Movies of 1986 Bracket Game!: Little Shop of Horrors vs Something Wild

http://lebeauleblog.com/2016/01/06/movies-of-1986-bracket-game-little-shop-of-horrors-vs-something-wild/

I’m going to go ahead and admit up front that Little Shop of Horrors is my personal favorite movie of 1986. By something like a mile. It is a film version on an off-Broadway musical which was based on a cheesy old Roger Corman movie with a similar title from 1960 (Jack Nicholson appeared in that film in the role that Bill Murray would take for the 1986 version). Composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who would later rise to prominence primarily through their work on Disney animated films, wrote the musical version of the Corman film with some plot and character changes and it became a big hit on off-Broadway. One of the show’s primary producers, David Geffen, instigated the idea for the 1986 movie, and after offering the project to both Martin Scorsese and John Landis, eventually hired experienced puppeteer Frank Oz to direct. In pre-production, Oz found that the plant’s movements looked more realistic when they were run in fast motion, so he decided to shoot all of the plant’s scenes in slow motion and then show them sped up. This meant that any actors in those scenes had to lip synch to a previously recorded voice track slowed down and move slower than usual during shooting. The film’s soundtrack would become popular, containing a new Menken/Ashman penned song “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” which secured an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.