The Rocky Horror Picture Show
In 94 I
went to a cinema while in London to watch “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”,
armed with rice, water gun and all the other paraphernalia required for a
proper viewing of this movie. It was a weird and fun experience, but I remember
zip from the movie itself. I know I have watched it since, but my memory of what
went on in the movie is very sketchy.
Watching it
again on the List I understand why. Despite a premise or plot that is
completely out there wacky there is also absolutely no meat to the story. Par
for the course you might say for a musical, but seriously, nothing in “The
Rocky Horror Picture Show” is coherent.
If you do
not know or know of this movie you must have been living on the moon for the
past several decades. For better or worse “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is an
institution of bad taste.
The plot
is, well hang on, that Janet (Susan Sarandon) and Brad (Barry Bostwick), a
newly engaged couple, gets themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere in the
rain. They seek help in a gothic castle where they are greeted by Riff Raff
(Richard O’Brien), an Igor look-alike, and Magenta (Patricia Quinn) who carries
some resemblance to Frankensteins Bride. Brad and Janet finds themselves in the
midst of a Transylvanian Transvestite Convention. The party, and indeed the
castle, is headed by the bisexual Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry), a crazy scientist
who are creating Frankenstein like creatures like Rocky and Eddie. He also has
machines to turn people into marble statues and back into people wearing
stockings and underwear. It also turns out that Dr. Frank is an alien from
another planet, though exactly what he is doing on Earth eluded me, and the
castle is actually a spaceship…
If any of
this made any sense, then I am impressed.
The raison-d’etre
for “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is the music, the provocation and the wild
ride of going beyond anything seen before or since. Somebody had a lot of fun
thinking this out and I am certain that in the day, this would have caused a
splash. Today, though, it is the incredible level of kitsch that keeps the
movie alive. This is the epitome of trash.
Being a
musical, the score is of course incredibly important. I do not feel I am the
right one to judge the quality, but a song like “The Time Warp” was a staple at
parties in my youth and I suppose the score in general have some merit.
For me
personally it always frustrates me how musicals sacrifice the narrative to
shoehorn in the songs, but in the case of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” the
story is so confused and pointless that this really did not matter much. I was in
it for the spectacle and that did not fail. Visually, this is not something you
experience every day, whether it is Susan Sarandon going around most of the
movie in her underwear, Tim Curry with heavy lipstick, mascara and women’s wear
trying to bed both Janet and Brad, or Dr. Scott (Jonathan Adams) in a wheelchair
wearing fishnet stockings and heels under his coat. This is just nuts.
You can
still find midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and that in
itself is crazy. I wonder if the audience is still bringing all the props to
the party.
I am of the opinion that we had a choice in the mid-'70s to become obsessed with a horror-themed rock opera movie and, like the collective idiots we are, we picked Rocky Horror instead of the vastly superior in every way Phantom of the Paradise.
ReplyDeleteIf you have space for it, track it down: it's glorious.
I suppose it is symptomatic that I never heard of "The Phantom of the Paradise", but have known of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" since old enough to watch this sort of movie.
DeleteI googled it and see it is from 1974, a year I am done with, but that does not mean that I cannot track it down and watch it outside the blog. I take your word for it being worthwhile.