

Lugosi isn’t given a whole lot to do, but he’s as fun to watch as always.  He returned to the series two years later for Ghosts on the Loose.  Spooks Run Wild isn’t as fun as that flick, but to me, any movie in which Rossitto plays Lugosi’s sidekick is automatically worth checking out.  Dave O’Brien co-stars as the boys’ guardian.  He also starred with Lugosi in The Devil Bat the previous year. 

 

Scruno (“Sunshine” Sammy Morrison), the token black Kid of the group gets the movie’s best line:  “If I’m yellow, then you’re color blind!”

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: TREASURE OF FEAR (1945) * ½

FORMAT:  DVD

Jack Haley (from One Body Too Many and… uh…  The Wizard of Oz) stars as a bumbling reporter who is sent by his asshole editor to cover a wine festival.  Naturally, since he’s such a putz, he winds up on the wrong bus.  When the passenger sitting next to him is murdered, Haley quickly becomes the prime suspect.  Before long, a gangster arrives on the scene looking for some priceless chess pieces, and it’s up to Haley to come back to his editor with a story… if he can survive, that is. 

I’ll tell you.  A little of Haley’s shtick goes a long way.  His jittery demeanor and twitchy behavior don’t exactly translate into laughs.  (The scene where he engages in a battle of wits with a car horn and loses is especially tiresome.)  I guess when you’re covered in silver face paint and playing third fiddle to Judy Garland, this kind of routine can be tolerable.   However, as a leading man, he’s borderline insufferable.  (The irritating know-it-all Encyclopedia Brown wannabe junior detective kid will also grate on your nerves.)

I was able to stomach Haley’s brand of comedy while rewatching One Body Too Many.  That’s mostly because that film was deeply rooted in Old Dark House murder/mystery cliches, and I have a certain affinity for the genre.  Here, he’s stuck inside what is essentially a tepid whodunit comedy, and he flounders.  Badly.  (Even the requisite scenes of secret walls, hidden passageways, and bodies suddenly turning up feel awfully tired.) 

I guess die-hard Wizard of Oz fans may enjoy it.  For me, this Tin Man wasn’t just missing a heart, but he apparently lost his funny bone as well.  As for Treasure of Fear, it was in desperate need of an oil can too, as it was creaky as fuck. 

AKA:  Scared Stiff.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on November 13th, 2007)

Some thoroughly bland white dude (John Archer), his pilot (Dick Purcell), and his manservant (the hilarious Mantan Moreland) crash land on a jungle island where the evil Dr. Sangre (Henry Victor) dwells. He welcomes the trio into his home where unbeknownst to them; he keeps a cadre of zombies. Sangre also tries to turn a military VIP into a zombie so he can steal vital information for his vaguely Nazi government but is foiled at the last minute by the now zombified Purcell.

King of the Zombies offers no surprises whatsoever, but it also gives you exactly what you’re expecting, so you can’t say that you’re disappointed by it. Nobody will ever mistake this flick as the definitive zombie picture, but it’s a lot of fun and it moves pretty briskly.

Mantan Moreland’s performance is far and away the best thing about the movie. Some people frown upon his performances and say they are “politically incorrect”, “stereotypical”, and worst of all “racist”, but I say that the man is one of the most overlooked comedians of all time. Today, some snobs may look back at his work and say it was borderline offensive, but Moreland really had no choice in the matter. Hollywood only offered him the roles of stereotypical black porters, chauffeurs and servants, so what was the guy to do? He played what could have been insignificant, underwritten and one-note roles and made them his own, infusing them with a lot of warmth and humor. In King of the Zombies, he gives one of his best performances. You can say that his role in it is stereotypical if you will, but he’s actually the one who discovers the zombies; it’s just the stupid white people who don’t believe him.

Mantan gets all the best lines in the movie and easily steals the film from his boring (white) co-stars. When they first arrive on the island, he muses, “Harlem was never like this!” When he wakes up in a graveyard he hollers “We in someone’s marble orchard!” When he first encounters the zombies he yells, “They’s fugitives from the undertaker!” In short, Mantan is one funny son-of-a-gun and has a lot more chemistry than anyone else in the flick.

The only other person who comes close to matching Moreland’s performance is Henry Victor. A lot of you may recognize him as the strongman from Freaks. He gives a decent performance as the voodoo doctor obsessed with hypnotism. If he seems to be channeling Bela Lugosi in some scenes, it’s probably because the role was originally intended for Lugosi, but Victor was cast at the last minute when Bela proved to be unavailable.

The movie maybe kind of light when it comes to zombies (there’s only about four or five), but the climatic voodoo ceremony is pretty memorable and features a lot of extras screaming something that sounds approximately like, “Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! We love cocoa beans! Cocoa bean, cocoa bean! Zombie! I need cocoa, I need cocoa!”

If you happen to catch King of the Zombies on television (or in a bargain DVD bin) you’ll probably enjoy it. You’d probably think that it’s hardly Academy Award material, but you’d be WRONG! The musical score was actually nominated for an OSCAR, but it lost. (I’m not quite sure HOW it got nominated as the music is mostly jungle drums and comical suspense build-ups like “Doo-doo-doo-doo-DOOOOO!”)