Amazon.co.uk Review
In a way, Scarlet Street is a remake. It’s taken from a French novel, La Chienne (literally, “The Bitch”) that was first filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931. Renoir brought to the sordid tale all the colour and vitality of Montmartre; Fritz Lang’s version shows us a far harsher and bleaker world. The film replays the triangle set-up from Lang’s previous picture, The Woman in the Window, with the same three actors. Once again, Edward G Robinson plays a respectable middle-aged citizen snared by the charms of Joan Bennett’s streetwalker, with Dan Duryea as her low-life pimp. But this time around, all three characters have moved several notches down the ethical scale. Robinson, who in the earlier film played a college professor who kills by accident, here becomes a downtrodden clerk with a nagging, shrewish wife and unfilled ambitions as an artist, a man who murders in a jealous rage. Bennett is a mercenary vamp, none too bright, and Duryea brutal and heartless. The plot closes around the three of them like a steel trap. This is Lang at his most dispassionate. Scarlet Street is a tour de force of noir filmmaking, brilliant but ice-cold.

When it was made the film hit censorship problems, since at the time it was unacceptable to show a murder going unpunished. Lang went out of his way to show the killer plunged into the mental hell of his own guilt, but for some authorities this still wasn’t enough, and the film was banned in New York State for being “immoral, indecent and corrupt”. Not that this did its box-office returns any harm at all.

On the DVD: sparse pickings. There’s an interactive menu that zips past too fast to be of much use. The full-length commentary by Russell Cawthorne adds the occasional insight, but it’s repetitive and not always reliable. (He gets actors’ names wrong, for a start.) The box claims the print’s been “fully restored and digitally remastered”, but you’d never guess. –Philip Kemp

Scarlet Street

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Even by Roger Corman’s thrifty standards, The Little Shop of Horrors was a masterpiece of micro-budget movie-making. Scripted in a week and shot, according to Corman, in two days and one night, it made use of a pre-existing store-front set that serves as the florist’s shop where most of the action takes place. Our hero is shambling loser Seymour Krelboined, sad-sack assistant at Mushnick’s skid-row flower shop and who is hopelessly in love with Audrey, his fellow worker. Threatened with the sack by Mushnick, Seymour brings in a strange plant he’s been breeding at home, hoping it’ll attract the customers. It does, and the store starts to prosper, but Seymour is horrified to discover that the only thing the plant will thrive on is blood, fresh, human blood at that.

The sets are pasteboard, the acting is way over the top, and altogether Little Shop is an unabashed high-camp spoof, not to be taken seriously for a second. Even so, Corman notes that this was the movie “that established me as an underground legend”. Charles Griffith, the film’s screenwriter, plays the voice of the insatiable plant (“FEED ME!”), and billed way down the cast list is a very young Jack Nicholson in a bizarre, giggling cameo as Wilbur Force, a masochistic dental patient demanding ever more pain. The film’s cult status got it turned into an off-Broadway hit musical in the 1980s, with a great pastiche doo-wop score by Alan Menken, which was subsequently filmed in 1986. The musical remake is a lot of fun, but it misses the ramshackle charm of the original.

On the DVD: Little Shop of Horrors on disc does not even boast a trailer, just some minimal onscreen background info about the production. The clean transfer, 4:3 ratio, and digitally remastered mono sound faithfully recapture Corman’s bargain-basement production values. –Philip Kemp

Little Shop of Horrors

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Even by Roger Corman’s thrifty standards, The Little Shop of Horrors was a masterpiece of micro-budget movie-making. Scripted in a week and shot, according to Corman, in two days and one night, it made use of a pre-existing store-front set that serves as the florist’s shop where most of the action takes place. Our hero is shambling loser Seymour Krelboined, sad-sack assistant at Mushnick’s skid-row flower shop and who is hopelessly in love with Audrey, his fellow worker. Threatened with the sack by Mushnick, Seymour brings in a strange plant he’s been breeding at home, hoping it’ll attract the customers. It does, and the store starts to prosper, but Seymour is horrified to discover that the only thing the plant will thrive on is blood, fresh, human blood at that.

The sets are pasteboard, the acting is way over the top, and altogether Little Shop is an unabashed high-camp spoof, not to be taken seriously for a second. Even so, Corman notes that this was the movie “that established me as an underground legend”. Charles Griffith, the film’s screenwriter, plays the voice of the insatiable plant (“FEED ME!”), and billed way down the cast list is a very young Jack Nicholson in a bizarre, giggling cameo as Wilbur Force, a masochistic dental patient demanding ever more pain. The film’s cult status got it turned into an off-Broadway hit musical in the 1980s, with a great pastiche doo-wop score by Alan Menken, which was subsequently filmed in 1986. The musical remake is a lot of fun, but it misses the ramshackle charm of the original.

On the DVD: Little Shop of Horrors on disc does not even boast a trailer, just some minimal onscreen background info about the production. The clean transfer, 4:3 ratio, and digitally remastered mono sound faithfully recapture Corman’s bargain-basement production values. –Philip Kemp

The Little Shop of Horrors

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