1hr 10mins // directed by:Roger Corman // featuring:Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller
B-movie maestro Roger Corman famously shot this cult classic in only two days and a night. When Skid Row plant-shop owner Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) threatens to fire his hapless clerk Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan Haze), Seymour brings in a new species of plant he’s been breeding at home, hoping it will lead the shop to fame and fortune and save his job. Turns out, the plant, named Audrey Junior after Seymour’s crush and co-worker, the sweet but bubble-headed Audrey (Jackie Joseph), not only talks, but also needs a special kind of food to survive: human flesh and blood. With its inspired script by Charles Griffith (who also voices Audrey Junior), its outrageous premise, and its hilarious performances, this cheapie black comedy helped establish Corman as an underground legend. Jack Nicholson, in only his third film role, gives an iconic cameo as a gleefully masochistic dental patient.
Unlike Audrey Junior, carnivorous plants in nature don’t actually eat people. But because these plants grow in habitats where soil nutrients are in short supply, they must rely on animal prey, primarily insects and spiders but sometimes small amphibians, for sustenance. They catch their dinner using a variety of strategies, from snapping their leaves shut on unsuspecting insects to snagging snacks with sticky tentacles to sucking in their prey like a vacuum cleaner.
Ecologist Aaron Ellison joins us before the film to shed light on the bizarre and amazing ways that carnivorous plants lure, trap, and digest their meals and on how these fabulously complex plants can offer insight into how a complete, functioning natural ecosystem works.
