Film

Rip It Up, Issue 118, 1 May 1987, Page 4

Film

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS Director: Frank Oz

It all started with one of Roger Corman'’s classic quickie horrors in 1960, an idea taken up by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken in 1982 and turned into a successful offBroadway musical. Here was every nerd’s nightmare and wishfulfilment rolled up into one: Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis), to win the love of Audrey (Ellen Greene), has to not only ward off Audrey’s psycho-sadist dentist, but also cope with the ever tyrannical demands of Audrey I, the evergrowing, man-eating plant that Seymour has been fostering in the plant shop where he works.

The score itself is a neat pastiche of early 60s music and occasionally, as in the song ‘Skid Row (Downtown), it's closer to plagiarism than parody. This 60s sensibility is the dominant theme of the show — right through to the trio of black girl singers who rejoice in the names of Crystal, Chiffon and Ronette. Even Steve Martin's dentist is described at one point as Leader of the Plaque. Does this nudging nostalgia trip come off? Apart from a perilous drop in energy just before Audrey Il takes her revenge, it's a pretty tight show. Frank Oz, whose last film was The Muppets Take Manhattan, makes a star of Audrey |, so much so that Miss Piggy might well be stomping her little hooves in envy. Mind you, Miss Piggy never had the advantage of Levi

Stubbs of the Four Tops to do her vocals! Oz handles the set numbers well, too. ‘Downtown, opened by the wonderful Bertrice Reading, reminded me of the first song of Absolute Beginners with its freeroving camera and the kitsch Better Homes and Gardens fantasy of Audrey | (“ cook like Betty Crocker and look like Donna Reed”) is beautifully judged. Out of a succession of droll cameos (Bill Murray, John Candy, James Belushi), Steve Martin's dentist is wonderfully manic, meeting an appropriately hysterical end as he ODs on nitrous oxide. William Dart i

CRIMES OF THE HEART Director: Bruce Beresford Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prizewinning play, Crimes of the Heart, was a delicate and rather fey portrait of the interaction of three sisters in the deep South, brought together for the first time in some years. A little like a low-key Tennessee Williams (it’s difficult not to compare the women’s dying Grandaddy to the mortally ill Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), its strength as a play was its claustrophobic intensity which was part and parcel of its theatrical setting. On the screen, there are a few problems. One is the serious lack of incident — Sissy Spacek's attempted murder of her husband is the only real “event” of the film. The other is the insecurity of tone,

which skeeters between sentimentality and black comedy as quickly as Spacek does from sanity to insanity. A more incisive directorial approach could have made the material gel together much better: Beresford seems infallibly to make the wrong cut at the-wrong moment over and over again, his crude handling of the breakfast scene being one obvious example. As the three sisters, Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton and Sissy Spacek play beautifully, but too often it is Beresford who detracts from the impact of their performance. Sam Shepard as Doc Porter is a mere plot device, a momentary diversion-for Lange, although Tess Harper's bitchy cousin/neighbour and Hurd Hatfield’s touching portrait of the women’s grandfather are splendidly done; the scene in which Harper writhes into a pair of small pantyhose is quite unbelievable. Ultimately, if you really want to see a film about sisterly dynamics, Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters is still playing around some theatres ...

William Dart