A nerdy florist finds his chance for success and romance with the help of a giant man-eating plant who demands to be fed.
Director: Frank Oz
Stars: Levi Stubbs, Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin, Tisha Campbell, Bill Murray.
Pat Garrett ... choreographer
13 songs in the Soundtracks, all Written by Howard Ashman (who also wrote the screenplay and the musical off-B'way play) and Alan Menken.
A featurette explains Geffen wanted RM from the start, due to his work on Ghostbusters (1984).
LS, from Motown's Four Tops, sings Audrey II.
EG originated her role onstage.
SM plays the sadistic dentist. BM plays one of his patients.
TC is the familiar face among the Supremes-like trio who dress glamorously alike and sing some Greek chorus for us.
The music is faithful to the time of the story ('60): 50's doo wop / Motown, and is the best part of the film, until it got tiresome. That may be because the plant was winning.
My disc is the director's cut (runtime 1h 43min), which has a completely different ending than the theatrical release. I can understand why this version didn't work, and they had to create a happy ending. Oddly, the disc does NOT include the revised, theatrically released ending (hooray for YouTube). What they do provide is the restored ending again as a special feature with Oz commenting as though we had NOT just seen it in the film. He describes the destruction of NYC as imitating Godzilla films, but I see it as imitating Ghostbusters (1984), which was imitating Godzilla. But by the transitive property of imitation...
Recommended, but not sure I love it. This is another film where a nice feature would be to provide a songs-only option.
Geffen, distr. Warner, dir. Oz; 7
