The plot of the film is set in Skid Row, the bad neighbourhood of Los Angeles where Mr. Mushnik (played by Mel Welles) owns a not so profitable flower shop. His financial frustrations are accompanied with the obvious incompetence of his clumsy clerk Seymour Klerboined (played by Jonathan Haze). The only thing that could save Seymour's job is a strange plant he had grown and named after his beautiful colleague Audrey Fulquard (played by Jackie Joseph). The plant begins attracting customers and Mushnik changes his mind about firing Seymour, at least as long as he can take care of it. It looks like almost impossible task until Seymour discovers that the plant feeds on human blood. At first, Seymour sheds his own blood to keep his treasure alive, but the plant is growing and its demands are impossible to meet. Soon, Seymour must choose whether to let the plant die or start killing people.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS became the legend not on its own merit as a film, but because of the apocryphal stories about its creation. Corman shot entire film in less than two days, with a minimal budget, cheap and soon-to-be-torn-down production sets and bunch of street bums as extras. It is very visible on the finished product - film looks very cheap, unpolished and sometimes even pathetic, at least compared with the lavish production values of its 1986 remake. But the insufficiencies of the production were more than compensated with the extremely funny script by Charles B. Griffith (who appears in the cameo role of burglar). The humour of the film is very dark and trashy, although rather tame for today's Tarantinoesque standards, and the viewers are quickly drawn into the story and its weird characters. And this film features whole bunch of them, all played by relatively unknown, but in this case, perfectly cast actors. Jonathan Haze is excellent as Seymour, Mel Welles is perfect as his neurotic boss and Wally Campo and Jack Warford give perfect spoof of Dragnet-like cops. Jackie Joseph, on the other hand, is rather inferior to Ellen Greene playing the same role in 1986 version. There are plenty of great actors in small roles here, but the best known of them all is young Jack Nicholson as masochistic dental patient, one of the first in long series of twisted characters that would later make him famous. All in all, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is a film that is hardly a masterpiece, but it is entertaining enough to deserve all the love felt by generations of cult classic aficionados.