“I see you shiver with antici…”
In last year’s review of Little Shop of Horrors, I called the fanbase for The Rocky Horror Picture Show annoying and tacky. I stand by that, but it’s easy to see where their obsession comes from. Rocky Horror is such an incredibly fun film that at the right time and place, anyone could become a fanatic. (That still doesn’t mean you can replace midnight showings with a personality – looking at you too, people who go to The Room.) I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand the zealous attachment some people have for this movie, but I had a hell of a good time watching it.
From the opening strains of the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, here retooled to sound loose and boozy, like a cabaret at 4 AM, Rocky Horror establishes its tone. This is very much a show, and less of a film; it even starts with an overture, “Science Fiction – Double Feature,” sung by Richard O’Brien in a Bowie-style falsetto that slyly clues us into the fact that Rocky Horror itself is kind of a double feature. Before long we’ve met Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon) heard Brad’s infectious number “Damn It, Janet,” and we’ve seen them get a flat tire and have nowhere to go but an imposing castle they refer to as “the Frankenstein house.”
If it sounds like I’m rushing through this synopsis, I am, but it’s a representation of what it feels like to watch the film for the first time. When you know Tim Curry is in a film, you spend most of that film waiting for Tim Curry to show up (we call this the Poochie effect). But I don’t want to give the impression that the stuff before Curry’s arrival doesn’t work; in fact, it’s a lot of fun.
Brad and Janet are admitted to the castle by Riff Raff (O’Brien) and Magenta (Patricia Quinn), and soon Riff Raff launches into one of the film’s signature tunes, “Time Warp.” This song is now stuck in your head, because it’s a great song, but I feel like O’Brien doesn’t get the attention he deserves for his performance. Not only did he write all the songs, but he sang most of them, and listen to his range in his first two songs. “Science Fiction – Double Feature” is wistful and melancholy; “Time Warp” sounds like pure glam rock, easy to picture being performed by Twisted Sister or the New York Dolls. O’Brien moves with alacrity despite Riff Raff’s hump, and his manic energy dominates the screen. In a lot of ways, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is O’Brien’s baby (although the whole cast, save for Bostwick and Sarandon, originated their roles in the stage production).
But if you have to be overshadowed by someone, there are worse people to have looming over you than Tim Curry. “Sweet Transvestite,” his first big number as the pansexual Dr. Frank-N-Furter, is rightfully the most famous song on this soundtrack, for one simple reason: this song fuckin’ whips ass. Curry – improbably making his film debut here – is such an arresting presence, with his frightful makeup and sheer lingerie, that we find ourselves as charmed and enraptured as do Brad and Janet. It’s a star-making entrance, and feels like more of an announcement than a character introduction. Curry is funny, dangerous, and deeply sexy – in short, he’s everything that the movie is trying to be.
As it is, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a long, loose riff on Frankenstein, with the subtext of Brad and Janet’s awakening sexuality. The two of them, Brad especially, are presented as uptight and square, and here comes this man in lingerie to challenge all of that (one could imagine that the stage production was mounted for the same reason). Throughout the film, Frank engages in trysts with both of them; in the seduction scenes he uses the same dialogue, word for word (Janet: “What have you done with Brad?” Frank: “Nothing. Why, do you think I should?”), as if to suggest that gender and sexuality is a continuum and what works on a woman would very well work on a man.
It’s in Rocky Horror‘s second half – the second film of its double feature, as it were – that the film starts to lose a little focus. It becomes nearly farcical in its introduction and dismissal of characters; Meat Loaf, for instance, shows up to sing what is essentially a Meat Loaf song before getting killed by Frank. Later, Dr. Everett Scott (Jonathan Adams) arrives and becomes convinced that Frank is an alien. And occasionally, there’s a criminologist character (Charles Gray, although Curry played the role in the recent live TV production of the film) who pops in to comment on the proceedings, and the whole thing is just a little too campy to age well.
The ending of the film certainly lags, especially compared with the bawdy, bravura opening. Everyone is turned into statues and Frank makes them perform a cabaret, until Riff Raff and Magenta show up, reveal that the two of them and Frank are indeed aliens, and shoot him with a laser. (This movie made me take the weirdest notes.) It never gets dull, though; Curry is admirably committed the whole time, and makes the whole cast rise to his weird, brilliant level. In his death, Frank becomes a Ziggy Stardust type of character, too beautiful for this world and doomed by his own hedonism.
Horror-themed musicals are almost destined (or designed) to be cult favorites: this, Little Shop of Horrors, Repo! The Genetic Opera, and so on. I think the only one to achieve mainstream success is Sweeney Todd, but that was written by Stephen Sondheim. Cult followings always look bizarre from the outside, so every once in a while it’s nice to see what all the fuss is about. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is unstoppably fun. This cult makes sense.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
“…pation.”
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