United Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe dirty little secret about The Little Shop of Horrors, a 1960 movie produced and directed by Roger Corman and written by Charles B. Griffith, is just how good a movie it actually is. Corman, the legendary auteur behind hundreds of low-budget genre movies spanning decades, shot the movie in less than five days (according to legend, two days and one night, give or take) on sets left over from not one, but two previous films. While no one is going to mistake The Little Shop for high art, its cast of stock players (including a young Jack Nicholson), Griffith’s sharp, witty dialogue, and the surreal nature of the whole piece have made this horror-comedy one of the most memorable films Corman has ever directed.But don’t take our word for it: filmmakers and critics embraced it over the years as it developed a late-night cult following, and it was eventually adapted as an Off-Broadway musical (later making the leap to Broadway), which itself was turned into a hit 1986 film. The show and the 1986 film have a different, somewhat more mainstream tone; what continues to make the original movie so watchable is just how oddball it is.The 1960 film actually sprang out of another Corman project, A Bucket of Blood. Also written by the enigmatic Griffith (who penned many B-movies for Corman and others — including Death Race 2000), it was a dark horror satire about a busboy named Walter (Dick Miller), who accidentally becomes a renowned beatnik sculptor but whose works are actually corpses covered in clay. The sets were previously used for a film called Diary of a High School Bride, and Corman famously never let usable production resources go to waste. So while the exact timeline is a little unclear, Corman was given additional access to those same sets and allegedly made a bet that he could shoot another motion picture in less than a week.Working off the same horror-comedy template they used for A Bucket of Blood, he and Griffith developed the story of Seymour Krelboined (Jonathan Haze), a hapless schnook who works in a Skid Row flower shop in Los Angeles for the stingy Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) and pines for fellow employee Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph). After Mushnick threatens to fire him, Seymour brings a strange plant to the shop that he’s been nurturing at home in the hope that it will bring in some curious customers. But when Seymour discovers that the now-talking (“Feed me!”) plant can only subsist on human blood — and eventually bodies — he becomes an unwitting murderer for the increasingly monstrous organism.What’s striking about The Little Shop of Horrors is that it crackles with the kind of energy that only comes from working by the seat of your pants. Although the movie was shot in just a few days on a $25,000 budget, the actors reportedly rehearsed for weeks beforehand; their timing and line delivery is on point. Each actor brings a little something extra to their roles, most notably Welles (a Jewish actor who infused Mushnick with a kind of Borscht Belt humor that veered around simple stereotyping); Dick Miller as a smooth-talking, flower-eating customer; and Nicholson (in only his fourth screen appearance) as the masochistic patient of a sadistic local dentist. His disturbingly orgasmic enjoyment of having his teeth painfully drilled is one of the acting titan’s most weirdly memorable early roles.The Little Shop of Horrors would soon reach cult status that turned it into the beloved Broadway musical it is today. | 70m Filmgroup/Kobal/ShutterstockIt was nine months after the film’s completion that Corman finally ended up releasing it himself, after other distributors passed. It gained a new lease on life at the bottom of a double bill with Mario Bava’s horror classic, Black Sunday, and from there the film’s following and reputation grew as it made its way to late-night TV broadcasts (avoid the colorized version — it looks lousy).The movie’s cult status took on a whole new dimension in 1982 when the rock musical Little Shop of Horrors, with music, book and lyrics by future Disney legends Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, debuted off-off-Broadway and quickly moved to Off-Broadway, where it ran for five successful years. The Franz Oz-directed film version was released in 1986 and also proved to be a sleeper hit (although both the stage show and film made extensive changes to the original story).If you watch The Little Shop of Horrors now, 65 years after its release, the movie may seem dated, slow-moving, or clunky in spots, and often belies its cheap production. But as noted earlier, it does have a zany, absurdist spark to it, another indication that Roger Corman — who went on shortly thereafter to create a horror cinema milestone with his cycle of Edgar Allan Poe films — was not just a purveyor of quickie exploitation trash, but good quickie exploitation trash.