Never get tired of the soundtrack for this movie.
Review Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
- Thread starter High Plains Drifter
- Start date
Elliot Thomas
Member: Rank 3
I thought this was great with infectious tunes and enthusiastic performances. It’s totally daft but great fun; Martin stands out as the sadistic dentist; musical highlight: “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space”.
Doctor Omega
Member: Rank 10
The Original Alternate Ending....
The film's original 23-minute finale, based on the musical's ending, was rewritten and reshot after audiences at the preview screenings did not react positively to it.
For years only available as black-and-white workprint footage, the original ending was fully restored in 2012 by Warner Home Video.
The finale
Audrey II on top of the Statue of Liberty in the film's planned ending, shown here in its unfinished state as taken from an early-stage black-and-white workprint.
The visual effects were completed for the Director's Cut of the film.
Oz and Ashman wanted to retain the ending of the musical where Seymour and Audrey die and the plant succeeds and takes over the city of New York, but Geffen was actually against it.
"He said you can't do that," Oz recounts. "But again he knew what Howard and I wanted to do, so he supported us."
A special effects team skilled in working with miniatures, and Special Visual Effects team, went to great lengths to create the finale.
The model department was supervised by Richard Conway, known for his model work on Flash Gordon and Brazil.
"It was all model stuff, that was the brilliant thing. He created the bridge, the buildings, several Audrey IIs and created all of it, all on tabletop. It's all old-fashioned, tabletop animation" [although no stop motion animation was used in the film or in the ending].
The Visual Effects work was supervised by Bran Ferren (Altered States).
Reportedly the entire planned climax cost about $5 million to produce, and included elaborate special and visual effects.
Oz said in an interview, "this was, I think, the most expensive film Warner Bros. had done at the time."
As the film was nearing completion, the excited studio set up a test screening in San Jose.
Oz said, "For every musical number, there was applause, they loved it, it was just fantastic... until Rick and Ellen died, and then the theatre became a refrigerator, an ice box. It was awful and the cards were just awful. You have to have a 55 percent "recommend" to really be released and we got a 13. It was a complete disaster."
Oz insisted on setting another test screening in L.A. to see if they would get a different reaction. Geffen agreed to this, but they received the same negative reaction as before.
Oz later recounted, "I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead. They're gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it."
Oz and Ashman scrapped Audrey and Seymour's grim deaths and the finale rampage, and Ashman rewrote a happier ending, with James Belushi replacing Paul Dooley (who was unavailable for the re-shoot) as Patrick Martin.
The musical number "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" was left mostly intact from the original cut, with new shots of Audrey observing from a window added in.
A brief sequence from the "Mean Green Mother" number was also removed in which Seymour fires his revolver at Audrey II, only to discover that the bullets ricochet harmlessly off of the plant.
In the happy ending, Audrey II is destroyed and Seymour, Audrey, and humanity survive.
This happy ending is made somewhat ambiguous, however, with a final shot of a smiling Audrey II bud in Seymour and Audrey's front yard.
Tisha Campbell was unavailable for the final appearance of the chorus girls in the yard and was replaced with a lookalike seen only from the waist down.
"We had to do it," Oz recounted. "[and do it] in such a manner that the audience would enjoy the movie. It was very dissatisfying for both of us that we couldn't do what we wanted. So creatively, no, it didn't satisfy us and being true to the story. But we also understood the realities that they couldn't release the movie if we had that ending."
"We had to take [the workprint] apart, and we never made a dupe of [the original ending]."
At the time, the only copies of it that were made to be viewed were VHS workprint tapes given to few crew members.
The scene in which Seymour proposes to Audrey originally contained the reprise of "Suddenly, Seymour".
This scene was re-shot and the reprise was placed later in the new ending.
In the final theatrical cut, the only miniatures that are retained are the New York City streets passing behind Steve Martin's motorcycle ride at the beginning of "Dentist!"
"When we did re-shoot the ending, the crowd reaction went over 50 percent in our favor. Before it was a point where they hated it so much, Warner probably wouldn't even release the movie," Oz said.
In November 2011, Oz held a Q&A session at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens during a Henson themed exhibit.
During the talk, he announced that the film would be released as a new special edition with the original ending restored.
Warner Bros. reconstructed and restored the ending in an alternate edit, with re-discovered color negatives of the sequence and the help of production notes from Frank Oz and others on the film's creative team.
It was released on Blu-ray and DVD on October 9, 2012 with features returning from the original DVD.
It was initially subtitled as "The Intended Cut",but changed to "The Director's Cut" once Oz began to support the release.
The new edit was screened at the 50th New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" line-up on September 29, 2012, alongside titles such as Laurence Olivier's Richard III and Heaven's Gate.
Frank Oz worried that the audience would give a negative reaction at the 2012 screening, however, "the audience accepted Audrey and Seymour's deaths with applause and roared in glee during the plant rampage," says Oz.
Here is the ending.....
The film's original 23-minute finale, based on the musical's ending, was rewritten and reshot after audiences at the preview screenings did not react positively to it.
For years only available as black-and-white workprint footage, the original ending was fully restored in 2012 by Warner Home Video.
The finale
Audrey II on top of the Statue of Liberty in the film's planned ending, shown here in its unfinished state as taken from an early-stage black-and-white workprint.
The visual effects were completed for the Director's Cut of the film.
Oz and Ashman wanted to retain the ending of the musical where Seymour and Audrey die and the plant succeeds and takes over the city of New York, but Geffen was actually against it.
"He said you can't do that," Oz recounts. "But again he knew what Howard and I wanted to do, so he supported us."
A special effects team skilled in working with miniatures, and Special Visual Effects team, went to great lengths to create the finale.
The model department was supervised by Richard Conway, known for his model work on Flash Gordon and Brazil.
"It was all model stuff, that was the brilliant thing. He created the bridge, the buildings, several Audrey IIs and created all of it, all on tabletop. It's all old-fashioned, tabletop animation" [although no stop motion animation was used in the film or in the ending].
The Visual Effects work was supervised by Bran Ferren (Altered States).
Reportedly the entire planned climax cost about $5 million to produce, and included elaborate special and visual effects.
Oz said in an interview, "this was, I think, the most expensive film Warner Bros. had done at the time."
As the film was nearing completion, the excited studio set up a test screening in San Jose.
Oz said, "For every musical number, there was applause, they loved it, it was just fantastic... until Rick and Ellen died, and then the theatre became a refrigerator, an ice box. It was awful and the cards were just awful. You have to have a 55 percent "recommend" to really be released and we got a 13. It was a complete disaster."
Oz insisted on setting another test screening in L.A. to see if they would get a different reaction. Geffen agreed to this, but they received the same negative reaction as before.
Oz later recounted, "I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead. They're gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it."
Oz and Ashman scrapped Audrey and Seymour's grim deaths and the finale rampage, and Ashman rewrote a happier ending, with James Belushi replacing Paul Dooley (who was unavailable for the re-shoot) as Patrick Martin.
The musical number "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" was left mostly intact from the original cut, with new shots of Audrey observing from a window added in.
A brief sequence from the "Mean Green Mother" number was also removed in which Seymour fires his revolver at Audrey II, only to discover that the bullets ricochet harmlessly off of the plant.
In the happy ending, Audrey II is destroyed and Seymour, Audrey, and humanity survive.
This happy ending is made somewhat ambiguous, however, with a final shot of a smiling Audrey II bud in Seymour and Audrey's front yard.
Tisha Campbell was unavailable for the final appearance of the chorus girls in the yard and was replaced with a lookalike seen only from the waist down.
"We had to do it," Oz recounted. "[and do it] in such a manner that the audience would enjoy the movie. It was very dissatisfying for both of us that we couldn't do what we wanted. So creatively, no, it didn't satisfy us and being true to the story. But we also understood the realities that they couldn't release the movie if we had that ending."
"We had to take [the workprint] apart, and we never made a dupe of [the original ending]."
At the time, the only copies of it that were made to be viewed were VHS workprint tapes given to few crew members.
The scene in which Seymour proposes to Audrey originally contained the reprise of "Suddenly, Seymour".
This scene was re-shot and the reprise was placed later in the new ending.
In the final theatrical cut, the only miniatures that are retained are the New York City streets passing behind Steve Martin's motorcycle ride at the beginning of "Dentist!"
"When we did re-shoot the ending, the crowd reaction went over 50 percent in our favor. Before it was a point where they hated it so much, Warner probably wouldn't even release the movie," Oz said.
In November 2011, Oz held a Q&A session at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens during a Henson themed exhibit.
During the talk, he announced that the film would be released as a new special edition with the original ending restored.
Warner Bros. reconstructed and restored the ending in an alternate edit, with re-discovered color negatives of the sequence and the help of production notes from Frank Oz and others on the film's creative team.
It was released on Blu-ray and DVD on October 9, 2012 with features returning from the original DVD.
It was initially subtitled as "The Intended Cut",but changed to "The Director's Cut" once Oz began to support the release.
The new edit was screened at the 50th New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" line-up on September 29, 2012, alongside titles such as Laurence Olivier's Richard III and Heaven's Gate.
Frank Oz worried that the audience would give a negative reaction at the 2012 screening, however, "the audience accepted Audrey and Seymour's deaths with applause and roared in glee during the plant rampage," says Oz.
Here is the ending.....
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