Plant Food

It started with Monsters (2000). Someone, probably in Twitter, recommended it, so I rented it without much thought. Since I knew the (first) twist - it’s a plant monster - I figured I’d queue up RiffTrax: The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). We picked the RiffTrax in case it got boring. I figured we’d round it out with The Day of the Triffids (1962), but that wasn’t available on Netflix. But we could watch on Amazon Prime, so our botanical horror weekend was complete.

Monsters is Gareth Edwards’ (Rogue One) first feature. It takes place in the near future, where giant tentacled monsters from outer space have been devastating the Infected Zone, a region on the US/Mexico border. Scoot McNairy is a photojournalist, having a field day around the Zone, when his boss calls. His boss’ daughter, Whitney Able, is more or less stuck in the Zone, and he has to get her back to the US. This is all filmed in a very verite style, with glimpses of the monster on the TV news, and the wreckage they encounter as they travel. They are young and foolish, so they do quite a bit of drinking and fooling around, which causes McNairy to lose their passports.

There are scenes of downed airplanes and helicopters, and graffiti that indicates that the local populace aren’t happy about being bombed by the Americans, on top of hosting the rampaging monsters. The enormous wall at the border doesn’t seem to have kept out the monsters, and it’s all a pretty clear political metaphor - or maybe it’s just what things are like, plus monsters.

The monsters turn out to be trees infected by fungus, and the tentacles are roots. Hey, we saw it after spoilers, why shouldn’t you? This was a different and interesting movie, although the leads were a little on the unlikable side.

It might be a bit of a surprise, but we’d never seen Little Shop of Horrors (or the musical version either). It is a bizarre and ramshackle little horror comedy. It stars Jonathan Haze as a clumsy and not very bright shop boy in a Skid Row florist shop. He sort of looks like Dick Miller, but Miller has a different role - he comes into the shop and order a dozen carnations and begins eating them. Don’t knock it until you try it.

The shop is run by Mel Welles, with a broad Jewish schtick. He also employs Jackie Joseph as Audrey, a ditzy dame that Haze is in love with. He has been growing a unique plant that he names Audrey Junior, after her. It’s kind of sickly, but perks up when it gets a taste of human blood. Soon Haze is feeding it bodies, and it learns to talk. But it’s good for business.

There is a lot of random nonsense here - Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient for no reason,  the cops who investigate the disappearances are parodies of Dragnet, and Dick Miller eats flowers. Also, Haze makes Sammy Petrillo look like Jerry Lewis. But it’s also pretty much nonstop fun.

I wish I could say the same for Triffids. I was sure I had seen this as a kid, but I didn’t recognize any of it. For one thing, I thought it starred James Mason, but actually, it stars Howard Keel as Bill Mason. He’s a navy man in the hospital with his eyes bandaged after an operation. A meteor show is making a beautiful display, and he has to miss it. But when he wakes up and takes off the bandages, he discovers that anyone who watched the shower has gone blind. Plus, the odd little flowers called triffids that someone discovered a few years ago are now capable of walking and eating people.

So he goes around finding sighted people, a little girl and later, a Frenchwoman, Nicole Maurey. Maurey had a large chateau, and was helping to shelter a large number of the blind. But when some escaped convicts, who were in the Hole for the meteor shower come along, Keel, Maurey and the girl take off.

It’s weird the way the blind are treated here - almost as if they were dead already. Of course, considering how easy it would be to stumble into a man-eating plant (even if they couldn’t walk, and they can), maybe that’s realistic.

In the meantime, on a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall, and alcoholic biologist and his wife are studying something or other - too busy studying and/or being drunk to watch the meteors. When they realize that the rest of the world is going to pieces, they start looking for a way to kill the triffids. The answer was right under their noses.

If you’ve seen Horror of Party Beach, you probably guessed “Sodium”.

So, in conclusion, I have to say that most ambulatory carnivorous plant props (or CGI effects) look silly, and the ones in Triffids don’t look much better that the one in Little Shop.