MOVIE REVIEW : DELICIOUS, LIP-SMACKING HORROR IN TASTY ‘SHOP’

When Roger Corman made the original 1960 “Little Shop of Horrors,” he was on an impossible schedule (two days) with an unknown cast, including the fiendishly grinning 23-year-old Jack Nicholson. But something in Charles Griffith’s black premise--the plant that eats and enslaves people--took root in the audience. It’s a nightmare that people remember--mostly because it’s done with such tongue-in-cheek unsentimentality.

Now, after a quarter-century, comes another “Little Shop of Horrors” (selected theaters), which is one of the year’s prize movie entertainments: grandly loony, full-bodied and explosively funny.

It’s a movie that connects with its audience in a big way. Right from the beginning, the show-biz currents crackle. The actors and lines are on target, the music has a swing and bite, the camera seems exuberant. The director, Frank Oz, has made only one other movie solo: “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (he co-directed “The Dark Crystal” with Jim Henson). He’s primarily known as Henson’s fellow Muppeteer, the man behind Miss Piggy, the Cookie Monster and Grover. But though Oz was no wizard in “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” he’s taken hold here. It’s a wildly infectious show.

Both movies--and the witty, rousing Howard Ashman-Alan Menken stage musical that this film adapts--are set in a failing flower shop called Mushnik’s. In its shadowy cellar grows the bizarre plant Audrey II, named after an adored co-worker by the schnook shop clerk, Seymour Krelborn. Audrey II resembles an anemic venus flytrap with bulbous lips, or a smirking cabbage, and it proves to have unusual, revolting characteristics. It battens on freshly killed human flesh and blood, an unholy sustenance that must be supplied, in increasing quantity, by the terrorized Seymour.

Corman’s movie was a shocking, mockingly inverted success story in which nebbish Seymour won fame, fortune and love even as his monstrous secret--the carnivorous plant--grew wildly out of control. It’s a hip fable, and playwright Ashman, who adapted the screenplay, seized on it.

The setting is Skid Row, the trash-strewn pesthole Seymour and Audrey dream of escaping to a squeaky-clean suburban tract where Audrey can watch “I Love Lucy” and hold Tupperware parties. This suburban dream is really a nightmare (as in “Blue Velvet”). And Ashman broadens the targets: Audrey II--whose mouth is designed to resemble Audrey I’s--is the dark side of ambition, a Faustian tempter with smacking lips and bottomless appetites. And Seymour’s romantic rival for Audrey I--Orin, sadistic dentist by day and black-jacketed, Presley-pomaded “Leader of the Placque” by night (played with hilarious abandon by Steve Martin)--is the first man killed.

All this makes the movie sound serious. But a lot of the best jokes or fairy tales have scary, brackish undercurrents. Ashman, Menken and Oz push the mix of hilarity and carnage giddily to extremes.

So do the actors. The whole ensemble clicks (producer David Geffen deserves a lionish chomp of credit). Rick Moranis and Vincent Gardenia look Seymour and Mushnik to a T--and, as Audrey, Ellen Greene is a delight. Her eyes have a dull, fake-pearl gleam, her voice is a scratchy swash of nasal sincerity (except in her big ballad, “Suddenly Seymour”), and when she skips and slithers on in one of her skintight outfits, she even pulls laughs out of her cleavage.

The cameos are equally pungent. Bill Murray is eye-rollingly fey in Nicholson’s old part of the masochistic dental patient; Jim Belushi is a perfect seedy huckster. Oz, the puppeteer, coordinates the styles expertly. (Steve Martin--who usually wears the sunny mean grin of the vacuous winner--is a virtuoso of scowls here, and his goony grace as a dancer was never better used.)

There’s more. As the movie’s chorus, a trio of Skid Row Supremes called Ronette, Chiffon and Crystal--Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold, three teen-age girls in their movie debut--lift your spirits sky high each time they come on. And can an Oscar be awarded for the best performance by a disembodied old soul singer and 40 animatronics handlers? As the voice of Audrey II--a great green, obscene, waving sea-monster of a killer plant--Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops all but belts the house down. Stubbs’ “I’m a Mean, Green Mothah From Outer Space” doesn’t just stop the show; it detonates it. (For Audrey’s eyepopping dexterity, we have to thank creator Lyle Conway and those 40 helpers.)

One question remains: Isn’t there something tasteless about this whole idea? Should anyone really be encouraged to go to movies about huge mutant plants that eat people?

Hmmm. . . Taste is relative. A lot of reality is in bad taste (just check the headlines). And a lot of this horrific “Little Shop” (rated PG-13) is not only sweet, melodic, funny and oddly idealistic, it’s even, well, tasty. As Audrey II herself once said: “Feed me.”

‘THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS’ A Geffen Co./Warner Bros. release. Producer David Geffen. Director Frank Oz. Script Howard Ashman. Camera Robert Paynter. Production design Roy Walker. Songs Alan Menken, Howard Ashman. Music score Miles Goodman. Editor John Jympson. Special visual effects Bran Ferren. With Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell, Michelle Weeks, Bill Murray, John Candy.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).