Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: "The PineSol Scented Air..."

 

Herewith the too-little-shouted-about Miss Ellen Greene preserves on film one of the finer moments I ever saw in the theatre.  Actually, now that I think about it, the 1986 movie of Little Shop of Horrors isn't all that much shouted about anymore either, but I remember it in general as both great fun on its own and fairly true to the delightful stage version.

 

Greene has one of those trick voices that in the theatre can be uniquely thrilling - one minute a tiny, buzzy rasp and the next a bell-like clarion that raises the rafters and the hair on the back of your neck.  The first time I saw her sing this, way downtown at the old Orpheum Theatre, she made people cry, me among them. 

 

This one may not do that, but it does evoke quite effectively both her character's and our nostalgia (false, reductive, seductive) for something simple, that seems clean and fine and worthwhile.  It's not something that Ellen/Audrey ever achieves (the character, after all, gets mauled to death by a killer begonia run amok)* or that we really want - but in the moment, it's beautiful - and that, my dears, is camp.  More calculated than some, perhaps; some would argue that calculation itself puts it beyond the pale of campery.  I disagree - by turning something inherently ridiculous into something moving, largely through the art of Miss Greene, it becomes the real, tinselly thing.

* In the stage version, that is; I've just been reminded that in the film's revised ending (released in place of an also-filmed and truly apocalyptic version of the stage's "Don't Feed the Plants," a great number), Audrey actually does achieve her Better Homes and Gardens dream.  Which kind of ruins it really; I'm with the fans who say they should have stuck with the real ending.