UPDATE: Extended Cut Blu-ray to be released on October 9th, 2012....

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/articles/17 … pdate-0612
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Shop-Horro … of+horrors

"Life is about movies; anything else is a bonus!"- Me   

Interesting. I'm curious as to how they actually end the movie. The footage on the original DVD release, in addition to being in black and white, ended with a series of unfinished puppet shots of the plants attacking. There was no final edit of the last minute or so.

A cut of the original ending exists -- it was shown to the test audience which resulted in its being reshot, and a fully-produced version of the original finale number "Don't Feed the Plants" has always been on the soundtrack. More than likely it never advanced beyond workprint form, with incomplete effects, but as I understand it the whole point is that the restored ending on the Bluray went back to the original negatives and finished the effects.

I watched this with DIF yesterday. It's a really fun movie that still works as a kind of horror film. The opening "Skid Row/Downtown" number is just amazing, and there's hardly a bad song in the bunch. (For Red Dwarf fans, one of the doo-wop cats in the flashback origin sequence is Cat himself, Danny John-Jules.)

It's interesting how Steve Martin's dentist number is similar to his "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" number in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Now that would be a challenge for the panel.)

Bravo! More musicals!

Also, more Chinese shopkeeper regulation! Did Gremlins teach us nothing?!

Yup, he was a dancer in The Great Muppet Caper and two of the Fireys in Labyrinth too.

He's being do that on UK TV for years

Here he is in The Great Muppet Caper, just for fun-

So, got the Blurry, checked out the "intended" ending. Acknowledging that maybe I just prefer the "Love Conquers All" version of LITTLE SHOP because it's what I grew up with, and that perhaps it will grow on me with further viewings, at this point I have to agree with the test audience from 1985 -- the original ending is just too sad, particularly Audrey's death. While her wish to be fed to the plant so she can finally be "somewhere that's green" is a powerful thematic tie, it's just played so straight and somber, and drawn out, that it sucks all the fun out of the movie and it can't really recover. I can see there being a way to do it tongue in cheek that lets it be sad but still kind of silly, but that's not how they play it.

I was apparently wrong to say the "Mean Green Mother" number was created to replace the original ending, because it's in the director's cut as well, with some subtle differences, and of course the not-so-subtle change that Seymour loses.

The real meat of the restored original ending, of course, is the full-on B-movie finale with a whole slew of giant plants taking over the world to "Don't Feed the Plants." While it was cool to see, and restored to match the film perfectly, it feels more like it was constructed by the marketing department than by filmmakers. Frank Oz wasn't, to my knowledge, involved in the restoration of the ending but rather just gave it his blessing, and the lack of creative supervision is evident. It feels like the first assembly cut (possibly due to matching the workprint), after which the director and editor would usually sit down and look for ways to trim the fat, drop redundant moments, tighten things up. That second pass seems never to have happened here, so despite the visual polish, the pacing of the ending just kind of drags and becomes more about the quantity of spectacle than the quality. They seem to have wanted to put every frame they shot for the ending into the film, which is great for wanting to give us our money's worth, but how many shots of people running terrified through the streets, intercut with laughing plants perched on buildings, do we need? It's a treat for existing fans, but not IMO a version that could stand on its own for people new to the film.

As someone who saw the stage play first, I've always been disappointed by the artificial happy ending of the movie. (and yes, all the characters do return for the final song - but as part of the plant, which in the finale grows to fill the entire stage).   

So instead of the classic Faust tragedy - don't make a deal with the Devil, because he always wins in the end - we got a rather muddled movie story of a nice guy who becomes a multiple murderer... and gets away with it.   Now THAT'S dark. 

But I'm not saying the original movie ending necessarily works - I've only ever seen the workprint version once, years before any DVD release, when one of the FX supervisors showed it at a conference (because he'd done all this work that nobody ever saw) so I don't remember it too clearly.   

The play ended with the suggestion that the plant was going to take over the world, but certainly didn't try to show that.      The entire play takes place at the flower shop, so just seeing that overgrown at the end felt apocalyptic enough in the theater.   Obviously they chose to "open it up" and make the movie finale more epic, but that might not have been the right choice.

Splitting hairs, but the film is very careful that Seymour doesn't himself commit any murders. Scrivello kills himself and Mushnik was avoidable but it's not like Seymour shoved him into the plant. It's dicey but I agree with Zarban, it's okay that the devil gets beat in the end. Although I will admit it would have been better if Seymour had actively outsmarted the plant rather than just lucking out in discovering electricity made it asplode.

But like I said, I think my bigger problem is the execution/tone than the idea. I saw a local production many years ago and the ending didn't bother me.