io9
Plant monsters are making a comeback, with The Ruins giving us an ancient Mayan plant thing in theaters and M. Night Shyamalan about to try our patience again with his forthcoming plant toxin movie The Happening. But there's a long history of evil plants on film, which seemingly has been forgotten in these new offerings. Now it's time to water the soil of the scary plant genre, and remind you how plant slayers in history have defeated their chlorophyl-loving foes.
Boil them, fry them. Those are the suggestions that one of the good scientists makes when fighting the giant carrot in The Thing from Another World, the movie that John Carpenter's The Thing is loosely based on. In this early-1950s flick, based on a short story, a bunch of scientists accidentally thaw out an ancient blood-sucking alien which is mostly made of vegetable matter. (Carpenter dispensed with the veggie parts of his alien in The Thing.) Knowing it's a vegetable, the scientists first try to kill it by cooking — they literally light it on fire with kerosine. It gets away, but they finally fry it with electricity.
Keep them at bay with electrical fences. In Day of the Triffids, a British series (based on a book), a meteor blinds every human on the planet and releases shambling, human-eating plant people to munch on the defenseless primates. The blinded humans finally defeat the invaders by building a giant electrical fence which doesn't kill the buggers but at least keeps them far away.
Call Godzilla to help out. My personal favorite plant monster is Biollante, a giant mutant rose from the mid-1990s with teeth and special anti-nuclear powers whose terrifying tusky mouth is partly the result of an infusion of Godzilla DNA. When Biollante starts rampaging and squirting people with deadly sap, or grabbing them with vines (some of which have mouths on them!), Godzilla steps in to help. Or maybe he just steps in to step in. There's a giant fight, and finally Godzilla destroys Biollante with a thermonuclear blast from his breath weapon, which dissolves her into spores that go up into space.
Don't beat 'em — join 'em. You can't really beat the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, a string of movies (and a musical) about an evil, blood-drinking flower that wants to take over the world. In the 1960 Roger Corman flick, the plant eats Seymour, the main character, but somehow Seymour manages to defeat it once he's been consumed. In the early 1980s musical, however, the plant eats everybody in the cast and eventually does take over the world. And in the awesome 1980s version of the movie directed by Frank Oz, Seymour electrocutes the plant and gets away — but it's too late. He moves to the suburbs but as the film ends we see a little blood-drinking plant growing in his front yard. Frank Oz later made a shortlived animated spinoff of the movie, about a teenager and his human-eating plant.
Comments
You have your Little Shop timeline mixed up. The 1960 movie came first, and was straight horror (well, relatively). In 1982, the musical version by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (later to become household names with The Little Mermaid and Beauty & The Beast) opened Off-Broadway, which used doo-wop and other musical styles of the 50s, hence your confusion.
Fun fact: the functional and harmonic similarity between the ballad "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop and "Part of Your World" from Little Mermaid was not unnoticed by the composers - while writing it, they called Ariel's number "Somewhere That's Dry."
If you're fighting a killer plant, why not just get as many bottles of weed killer as your local hardware shop has in stock?
@Lizzie24601: Oh crap. Right you are. Fixed now.
@B: I'm waiting for a movie about a roundup-ready plant monster.
@B: Yeah Roundup.
Considering how badly "The Ruins" bombed, I don't really think "comeback" is the right word.
Actually, if I remember correctly, the triffids can be killed with salt water.
@B: To obvious. Anyway, it's not a far stretch to say that a plant monster would have evolved a resistance to conventional herbicides. These days the solution would have to be some sort of environmental commentary, like harnessing nuclear or solar power to tame the out of control envronment. Or you could go negative and kill it by drowning it in oil, or choking it with cfc's.
You can always take the Power Puff Girls lead and just eat them. They're veggies! They're good for you!
Mmmmm. I will eat your invasion force with some fava beans and a fine chianti. (yeah! and some gum, too!)
...Or there's always Ash's method.
Step 1. Chop off hand.
Step 2. Replace missing hand with chainsaw.
Step 3. Adopt cheese-eating grin and catch phrase. (It's the Arbor Day Massacre, baby!)
Step 4. Go to town.
Hmmmm, a breed of herbicide resistant plants, evolved as a reaction to the overuse of roundup? Sounds like a great idea on the movie, and it doubles as a metaphor for environmental abuse and the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
@Jackson West: Correct, that was the 1962 film adaptation by Steve Sekely starring Howard Keel. I think it was in the tv serial that they had the electric fence, but I never got to see it.
@B: Exactly. Al Gore could Cameo as the gandalf-esque sage that helps the hero shut down the local factory, since the plant monster feeds off of pollution.
@Miranda Kali: That works for any kind of monster, not just plants!
Just put googley eyes on the scary plant to make it look more like friend. Or at least that's what Christopher Walken says to do: [www.nbc.com]
@Annalee Newitz: Then replace the chainsaw with a salad shooter.
Aphids. We need mutant Aphids.
To the Nuclear Power plant! ... Then the Botanical garden!
@B:
Dear me, I see the makings of quite a movie there.
"We have the technology to beat them, thanks to you, Dr. Ronco! ...but can we find a thousand gallons of balsamic vinegrette in time!"
No, Seymour didn't defeat the plant in the original. He climbs into the pod with a machete, but is digested, and his face appears in one of Audrey Junior's flowers.
The 80s movie was originally filmed with the stage ending - Audrey II eats Audrey and Seymour, little cuttings are sold in flower shops and supermarkets all over the country, and the little Audreys turn into Godzilla-sized monsters and take over the world. Nice! They cut it out cause of the preview audience, and this insanely great footage has been languishing in a vault ever since.
I have a photo gallery of images from the scene were giant Audrey IIs stomp the living shit out of a burning Manhattan. Check it out! And write to Warner Brothers and / or Geffen demanding a director's cut DVD!
[mondomusicals.blogspot.com]
Bah! Let's let the Monolith Monsters take care of the plant monsters. ([www.imdb.com]) They'll suck the silicon out of the plants, and that will be that.
Saw that movie years ago on late night TV. Great concept. Stupid title.
@SeeingI: [bluegobo.com] There you go. :)
Don't feed the plants.
I said it before and I'll say it again:
Triffids vs. Vegan Zombies, the ultimate in shambling horror entertainment.
@BloggyMcBlogBlog: I am surprised that Mansanto and the folks over at Roundup aren't all over the tie-ins right now.
How else are you going to make someone feel good about defoliants? Make them the savior of mankind when the plant monsters come a munching!
I love the "day of the triffids" novel, movie, BBC tv series, you name it, if it has triffids, I'm there.
But the triffids were only a part of it. The idea of an entire world being blinded and society crashing down because of it is a lot greater part than the triffids themselves. Basically, the triffids were opportunists. They sit and wait, sting, and then shamble out and consume. If you can see them soon enough, chances are you really won't have a problem...
...if you can see them.
"When the world attacks with giant plants, develop a mutant strain of giant herbivores," or so my grandfather used to say.
@Slatz_Grobnik: Ooooh~! GOATZILLA!!
Aquanet+Zippo+Boiling the remains+Vegan cookout = Profit
@Annalee Newitz
"The Thing from Another World, the movie that John Carpenter's The Thing is loosely based on.
Untrue... John Carpenters "The Thing" is based on John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There", which is the story both films are based on.
And might I add that the John Carpenter version is much closer to the original story than the 1950's version. Mainly because I doubt they could have handled creating the effects needed to make the movie resemble the book, so they simplified the concept. ( and did a very good job of it too )
@dOk: Both are based on the story, but Carpenter clearly tips his hat to the flick with his title, "The Thing," which is not a reference to anything in the story but is a reference to the title of the first movie.
When will the Japanese learn that combining ANYTHING with Godzilla DNA will not produce any sort of favorable result?
And The thing was also remade as a 5 page UNIT backup in the Doctor Who comic featuring the zygons, and talking of Who what about the Krynoid which was blown up twice.
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