at this link.
" data-portal-copyright="" />
Here’s your link for the movie. Show starts at 7:30. Click your clicks then!
Essentially, there’s a Murder Plant, it wants Blood, and it has the voice of Levi Stubbs from The Four Tops. Rick Moranis stars as its hapless keeper/enabler, and there’s a whole slew of guest stars, named in the poster above… or you can wait to be surprised when they show up, that’s fun, too. (This intro is adapted from an earlier post at this link.)
The backstory to this is wild! It all began in 1959, when Roger Corman had
a few days and a few thousand lying around…
Now, if you don’t know who Roger Corman is, he was the ultimate moviemaking cheapskate. If he was producing a film and it came in slightly under budget and finished a few days early, Corman was gonna find a way to get a whole ‘nother movie made that fast for that money. So a bunch of people got drunk and wrote a script overnight.
Oh, and it’s also likely that Corman wanted to get one last movie made under old rules that allowed him to not pay actors any residuals when the movie was seen in re-runs and such. Like I said, Corman was the ultimate cheapskate.
Anyhoo, the 1960 release WAS eventually seen by a good number of people on late-nite TV and such. It’s kinda funny (and now in the public domain, so you can watch it all on Wiki for free). Part of the humor is, the movie KNOWS it’s super-quickie junk, it’s not trying its hardest to hide it (like The Blob did). Jack Nicholson has a small part (which one of the guest stars has in the 1986 movie). Jack really wasn’t good at acting just yet!
One of the people who saw it on late-nite TV was playwright/lyricist Howard Ashman. He saw it as a teenager, and it stuck in the back of his mind.
In the 70s, Ashman had a couple of relatively unsuccessful plays under his belt. In 1979, he worked on a musical version of a Kurt Vonnegut novel with composer Alan Mencken; it did pretty well, until they tried moving it from off-Broadway to the biggest theaters. Ashman was eager to work with Mencken again, and he remembered that old cheesy movie; it turned up on cable, they watched it together, and Mencken enjoyed it. “Alan liked it,” Ashman said later, “because it immediately gave him musical ideas. It reeked of the 1960s.”
Those musical ideas are, BY FAR, the best thing in the movie. Ashman/Mencken’s genius with these songs is to do them in a very specific style — that of 50s/60s girl groups, doo-wop and soul tunes. (There’s songs with a more traditional Broadway feel, too, but the movie has that 50s/60s sound at its core.) The play was an off-Broadway smash.
Frank Oz directs the film version, which omits a few songs and adds a few (including “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” which was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to ”Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun, because… I dunno). Oz became famous as a puppeteer who performed Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and Yoda, among many others. He’s not the greatest at directing humans, but the plant puppet/animatronic here is an impressive piece of work.
The cast includes Rick Moranis, who can sing surprisingly decently, and Ellen Greene, who reprises her role from the stage version. (She has a meek speaking voice and a MAJOR singing one.) The three teenagers who act like a Greek chorus (and sing like the Marvelettes/Vandellas etc.) are Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell, and Michelle Weeks; the stunning-voiced lady who starts off “Downtown/Skid Row” is Bertice Reading.
The big star, though, is Levi Stubbs. If you’ve never heard a Levi Stubbs song, you’re in for a real treat. But I think you HAVE heard his Four Tops songs, even if you don’t recognize his name. “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)“, “It’s the Same Old Song,“ and what might be my favorite-ever Motown song (although you could pick 25 others and I wouldn’t complain one bit), ”Reach Out I’ll Be There.“
The movie did well enough to make its money back, and got the attention of the people at Disney. If you don’t remember how new Disney animated features were doing at the time, the short version is “not well.” Disney hired Ashman and, at his insistence, Mencken to write the songs for their adaptation of The Little Mermaid. It was a smash. (And basically recycles one song from Little Shop; “Somewhere That’s Green” becomes “Part of Your World.”) Ashman/Mencken would also write the songs for Beauty and the Beast and part of Aladdin (Ashman tragically died from AIDS at the age of 40, and Tim Rice wrote the rest of the movie’s lyrics).
Disney probably would still be a corporate behemoth without the gigantic success of those movies, but they were extremely popular. And it’s all thanks to two oddballs who watched an old Roger Corman cheapie on late-nite cable, and decided, “hey, let’s make a musical about a Murder Plant.”
Works for me.
Here’s the link again, and click your clicks at 7:30. Here’s the upcoming Movie Night Schedule:
November 6: Bad Day at Black Rock. Spencer Tracy faces down some bullying bigots in a teeny California town. Will goodness and justice prevail? It’s 1955, what do you think? With Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, Lee Marvin, and the terrifically-nasty Robert Ryan. 81 tight minutes, folks… that movie RULES. It’s on Archive, so feel free to download it in advance if you like.
November 13: 61*. Softspoken Roger Maris and brash Mickey Mantle find they have more in common than they expected as they both chase Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. With Barry Pepper as Maris, Thomas Jane as Mantle, and directed by mega-baseball fan Billy Crystal.
Remember, start tonight’s show at 7:30 at this link! See ya then!
