31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 22: They Live

Day 22: They Live (1988), dir. John Carpenter

Streaming Availability: Peacock (and Tubi, weirdly)

"Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain."

The Reagan Era was bad. I know the Eighties is this fetishized decade in terms of fashion and music and even horror fandom, but all it also sucked hard in a million ways. The Seventies are a rough wake-up call for America that the Post-War prosperity would not last infinity. Our brilliant plan to fix the Stagflation economy was generally to make things much worse for regular people. We start seeing the demolishing of welfare, a rejection of Keynesian economics for tax cut supply-side fantasies, and more importantly, labor rights on the decline. Reagan was at war with unions, but it extended all across the economy. Before the Eighties, a middle-class job was a stable career. It was easy to believe in the Ford Motor Company as an employee, because there was a good chance you would be working there your entire life. By the Eighties that changed. The new doctrine was "stockholder value above all else". If your salary, no matter how much good you did the company, made the stock price look bad, too bad so sad, you're on the streets, fucker. Now you go to work every day with no dreams of climbing up the ladder, just nightmares that you and some semi-random sampling of 20% of your coworkers might get cut. And that's the problems of the white-collar middle class, they at least could find new jobs. The industrial blue-collar economy was being left to rust away and those jobs were never coming back.

But hey, if you were a kid, you got to watch Ghostbusters cartoons, so nostalgia is all we need for the Eighties. Let us never examine it any further.

In case you've heard otherwise, no, They Live is not an antisemitic fantasy about Jews or lizard people secretly running the world. If you ask John Carpenter what he thinks about your (((Evil Globalists))) tweets, he'll grab his synth board and break it in half over your skull. There is a universal paranoia and grievance at the heart of They Live, which can be manipulated. It's the same way that The Matrix, a movie made by trans women about escaping the illusions of their visible bodies somehow became a rallying symbol for the most toxic misogynist pieces of shit in modern online society. Yes, the Gnostic metaphors of control are scary and can be misapplied if you really want to work hard. The only problem is that They Live is not quiet about who it is afraid of, and it isn't whatever DEI boogeyman reactionary streamers are fuming about this week (one of the two leads is a Black man).

There's an evil alien on TV talking about how "It's a new morning in America", a play on Reagan's 1984 political ad, "It's morning again in America". Maybe that reference is a bit too dated now, you might miss it.

They Live does not show a single alien for an entire act of the film. Before that, there's this palpable sense of unease, something fundamentally wrong with the world. And then those vibes are tossed away for a direct statement of institutional violence. Carpenter stages a terrifying night crackdown with the police savaging a homeless encampment. The police have their faces covered in clouded riot helmets, allowing them to be faceless instruments of violence. Our hero, Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper) tries to make his new friend, Frank (Keith David) relax. They're both are out-of-work men, having been chewed out by Reaganomics. Nada says, "I deliver a hard day's work for my money. I just want the chance. It'll come. I believe in America." The ideology says hard work will pay off. Everybody gets what they earn under capitalism. Nada instead sees there are no chances, just nightsticks and riot shields as the government torments anybody on the outside.

Within a few scenes, Nada is carrying around a shotgun and coming up with action movie one-liners as he shoots up a bank. That is both the industry he got shat out of, and the most capitalist institution he can lay violence upon. Remember, They Live was made well before the epidemic of random mass violence, so there are parts of this that have aged poorly, even noting how "kick ass and chew bubblegum" is maybe the greatest line ever written in the history of cinema.

Another figure at this homeless encampment is an unnamed Drifter played by legendary actor of drunkards and bums, Buck Flowers, a Carpenter regular. At the end of the movie, we meet Buck Flowers, now shockingly cleaned up in a tuxedo and holding a martini. He's fully bought in on the alien conspiracy, slipping easily in the role of a Fat Cat. "We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team."

There's a lot done with the visual metaphor of the Magic Sunglasses. It's this device that allows Nada to suddenly see through all the ideology baked into every aspect of modern life. You can read a lot of Derrida or Foucault whatever, or you can you just put on some glasses and see that every newspaper is demanding "OBEY", "CONSUME", and even heteronormativity with "MARRY AND REPRODUCE". On that note, They Live is up there as Carpenter's gayer movies. The main relationship is between Nada and Frank, who even joke as they get a hotel room together "isn't love grand?" There's a legendary six-minute-long wrestling match in a back alley of LA as Nada demands his new best friend wear the sunglasses and unlock his revolutionary potential. It's violent, sure, but there's a lot of heightened homoerotic emotion to put into this, especially Keith David keeps kneeing Roddy Piper in the balls. A lot of big-shouldered dad bodies slapping each other in acid-washed jeans. Holly (Meg Thompson) is the one bit of female sexuality in this film, and her steel blue eyes and stylish suit is the threatening "MARRY AND REPRODUCE" symbolism written in such a way even the sunglasses cannot help Nada see. Of course, she's working for the aliens.

The Magic Sunglasses also allow Carpenter to have fun with some really goofy special effects. It flips the movie over from this dreary vision of Downtown LA into a Fifties black and white B-movie, complete with flying saucers. The alien design is as silly as they are creepy. It evokes skulls. They have no eyelids or lips, but instead of a skull smile, their mouths hang open with a kind of floppy frog-like expression. With their big shiny eyes, they like something you'd see on a Twilight Zone episode. You cannot actually solve the world's problems with a random rampage, but that's when dealing with humans. When dealing with these adorable freaks, action schlock fantasy rules apply.

As angry as They Live is, and it is very angry, Carpenter still makes a fun movie. This is a vision of America that's been colonized by free market sleazebags the same way we colonized the Earth. Yet, it has got tons of action, big gunfights, Roddy Piper never lacks for a great one-liner. And it ends on a fantastic gag where a topless woman discovers the man she's riding is a gross blue-faced skull being from beyond the stars. "Hey, baby, what's wrong?" That's how you end a movie, man. These visions of full government control and conspiracies are going to get a lot darker and more sinister as the Nineties roll in. The X-Files is coming. And the resistance against conspiracies will see more Timothy McVeys, fewer WWF stars.

Next time! Maybe the single weirdest movie of the month, Communion.

31 Days of Horror Review Day 21: The Blob (1988)

Day 21: The Blob (1988), dir. Chuck Russell

Streaming Availability: Peacock

"Listen to me, Briggs! Think for a minute! Do you suppose an army of guys in plastic suits show up every time a meteor falls?"

Back to remakes!

The new Eighties spin on The Blob was written by Frank Darabont. You'll probably know that name because of his connection to Stephen King, specifically directing three adaptations: The Mist, The Green Mile, and of course, the favorite old man yaoi film of the IMDB crowd, The Shawshank Redemption. The Blob is only Darabont's second film credit (the first being the really solid A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, also directed by Chuck Russell) yet you can already see a lot of fascination and inspiration from King. There's a character named "Flagg" (Kevin Dillon) dressed like a Fifties Greaser, as if multiple King villains got mixed together. Flagg, however, is the hero this time, fitting into a very cynical and bitter look at modern America which is also very King-y. The Conservative man of faith is in fact a deranged cleric worshiping a Lovecraftian deity of evil. A vague yet sinister government conspiracy rolls into town, more or less The Shop from Firestarter and King's underrated alien opus, The Tommyknockers.

While the original The Blob gets going immediately with our two lovebirds in the car, the 1988 version takes a bit more time. This movie is still only about 90 minutes, there is not a slow artsy adventure. It does want to establish the scene more, since this Blob has more on its mind than just "wow, teenagers exist and are people too, mom and dad". We see the run-down theater, main street losing a battle against urban decay, the sidewalks covered in dust and debris. We're no longer in Pennsylvania, this was shot in Louisiana with the location filling in for an unnamed skiing town in October. That means the economy is dying, but there's plenty of snow machines hanging around if say, a dangerous space virus landed with a critical weakness to Blizzaga spells. 

Speaking of, within a few scenes a meteor lands and the first victim is again an old man with "something funky" on his hand. The good cheerleader, Meg (Shawnee Smith) and the star Wide Receiver, Paul (Donovan Leitch) are out on their first date. They're our new Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut. Paul has several comedy scenes, including buying condoms from his date's pharmacist father. Sure is a lovable young man, hope he doesn't get eaten by moving slime.

The '88 Blob makes a big statement early by devouring the Old Man in gruesome detail, we see most of his torso eaten away. It makes a bigger statement by feeding Paul to the Blob, in this incredible gore effect. Even after two Blob movies, we've never actually seen the creature eat anybody.  But now it is 1988, gore is in big time. Now we see Paul is in there screaming, until the pink goo's acidic power causes his face to dissolve into a monstrous snout. With offense intended to Beware! The Blob, Darabont's Blob script has better gore *and* better jokes.

There's going to be a lot of great gore effects and twisted remnants of humanity in this version. The influence of The Thing is already being felt by the effects here. They are wonderful. There is a whole sub-genre of horror movies called "Melt Movies", which... are exactly what you think. For much sleezier things of this nature, check out Street Trash or Body Melt. The Blob '88 is the greatest example of a Melt Movie, both technically and in terms of actually being a respectable film. Let us also not forget Larry Cohen's 1985 movie, The Stuff, also about goo eating people.

One thing this movie does is make the Blob more than merely a fluid or a lump. There are several gags of people eating Jell-o or a character spilling a can of cranberries, just to give you a clearer visual contrast of how this movie's special effects are far more sophisticated. It moves like a shape-shifting eldritch horror. It makes unearthly screaming sounds. It grows tentacles to grab at you, getting into Meg's hair in one scene. In another great gag, it has eaten a girl on lover's land from the inside, so while her awful pervert boyfriend goes in to molest her, the creature pops out, while her face implodes from the inside-out. There's a lot of deaths, but the Blob never eats anybody the same way twice. Sometimes it'll digest you up on the ceiling for a jump scare. It even eats a little boy, breaking a big horror taboo.

So with our Steve McQueen gone, who is going to be our male lead now? Well, that belongs to a new character, Brian Flagg, the local baby-faced punk in a leather jacket. His dialog might be a bit too clever. There's one too many sarcastic remarks. B this is the Eighties, society is a mess, so the jaded outsider is ultimately the voice of reason. Unlike the '58 movie, the teenagers have no problem making the authorities believe them about pink slimes eating people. The authorities pour in that very night. All should be well, except that in Reagan's America, a small town in the middle of nowhere is "expendable".

Fans of the '88 Blob might Cinema Sins me for putting this in Aliens Month. Because one big twist Darabont added is that the meteor is not a rock from space but instead a satellite. The Blob isn't an alien, technically, it's a military virus sent into space, which transformed radically into a gooey death mass. (What if Captain Trips ate people?) Dr. Meddows (Joe Seneca) is the leader of a group of government scientists in astronaut suits, trying to put together a containment. There's tons of value in the slime as a weapon. However, the government is as incompetent as they are evil, since Flagg easily escapes, and the Blob wipes out the soldiers. Even the scientists have no idea what they're dealing with, in the end. Teenagers must save the day because the older generation has already failed.

So... the text says the Blob isn't an alien. However, I would note that what has come down is something changed radically and terribly by its connection with the unknowable physics of outer space. The Quatermass Xperiment is just about a guy who went up one time and came back a cosmic horror. Also, The Blob kicks ass, so who cares?

We end with the creepy Reverend (Del Close) having survived this night only with minor injuries and a half-melted face. He's now an evangelical apocalyptic preacher, complete with a tent revival service and all. He's got a jar of some Blob goo, still alive in there, if the angels won't bring the fire and brimstone, the Moral Majority has a back-up plan. "The Lord will send me a sign." 

Unfortunately, that sign never came. The Blob '88 was a box office failure, which is a massive shame. This is a near-perfect horror movie. It's great to see the monster attacking a theater again, this time showing a blatant parody of Friday the 13th movies. You can see where schlock horror has moved between 1958 and 1988. No more Bela Lugosi, now its tits and garden tools as butchering equipment. And say what you want about Jason, he filled audiences in the late Eighties. This didn't. Somehow the teenagers didn't connect with it. Probably because the 1988 Blob forgot to have a rocking pop song like the 1958 one did. You mean to tell me Ray Parker Jr. couldn't get on the case this one?

There has never been another Blob movie. Luckily there does not need to be one. This Blob is perfect.

Next time! John Carpenter really hates Republicans in They Live.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 20: Predator 2

Day 20: Predator 2 (1990), dir. Stephen Hopkins

Streaming Availability: Hulu

Predator 1 is big twitching biceps, big twitching machine guns, invincible masculinity slaughtering everything in its way. In one of its best choices, Predator 2 decides to be a different kind of action movie. See, there are subgenres here, not schlock action movie was Commando, there was also Die Hard. These are slightly more grounded movies with heroes that can get hurt, but still they solve all problems with bullets, grit, and catch-phrases. The comparison between Predator 2 and the Lethal Weapon franchise is unavoidable. Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon 1 and he was the guy in Predator 1 making bad jokes about his girlfriend's private parts. Today's movie stars Danny Glover as a badass LA cop prone to cowboy antics to the frustration of his superior. Imagine if Murtaugh fought an alien while Riggs was on vacation or something. Also, Gary Busey is here. Unsurprisingly, producer Joel Silver is involved in both franchises, he did not mind a bit of cross-contamination.

So before Predators ever fought Aliens, they also were the villain of a stealth Lethal Weapon 2.5.

The shift in location and genre is something I admire. This is what the Predator franchise should have done: in every entry find a new subgenre to break into. John Wick should fight a Predator one day. In Predator 2 we got from jungle to urban jungle, the verticality of the rain forest going to Los Angeles high rises, set in the near-future dystopia of... 1997. Lt. Harrigan (Glover) is melting in every scene, his enormous costume which seems to be three sizes too large is usually soaked. They explain this by saying we're in a middle of a big heat wave, which has the city literally exploding. 

Schwarzenegger is a pair of oiled-up biceps that walk like a man, Danny Glover is not. He has to aim, for example. He has to worry about getting hit. He has an annoying superior who threatens him in typical cop movie fashion. It would be a Buddy Cop movie, except Harrigan loses his partner early on. Instead the odd pairing is Harrigan's two sidekicks, the straight-laced Leona (María Conchita Alonso) and a newbie goofus comic relief in Jerry (Bill Paxton, a real highlight of this movie). Predator 2 would be the usual "the rules don't work on the means streets, man" cop fantasy bullshit if not for the fact that an alien has landed in LA and is butchering people.

Another genre shift is a turn towards Verhoeven-esque RoboCop satire. Demolition Man also opens on a late-Nineties vision of LA in flames, there was something in the zeitgeist assuming the cities were ripe for complete meltdowns. Predator 2 sorta got this right in the most backwards way, LA Riots will happen in 1992 and those racial tensions with dominate American discourse in the Nineties. Unfortunately the cure for all this violence in these movies is more of the cause: police brutality. Don't expect Predator 2 to have great politics, it will get worse. We open on the entire city in a giant gunfight. It is so over-the-top it tip-toes to the line of becoming comedy. We get a lurid blood and guts reporter in Tony Pope (Conservative trash TV personality Morton Downey Jr.), a Greek chorus figure to give exposition for how every right-wing fantasy of urban decay having come true. He ends up being just another nuisance to Harrigan, who punches him in the face. 

The weirder thing is that the gang war imagined in 1997 is a battle between Colombians and a crew of extremely racist "voodoo" stereotypes, who are also dope-smoking Jamaicans. The Ranged Touch podcasts have a a catch-phrase: "I don't know what to do with this", and I think that applies here. I don't know what to do with any of this. It makes no sense. There is not a large Jamaican population in LA, for one. Also, Voodoo is more a Louisiana thing than Jamaican, not that it matters. I don't know to get into the history of East African diaspora folk religion, because this movie does not a give a fuck about any of this! It's exploitation in the most careless and sloppy way, Live and Let Die had more authenticity. Plus, it goes nowhere. All the magic in the world does nothing when an invisible giant alien (Kevin Peter Hall, returning as the Predator) simply rips off the head off the main drug lord, who has one scene. All it does is let us know in this film's imaginary that we need Harrigan because the criminal element has turned into spooky, weird nonsense that needs to be burnt out.

My one theory is that they have Jamaicans in this movie because the Predator has dreadlocks. Which... you know, now that you bring this up, Predator 2, maybe that's a problem actually. I didn't even realize what you were doing racializing this alien until just now. Cut this shit out.

I do like a lot about Predator 2. For most of of my life, this was the only halfway decent sequel in this franchise. For one, it is not a complete mess, racial politics aside. I even enjoy the other Predator 2, I Come in Peace (AKA: Dark Angel), also about a cowboy cop fighting an alien with wacky super-sharp gadgets in a crime-torn city, which also came out in 1990. That movie reps Houston though, in Predator 2 the LA backdrop feels iconic. There were so many ridiculous action B-movies in this era: all you needed was a film crew, a few junker cars you could explode, and a stuntman willing to jump off a roof, and you could make six of these a year and go straight to VHS. Predator 2 is well above average by that standard. Danny Glover carries the movie, and the final fight I think is better than Predator 1.

Some scenes do not work. Jerry's death on the subway is shot like shit, the lights will not stop flashing. But most of the action is really good. You get a fun Gary Busey performance as the face of the Government Conspiracy trying to capture the Predator. He's playing it straight as a stuffy "stay out of my jurisdiction" cliche. But just when you think Busey won't be wacky enough, he's back from the dead, missing a tooth, and screaming his head off before he gets cut in half in a meat plant.

The ending is a fascinating one. Harrington does not win by dipping into a primal animist nature, he's just a bit lucky and never gives up. Glover never says "I'm too old for this shit!" but it's all over his face when he has to climb down an apartment building or jump down an elevator shaft to fight an alien. He gets to go down to the Predator ship, which decorated like cenobites met some Aztecs. He's given an antique 18th-century pistol, a fun little twist on the bow of this movie. The Predators have been here a long time. And they'll be back.

Also there's a xenomorph skull in the background of a few shots. It is never the focus of a shot, it just happens to be there. Somehow that's the one part of Predator 2 anybody remembered. Let that be a lesson to you: never do a fun easter egg. The fans will never let it go. It will torpedo your franchise.

Next time! Fuck I'll have to do Alien vs Predator at some point, won't I? Goddammit. But it is not time yet, first we do a movie I actually like, the remake of The Blob!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 19: Predator

Day 19: Predator (1987), dir. John McTiernan

Streaming Availability: Hulu

The thing about these Eighties action movies is that they knew how dumb they were. Commando, two years before Predator, features a character complaining "I can't believe this macho bullshit". Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography is full of these self-conscious attempts to write memes, basically. He starts out with "I'll be back" in The Terminator and then afterwards everybody wants to write him some goofy one-liner, no matter how forced. Commando has "Let off some steam, Bennett!" after impaling a guy on a pipe. In Predator he throws a machete through a guy, nailing the corpse to a wall, and then we get "stick around!". I'd say nobody has ever worn a T-shirt to reference these puns, but sadly I'm 100% sure somebody has. Check Etsy right now, you can probably get a whole bedroom set with "stick around!" on every surface. The point is: these were live-action cartoons even in their own time. Only a few years after this, John McTiernan and Schwarzenegger go on to make a metafiction parody of his their own genre in Last Action Hero, and other than the metafiction plot line, you can barely tell the difference.

Predator does one of my favorite story gags: shifting genres into horror. And since Eighties action shlock has such a thin reality already, why not deconstruct it this way? It is the same move that From Dusk Till Dawn makes, going from a quippy cool Tarantino crime thriller into vampire cheese. In the first act, there is little about Predator to make you think this would be anything less than another musclebound infinite magazine Eighties action movie. The only tell is that there's a suspicious large body counte. Dutch (Schwarzenegger) alone could fight off whole Latin American armies, why do we need Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke? Well, because they're cannon fodder. This is not just in the jungles of Latin America and stereotypical Banana Republic tropes, they're at Camp Crystal Lake. The gym rats are the teenagers. 

Considering how much hugneness is going around in this cast, you probably need something a bit better-armed than Jason. Well, how about a seven-foot-tall space man (Kevin Michael Hall) with a cloaking device and a laser cannon on his shoulder? There we go.

The politics of Predator are interesting, even if this is far far away from being anti-war or anti-Cold War. This is again, a Post-Vietnam movie, the characters are all veterans with experience in Southeast Asia. There's so many gags in the script (a lot of them written by cast member and future The Predator director, Shane Black) that you would imagine no depth to any of these experiences. When you say you're a "goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus", that seems to exclude you having a deep inner life with lingering trauma or injuries. These guys go off to war with all the seriousness of marching across the convention hall to play a Smash Bros tournament. The jungle is never a threat here, these men own it. 

That is until halfway through the film, when Jesse Ventura's Cooper has been hollowed out, and his friend Mac (Duke) starts to break down. Bill Duke gives this incredible monologue at night to the Moon. It's a tone shift, more melodrama than really the rest of the movie deserves. He recounts some massacre in the war. Suddenly Mac's trigger discipline breaks down, he's jumping at shadows. All that PTSD we've buried under bravado has snuck back out, which he tries - and fails - to redirect towards killing the invisible hunter after them. And he becomes easy prey for the titular alien.

This is the Eighties, we're deep in the muck of the Reagan Administration's support for - and I'm not exaggerating this term - terrorism in Latin America. The Contras in Nicaragua got a lot of the press thanks to their reckless violence. We remember all the illegal shit our sainted Republican president did to continue to support them against explicit Congressional ban. But Iran-Contra is the least of America's sins. Let us not forget the civil wars in El Salvador or the straight-up genocide in Guatemala. Pinochet down in Chile was already sitting on mass graves by 1980 and got plenty of support from up north. In Columbia there's police death squads on American payrolls. These same Cold Warrior Neo-Cons worked for Nixon and would go on to work for W. Bush. It is all one continuum of disaster. The battles in the jungles of Vietnam in the imaginary of these people got to be replayed in the jungles of Latin America, only this time, nobody stopped them. "Nicaragua' Spanish for 'Vietnam'" was a meme back in the Eighties. In the blood of tens of thousands of socialists, clerics, and totally innocent indigenous villagers, American got a W and beat Communism. We got over our "Vietnam Syndrome" just long enough to glorious... oh yeah, do another two Vietnams at the same time in the deserts of the Middle East and the mountains of Central Asia.

Similarly, Dutch's team gets to have this fantasy of only fighting "good wars". They rescue people, they're not assassins. It is still the full might of masculine American (and Austrian) power slaughtering brown people, but any crookedness gets to be absorbed by Dillon (Weathers). This character is like a Sin Eater for the cast, so you can root for the other gun-toting badasses without worry. He's the CIA rep, the liar that's misleading our heroes into massacring an enemy base without cause. Yet even Dillon ends up unable to resist the call of true martial valor to fight the Predator. He dies for the sins of the Central Intelligence Agency and the good heroes can stay pure.

Interestingly the Predator is not part of this politics. It exists outside all this "nation building" and Cold War shit. Instead it this abstraction of violence, a more primal form of combat. Maybe it is here to colonize Dutch's team the way they colonize the jungle, but I don't think so. We do not know where it came from, what its world is like, just that it is here to Hunt the most dangerous game in the Universe: Eighties action heroes. Dutch and his crew lose the technology advantage to this alien, and are withered down one by one. That leaves only the biggest and baddest of the action stars to stand alone, coming to a realization of the true nature of this battle. Dutch gives up his guns and tools and even his shirt, becoming part of the animalistic reality of this jungle. The alien cannot descend into the elements as successfully, and gets crushed by a tree.

Predator is a beloved movie, honestly I'm cooler on this than most. Production-wise, Predator is clean and efficient. I think the score is too much, too loud, and it never stops. The final fight scene seems to last forever and Predator loses a lot of energy once Schwarzenegger has nobody left to banter with. But Stan Winston's design on the Predator's face is as iconic as any movie alien out there besides their future foe, the xenomorph. McTiernan shot this out in the jungles of Mexico, and the shoot never became an Apocalypse Now or Aguirre-level war against the elements. Still, the environment looks good, you can feel the humidity as several actors melt away in sweat. All those big dudes shooting like Hell into the jungle like idiots is fun, I'm not above it.

Next time! With the War on Communism won, we go to hunt the War on Crime in Predator 2.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 18: Little Shop of Horrors: Director's Cut (1986)

Day 18: Little Shop of Horrors - Directors' Cut (1986), dir. Frank Oz

Streaming Availability: Rental

"You remember that total eclipse of the sun about a week ago?"

Note: There's no hard rule or anything, but I've been watching the theatrical versions of these movies for these reviews. No Assembly Cuts. I'm making an exception here because the Director's Cut of Little Shop of Horrors is not the version I've ever seen. I've been really excited to check this out. There's a totally new ending, and holy crap: what an ending! I cannot believe this sequence was left on the cutting room, just out of pure expense. I've read that this cut material cost something in the neighborhood of $5 million to shoot, which was enormous back in the Eighties. This is the most complicated and incredible part of the movie and Warner Bros tore it out because it was too much of a downer. This footage was not fully restored and made available again until 2012, twenty-six years later.

So, our history lesson of that is that WB was having problems even before Zaslav, fun to know. Well, this is HORROR MONTH, so we're doing the more horror-full version. Downers are my uppers!

Little Shop of Horrors, the big special effects movie we're covering today, is an adaptation of an off-Broadway stage musical from 1982. The musical was written by Alan Manken and Howard Ashman, the two men who would launch Disney's Renaissance by writing the songs for Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and notably The Little Mermaid. (Listen for how much of Ariel's big song, "Part of Your World" is already in "Somewhere That's Green".) Manken would later reuse the idea of three doo wop back-up singers as a Greek chorus in Hercules, making the "Greek" part more literal. All you Disney Adult sickos will find a lot to like musically in this one.

The musical in turn is based on a 1960 Roger Corman movie, which we did not cover for this series. That original movie never says the killer plant is from outer space, so it is ineligible. But more importantly: it is not very good, basically a bad comedy. Nothing but respect for my man Rog C., he is a legend, but Little Shop of Horror was made mainly as a dare to see if he could squeeze out another movie with the few days he had left in the shooting schedule for A Bucket of Blood, also starring Dick Miller. Watching that movie gives one the strong impression... that it was shot in two days, rather poorly. I couldn't even finish it the one time I tried.

So how does this dismal little cheap movie end up the inspiration for a major multi-million dollar blockbuster? Well, there's this thing called "camp". I am not all that terribly well-equipped on this topic, I'm a straight dude, after all, so I'll do my best. Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of most important films in queer culture in the Seventies, being one of great Midnight Movies. And that's a strong counter-culture glam rock statement of sexual liberation heavily inspired by genre movies from the Thirties to the Sixties. (Remember how It Came from Outer Space was referenced in the lyrics of "Science Fiction Double Feature"?) There's plenty of connection between horror and queer culture: there is no such thing as a 100% straight vampire movie, for example. Little Shop of Horrors is nowhere near as transgressive as O'Brien's opus, but it is still very goofy, very campy. These old B-movies also have a camp appeal just by their dated quality, an ironic appreciation for all things passé is wrapped up in here too. A lot of old genres ended up reclaimed by queer culture, see the brief hagsploitation craze of the Sixties or the "woman's films" that inspired John Waters to make Polyester. The original Little Shop was a relic by the Eighties - the Corman movie looked dated even in 1960. That increasing ridiculousness increases the artifice and from there you get a ton of Camp value. So... why not turn this into a wacky musical? Play up the retro mid-century aesthetic for extra irony.

It also helps that Corman did not bother to copyright his movie, so his Little Shop of Horrors went immediately into public domain.

Anyway, I have written many paragraphs and I haven't actually talked about Little Shop of Horrors '86 yet. Frank Oz did not shoot this movie in two days. Like many classic film musicals, this is shot mostly on sound stages, in this case on an enormous set for Skid Row, built on the "007 Stage" in England. It is a really impressive, filling out an entire street corner with rooftops, stunning stuff. Even more impressive is the puppetry. This is the Eighties, the Jim Henson Company is at the height of its powers, and while Little Shop not a Jim Henson joint, Frank Oz was one of their main creative voices. (And of course, he's Yoda, cannot not mention that.)

As a musical, Little Shop of Horrors is solid, I still got the main theme floating through my head. Rick Moranis is a surprisingly decent singer. His strength is the lovable dweeb character he played in things like Ghostbusters, so he plays the main role of Seymour well. They did not cast a Hollywood actress to play Audrey, instead bringing back Ellen Greene from the stage version. Holy crap are her pipes impressive. Her voice shakes the soundstage in "Suddenly Seymour", it's something special. Seymour's other relation is also named Audrey, Audrey II (Levi Stubbs), a man-eating plant he bought from a Chinese man downtown, Gremlins-style. They're a "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" and the other great voice in the cast thanks to Stubbs' smooth R&B baritone. 

But while the acting and singing are good, the effects over-shadow everything. Moranis doing a duet with an incredibly articulated giant puppet several feet tall is unbelievable. It.... could be the most impressive special effect I've ever seen. They only really do this shot once, because it was probably so difficult. Most of the time when actors are on set with the killer Piranha Plant, they're either shot from behind or standing off the side, not moving much. That's because Audrey II is so sophisticated and complicated a puppet, they're actually moving in slow-motion, and the footage is then sped up to 24 fps. Moranis is mouthing his words in slow-motion, the final singing being dubbed in. You'd never be able to tell, the effect is seamless.

The plant has a ton of moving parts as well: articulated leaves and tentacles and later little extra mouths to be its own back-up singers. But the most impressive thing is the mouth itself, with a big nasty smile without eyes. Even without eyes, the puppet is wonderfully expressive and fluid. Just watching this creature sing at any point is amazing.

Plot-wise Little Shop of Horrors is a Faustian story where Seymour discovers a space plant, feeds it his enemies, and then it grows too large to controlled, eventually devouring his beloved Audrey in her cleavage-bearing dress. They're poor kids with a dream to escape the Mean Streets, and for that they're eaten. It is grim, but the black comedy lands well thanks to a comedy back-up cast of people like Steve Martin, John Candy, Bill Murray, and Christopher Guest. Plus, Audrey II is a foul-mouth wise-cracker.

Now let us talk endings. The theatrical version is boring. The Director's Cut keeps the stageshow ending, which is disturbing and magnificent. In this version, Audrey II eats Audrey I, then Seymour, then NYC itself. Let me tell you: cinema does not get better than this. Oz stages this elaborate, fantastic sequence of Godzilla-sized plants smashing through buildings and devastating Manhattan landmarks all to a final song "Don't Feed the Plants". There's so much miniature work and so many effects shots, which all work brilliantly. Gag after gag. Maybe there's one too many shots of Audrey II tearing through a brick wall, but the creativity of the monsters rocking on the Brooklyn Bridge or conquering the Statue of Liberty make up for it. It is the best part of the movie, and Warner Bros cut it out.

Unbelievable.

It even ends on lovable nods to the 1958 The Blob. With a cheesy "THE END?!?" credit, and Audrey II smashing through the screen to eat the audience you're in, laughing it up in that deep Motown voice. Yeah, it's dark, but this is no Xtro. It's pure joy. An apocalypse of silliness. If it had to end, I hope it ends this way.

Next time! America gets over its Vietnam Syndrome with Predator.