Stage Door: The unkillable 'Little Shop of Horrors'

'Stage Door' is our new theater column. We'll review plays and musicals and, because this is a film site, we'll end each column with related movie recommendations. - Editor 

Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon, the doo-wop chorus of Little Shop, are still a major highlight

The October 2019 Off Broadway revival of the singular scifi-horror-comedy-whatsit musical Little Shop of Horrors is still going strong at the West Side Theater in NYC. Well, minus 18 months off for the pandemic of course. The production has been through five Seymours now in its run (Jonathan Groff, Jeremy Jordan, Gideon Glick, Conrad Ricamora, and Skylar Astin) with a fifth on the way; Rob McClure takes over on July 12th so this is your last chance to see Skylar Astin (Pitch Perfect) in the role. Curiously its original Audrey (Emmy winner and Tony nominee Tammy Blanchard) and Orin (Tony winner Christian Borle) are still recycling their sadomasochistic relationship every night in this iteration of Skid Row.  Why can't the show keep a Seymour!?

Well, it is surely an exhausting role even if the anemia and sore fingers from feeding the bloodthirsty plant is fictional...

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Review: "Watcher"

by Matt St Clair

With her feature debut Watcher, director Chloe Okuno offers up a simple but discomfitting concept. What if you felt a stranger was watching your every move? The concept alone feels paralyzing thanks to its proximity to every day fears. If you’re so much as going on a simple park stroll, the sense that the person walking behind you is following your footsteps, whether or not they actually are, is terrifying.

For protagonist Julia (Maika Monroe), those kinds of anxieties are only amplified by her physical and mental solitude...

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Cannes at Home: Day 1 - 'One Cut of the Dead'

by Cláudio Alves

Last year, I had a lot of fun with the Cannes at Home project. It was meant as a way to dispel FOMO by running a homebound parallel companion to the most prestigious film festival in the world. Since we couldn't screen the new titles on the Croisette, we discussed their directors' past works. In other words: I'm back on my bullshit this year, and you're invited to play along. While this miniseries will focus on the Main Competition and its auteurs, the festivities didn't start with any competing titles. Instead, Michel Hazanavicius' latest film, Final Cut, opened the festival. It's the French remake of a Japanese zombie comedy, and you can read about it in Elisa Giudici's first Cannes Diary.

It only seems appropriate to kick off this parallel project with some thoughts on the original film – Shinichiro Ueda's One Cut of the Dead…

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YNMS: Crimes of the Future (New Trailer)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

NEON, the enfant terrible of indie film distributors (Parasite, Titane, The Worst Person in the World, etc.), has released a full trailer for the new David Cronenberg film, Crimes of the Future, so you know what that means! Let’s roll…

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Review: Sebastian Stan devours horror-romance 'Fresh'

by Matt St Clair

The new horror/romance hybrid Fresh chiefly functions as a viable kidnapping thriller that still  gets one thing right about our modern dating scene. It can be a literal terror show. It’s especially horrifying in our era of dating apps. The constant hoping for a companion as you keep sending messages saying “Hello” that get no response can make you wonder if people read the actual profile. It’s easy to judge a book by its cover and message someone based on how they look in their photo. But do people bother to read our bios for a better idea on what we might be like? 

As Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) finds out the hard way, meeting people in real life can be just as rough...

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