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captainsblogOn the way to downtown Toronto, the Gardiner goes right by a humongous Cineplex Odeon multirama with equally humongo posters for its current and coming-soon offerings. One I'd not heard about earlier was the sweetly named film Death Race. Could it be a retooling of the Roger Corman midnight movie classic with David Carradine and the flyin' pedestrians?
It could, yet it really isn't. According to the one review I've read, it's just another summer action flick that barely tips its CGI-loaded hat to any of the snarky fun of its original material:
Even if you’ve never seen it, you’re familiar with the premise—a cross-country auto race set in a dystopian future where the cartoonish contestants (including David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) gain points by running down pedestrians. (If you’ve ever looked at the people crossing the street in front of you at a red light and joked to yourself, “Old lady in a walker, two points,” you’re paying homage to it and writer Charles Griffith, who also wrote the original Little Shop of Horrors.)
Funny thing about that last reference, though. That very hour, I'd picked up library DVDs of Little Shop- both the Corman original (with Mike Nelson doing an MST3K-esque comment track) and the 1986 adaptation of the off-Broadway musical knockoff. We watched the latter last night and, unless Netflix finally gets off its Grumpy ass and sends the movies I've been waiting for since Wednesday, we'll play the bots with Mike in the front row while watching the original tonight.
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It's sad to see how so much of this summer's rebooting/revival/retread efforts have gone. We liked Get Smart enough, but no thanks to the writers, who seemed to be holding their noses when making any references to the original material. Speed Racer remains under the limit for me relative to my fond recollections of the badly-dubbed but tolerably short 60s episodes. And couldn't Batman have gotten ONE "holy something!" joke in?
I have far more fondness for the way Little Shop of Horrors morphed from screen to stage and back again. Some of it is personal: I proposed to Eleanor on a 1986 weekend in and around New York City. We stayed at a now-destroyed hotel next to the Twin Towers, but visited my late sister at her home on one of the evenings we were there. She'd always loved theater, and she made sure we saw some on our visit, and the show she treated us to was the still-running Little Shop engagement at the Orpheum.
Packrat that I am, I still have the Playbill. The only original cast member to make the movie was Ellen Greene, and she'd left by then (our Audrey was Katherine Meloche, who seems to have fallen off the edge of Broadway since then), and I don't recognize any other name in our night's cast except Fyvush Finkel as the florist. The family connections of that trip are far more memorable to me than the show itself, but I've always had a place in my heart for the story because of the connection to my sister.
So much so that, after she died, the Little Shop musical was the first video we ever rented. Movie rental was itself so new a concept (in, like, 1990, get off my damn lawn) that we actually rented a VCR with the film to play it on. Out of those viewings, along with our memories of the stage show, the line "Feed Me, Seymour!" has taken on catchphrase status around this house. The DVDing of the film was nicely done, too, with plenty of interviews with director Frank Oz, originator Roger Corman (who loved the adaptation), and many of the cast, including Rick Moranis and the returning Audrey, Ellen Greene.
She, by the way, looked a bit more familiar than I expected. Turns out she's one of Chuck's catatonic aunts in Pushing Daisies, which the musical number "Somewhere That's Green" amazingly resembles.
It could, yet it really isn't. According to the one review I've read, it's just another summer action flick that barely tips its CGI-loaded hat to any of the snarky fun of its original material:
Even if you’ve never seen it, you’re familiar with the premise—a cross-country auto race set in a dystopian future where the cartoonish contestants (including David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) gain points by running down pedestrians. (If you’ve ever looked at the people crossing the street in front of you at a red light and joked to yourself, “Old lady in a walker, two points,” you’re paying homage to it and writer Charles Griffith, who also wrote the original Little Shop of Horrors.)
Funny thing about that last reference, though. That very hour, I'd picked up library DVDs of Little Shop- both the Corman original (with Mike Nelson doing an MST3K-esque comment track) and the 1986 adaptation of the off-Broadway musical knockoff. We watched the latter last night and, unless Netflix finally gets off its Grumpy ass and sends the movies I've been waiting for since Wednesday, we'll play the bots with Mike in the front row while watching the original tonight.
----
It's sad to see how so much of this summer's rebooting/revival/retread efforts have gone. We liked Get Smart enough, but no thanks to the writers, who seemed to be holding their noses when making any references to the original material. Speed Racer remains under the limit for me relative to my fond recollections of the badly-dubbed but tolerably short 60s episodes. And couldn't Batman have gotten ONE "holy something!" joke in?
I have far more fondness for the way Little Shop of Horrors morphed from screen to stage and back again. Some of it is personal: I proposed to Eleanor on a 1986 weekend in and around New York City. We stayed at a now-destroyed hotel next to the Twin Towers, but visited my late sister at her home on one of the evenings we were there. She'd always loved theater, and she made sure we saw some on our visit, and the show she treated us to was the still-running Little Shop engagement at the Orpheum.
Packrat that I am, I still have the Playbill. The only original cast member to make the movie was Ellen Greene, and she'd left by then (our Audrey was Katherine Meloche, who seems to have fallen off the edge of Broadway since then), and I don't recognize any other name in our night's cast except Fyvush Finkel as the florist. The family connections of that trip are far more memorable to me than the show itself, but I've always had a place in my heart for the story because of the connection to my sister.
So much so that, after she died, the Little Shop musical was the first video we ever rented. Movie rental was itself so new a concept (in, like, 1990, get off my damn lawn) that we actually rented a VCR with the film to play it on. Out of those viewings, along with our memories of the stage show, the line "Feed Me, Seymour!" has taken on catchphrase status around this house. The DVDing of the film was nicely done, too, with plenty of interviews with director Frank Oz, originator Roger Corman (who loved the adaptation), and many of the cast, including Rick Moranis and the returning Audrey, Ellen Greene.
She, by the way, looked a bit more familiar than I expected. Turns out she's one of Chuck's catatonic aunts in Pushing Daisies, which the musical number "Somewhere That's Green" amazingly resembles.
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Date: 2008-08-24 02:29 am (UTC)I must see this original Death Race. I'll try and Netflix it.