Tag: Little Shop of Horrors

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Film Features Film/TV

Fast X

In Fast X, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto uses a car door as a shield, as one does.

Ever since I first looked at the release schedule for 2023, I have been dreading Fast X. The tenth Fast & Furious film seems completely pointless. I love a good car chase as well as the next guy, but Dom (Vin Diesel) and his “family” long ago exceeded both the bonds of Newtonian physics and cinematic decency. In the last one, F9, they literally drove cars into space. When a long-running film series that does not take place in space suddenly decides to go into space, it means they’re out of ideas. That’s called the “Moonraker Rule.”

Given Fast X’s running time of 141 minutes, it looked like a bad weekend was brewing for me. Then, a stroke of luck. On Saturday night, my wife LJ and I went to the monthly Time Warp Drive-In for Singalong Sinema: Mad Musicals in May, a triple feature of Little Shop of Horrors, The Blues Brothers, and The Wiz. It was a perfect night to camp out at the Malco Summer Drive-In’s Screen 4 with several hundred of our closest friends. Next door, Screen 3 was also filling up with a crowd who favored muscle cars and giant trucks.

At dusk, the films started. A miscommunication led to the Time Warp films being played out of order, so The Wiz rolled first. From our lawn chairs next to our parked car, we could see both screens 4 and 3. That’s when I got the idea. It’s highly unethical to review a film without watching it. But the truth is, nobody who is going to go see Fast X cares what a critic like me has to say about it. You’re either down with $350 million and 141 minutes worth of explosions and big guys in muscle cars going vroom, or you’re not. But technically, I was watching Fast X, even if the sound I was hearing was the Tony Award-winning score of The Wiz. If the other Fast & Furious films were anything to go by, it’s not as if hearing the dialogue would shed any light on the plot that was allegedly happening between car chases. I have seen at least five of them, and I have never understood what is going on. Is Dom a street racer? A bank robber? Some kind of super spy? All of the above?

The first big improvement I noticed in Fast X is that Aquaman himbo Jason Momoa is the big bad, a drug lord named Dante who is dead set on revenge for Dom’s crimes against (what else?) his family. This information comes from an extended opening flashback taken from Fast Five, where Dom and the crew steal a bank vault and drag it through the streets of Rio. Aquaman’s exquisitely-styled locks mean that, unlike earlier installments with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham, the story does not boil down to bald guys punching each other. Momoa’s performance is so excessive it lands like a silent film actor’s pantomime — especially when accompanied by the dulcet tones of Diana Ross as urban Dorothy Gale.

At roughly the time in The Wiz when Michael Jackson is introduced as the Scarecrow, Charlize Theron is reintroduced in Fast X as Cipher. I hope she got paid a lot of money. Same for Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren, both of whom have scenes with Dom which I think are supposed to be motherly, but come off as romantic. You go, ladies!

As Diana Ross and Michael Jackson explode into the radio hit “Ease on Down the Road,” Fast X travels to Rome, where Dante is planting a bomb that looks like a giant metal ball. Naturally, automotive hijinks ensue, with Dom and fam chasing the big ball through the streets of the Eternal City. By the time Nipsey Russell is introduced as the Tin Man, the giant ball is on fire; it eventually explodes in the Tiber River in a way that is somehow both good and bad for Dom.

In conclusion, The Wiz, a box office bomb widely credited as ending the ’70s golden age of blaxploitation cinema, is flawed, but much more fun than its reputation suggests. The disco-era bass work in Quincy Jones’ soundtrack is especially choice. Fast X is elevated by the presence of Aquaman and a flagrant disregard for human constraints like “good taste.” It’s the best film in the Fast & Furious series to kind of watch out of the corner of your eye while doing something else.

Fast X
Now playing
Multiple locations
(But unfortunately not alongside The Wiz again)

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In

There is no Dana. There is only Zuul. Sigourney Weaver slays in Ghostbusters.

October is horror movie month, and nobody does it better than the Time Warp Drive-In. The Warp got its start as a special Halloween program, and it proved so popular it expanded into a monthly event. This year they pulled out all the stops with a loaded program of comedy and musical horror from the glory days of the 1980s.

Leading the program is, naturally, Ghostbusters. The 1984 film was originally conceived by Dan Ackroyd as a vehicle for him, John Belushi, and Eddie Murphy as interdimensional “paranormal exterminators.” Ackroyd says he was actually writing dialog for Belushi when he found out his friend had died in March 1982. After Murphy turned down the opportunity, and an extensive re-write with Harold Ramis—conducted while the pair were locked in a fallout shelter—that has become the stuff of Hollywood legend, the film became the highest-grossing comedy of all time. Bill Murray’s performance as a would-be shyster who unexpectedly discovers ghosts are real cemented his status as a superstar, but it was the incredibly catchy, New Wave theme song by Ray Parker, Jr. that drove the masses to the theaters in the summer of ’84. Roll that tape!

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In (3)

Next up is Little Shop of Horrors, which began life as a shlocky Roger Corman film from 1960, then revamped as an off-broadway musical in the early 80s. Muppet co-mastermind and Yoda himself, Frank Oz, directed Rick Moranis as a geeky flower shop worker who discovers a carnivorous plant from outer space, and makes an unlikely deal with it to woo his crush Audrey, played with squeaky precision by Broadway singer Ellen Greene.

The voice of the alien plant, dubbed Audrey II, is Four Tops frontman Levi Stubbs. Here he is absolutely killing it in the show-stopper “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space”:

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In (2)

Universal Studios hasn’t had much luck with its classic monster properties in the 21st century. Just look at 2014’s Dracula Untold—or better yet, don’t. Maybe they need to switch directions and remake The Monster Squad. The 1987 monsters vs. teenagers romp didn’t scare up much business back in the day, but it earned a huge following on home video, and it’s got a hell of a lot more life than Tom Cruise’s deeply awful Mummy remake.

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In (4)

Speaking of bad ideas, remember that adaptation of the board game Battleship? What a fiasco. Well, the 1985 adaptation of the board game Clue is the polar opposite of that. It’s got a stacked cast of Tim Curry, Martin Mull, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Lloyd, and a timeless performance by Madeline Khan, who delivers one of the greatest ad-libs in the history of cinema:

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In (6)

You’re gonna want to stay up late for this one.

SHOCKTOBER! Ghostbusters Leads Packed Time Warp Drive-In (5)

The Time Warp Drive-In starts at 6:30 at the Malco Summer Drive-In with a performance by The Conspiracy Theory. Movies start at sundown. 

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Holiday Classic

Has Little Shop of Horrors, a 1982 musical featuring bloody murder, brutal dismemberment, a shit-talking plant, a kinky, leather-clad dentist, and a host of adult themes, overcome its laundry list of perversities to become an unlikely family classic? Based on the vast number of children in Theatre Memphis’ audience last Sunday, that would appear to be the case. And why not? Even with its naughty parts Little Shop is no more unsettling than most fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, and its moral is more clearly defined. With an exciting set by Pam Hurley and vibrant staging by director Cecilia Wingate, Little Shop plays out like an animated feature by Tim Burton but with attitude.

Set in a hopeless and broken urban landscape where kids split school in the fifth grade, winos roam free, and “hopheads flop in the snow,” Little Shop touches on addiction, sadistic relationships, greed, and mankind’s infinite corruptibility. Borrowing a principle from the biblical beatitudes, the little musical full of big ideas teaches first and foremost that the meek are “gonna get what’s coming to them.” They’re gonna be eaten by all manner of predators: businessmen, the media, the status quo, and eventually Audrey II, a blood-sucking, limb-chomping plant discovered by supergeek Seymour Krelborn, the play’s mild-mannered florist/hero with no hope of ever leaving skid row.

Of the many Seymours to have played Memphis over the years, Marques Brown may very well be the best. We never see Brown the actor winking at his klutzy character, only an aching soul looking for a ray of hope and possibly the love of a good woman — or at least Audrey, skid row’s B-girl with a heart of gold.

In the ’80s, America was caught up in retromania and enamored of all things ’50s. Sadly, that love affair included Ayn Rand, whose 1957 book Atlas Shrugged turned greed into a virtue and posited that the “good” who offer themselves as sacrifices to “evil” get what’s coming to them. This was the era of trickle-down economics, which is nothing more than a fancy way of saying “let them eat cake.” With a feather-light touch, Little Shop turned these Randian values upside down, quickly becoming a cult favorite.

In “Somewhere That’s Green,” Audrey sings of a beautiful 1950s tract house and her desire to live a more natural life with the aid of plastic furniture covers, TV, and Pine Sol. Miriam Rodriguez, who is 16-years old, pines for this manufactured Utopia like a December bride who wasted her youth going round and round the same rotten block. Her violent dentist/boyfriend Orin is given equally fine treatment by Kent Fleshman, a veteran of productions such as Zombie Prom and Assassins.

Character actor Greg Krosnes puts his exceptional skills as a physical comedian on display as old man Mushnik, the cranky flower-shop proprietor. At times his character — all frustrated arms and supressed anger — seems to dwarf the stage. The 39-year-old actor is thoroughly convincing as a toupee-wearing grump of 60.

Little Shop in narrated by a chorus of three tough chicks whose names — Ronette, Chiffon, and Crystal — are inspired by girl groups of the Motown era. As is the case with any grand tragedy, they are the heart of the production, and Thymia Rogers, Mandy Lane, and Ashley Wieronski throw down enough vocal pyrotechnics to set the house on fire. As the voice of the plant, Steven Tate is equally soulful even if he does seem to be imitating syllable for syllable Levi Stubbs’ definitive performance from the 1986 film.

Theatre Memphis first staged Little Shop of Horrors 20 years ago on The Next Stage, a small black-box theater that’s perfect for intimate performances. Although this Main Stage revival is bigger, brighter, and better in most every way, this is still a character-driven story, and, through no fault of the superb cast or crew, it loses a little something in the much bigger space. Given the near sellout Sunday crowd, that would appear to be the price of popularity and a small price to pay.

As we quickly move into the holiday season — a miserable time for theater critics who are faced with the prospect of watching and writing about stale children’s shows, family affairs, and endless variations on Dickens’ fine but threadbare A Christmas Carol — it’s interesting to consider Little Shop of Horrors as a new kind of holiday classic. Any play this fun and able to say so much without sermonizing deserves to be brought back again and again. So what if the plant says some dirty words? He is the bad guy, after all.

Little Shop of Horrors

Through October 31st

Theatre Memphis

davis@memphisflyer.com