Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Seymour works in a skid row florist shop and is in love with his beautiful co-worker, Audrey. He creates a new plant that not only talks but cannot survive without human flesh and blood.
Roger Corman's micro-budget quickie is a genuine cult oddity — shot in two days, surprisingly witty, and built around one of the most memorably absurd premises in B-movie history. The carnivorous-plant-as-metaphor dark comedy is genuinely distinctive and proto-campy in a way that influenced decades of horror-comedy. The plot is thin but functional and playfully subversive for its era. Acting is broad and uneven, though Jack Nicholson's brief cameo is a delight. Cinematography is flat and utilitarian, the limitations of speed and budget plainly visible. The ending is abrupt and chaotic rather than satisfying. Its novelty score is justified not by production values but by its singular voice — no other film of 1960 felt quite like this.