Six Damn Fine Degrees #261: Roger Corman’s Big Little Shop of Horrors

Melanie’s review of 1980s cult musical Little Shop of Horrors through teenagers’ eyes finally gives me a chance to loop back, not only to the 1960 original directed by Roger Corman, but also to the director/producer himself, who arguably became one of the greatest masterminds of copycatting any movie hit within his own production universe. Roger Corman was running his own, wildly successful shop of horrors – actually a big, bold, fiercely independent venture of horrors, thrills, and other exploits!

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Criterion Corner: Targets (#1179)

It’s the kind of meta filmmaking that’s catnip for critics and academics: screen legend Boris Karloff, firmly at the tail end of his career as a horror movie actor, plays the equally legendary Byron Orlok, a man firmly at the tail end of his career as a horror movie actor. Orlok announces his retirement from cinema, because he’s a has-been and his brand of cinematic horror is no longer scary, it’s camp. Meanwhile, a thoroughly modern kind of bogeyman stalks Los Angeles County: a young, blandly all-American insurance agent with an unsettlingly large gun collection, takes aim at random targets. Slowly but surely the two storylines converge, until they intersect – in a drive-in cinema, where Orlok is set to make his final public appearance. It’s cinema all the way down.

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