Overall Rating
 Awesome: 51.14%
Worth A Look: 25%
Just Average: 11.36%
Pretty Crappy: 4.55%
Sucks: 7.95%
2 reviews, 76 user ratings
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| Rocky Horror Picture Show, The |
by Derek
"A cult icon dead and gone - more's the pity."
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During my senior year of college, the only theatre nearby still showing ROCKY HORROR at midnight every saturday ceased to do so.Of course, this is pretty much what happened to the ultimate cult movie all over the country at that time. It now seems like a hell of a long time ago that there were raucous gatherings at theatres of garishly made-up and costumed young people throwing rice, singing, doing the time warp, acting out the parts in the movie in front of the screen, and causing older generations to wonder if the world was going to hell in a handbasket. If it all seems pretty quaint nowadays...I guess it should.
What's ROCKY HORROR itself about? To be honest, I couldn't really tell ya, even though I saw it several times. It was sort of a musical spoof on the old haunted-castle type of horror movie. You know, "Oh, a flat tire. Where are we? Well, maybe we can use the phone at that old scary-looking castle." It was campy as hell; in fact, I think it may have been the subject that the word 'campy' was invented to define. The later sections of the movie get so tripped out and weird that I usually just chalked it up to a full descent into surrealism. Of course, by that time of night I was usually getting groggy; it was 2am or so. Plus, I always had sucked up a decent amount of secondhand pot smoke, so that may have contributed to my haziness as well.
The cast is a point of historical interest. The young couple with the flat were played by Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. Barry Bostwick is now better known as the Mayor on "Spin City," and Susan Sarandon is now well known as Susan Sarandon. Then there's Tim Curry, who unforgettably played Dr. Frank N. Furter, the leader of the wildly costumed clan who inhabited the castle. He turns up from time to time in various movies and TV shows; some people recognize him as the guy behind the desk at the Plaza Hotel in HOME ALONE 2, the one in New York. But to those of us old enough to know, he will never be anything but, as his song goes, a "Sweet transvetite/Transsexual from/Transylvaniaaaa huh-ha!" Also in the cast was Meat Loaf, whose entrance crashing through a bathroom wall was celebrated in the audience by a cascade of thrown toilet paper rolls.
The audience participation was the real entertainment. There was a pretty kickin' 70s rock score to the show, written by Richard O'Brien (who appears in the movie in the role of Riffraff). In fact, the best soundtrack available of the movie was one that was recorded live in New York, which included the audience's lines. The lines that the audience would yell at the screen changed over time, to fit current events.
Of course, the audience's lines were funnier than any of the lines in the movie itself. Some were just simple insults (Brad and Janet, the young couple, were respectively referred to by the crowd as "Asshole" and "Slut"), and others were clever plays on the words or actions of the characters (MAGENTA: "He's happy, she's happy, [straddles the bannister and slides down] we're all happy! CROWD: THE BANNISTER'S HAPPY!!!). The sung line, "There's a light..." was the cue for a sea of cigarette lighters to be flicked and held aloft. At the dinner table scene, Frank's line "I propose - a toast!" was the precursor to a hail of pieces of toast thrown in the theatre. Maybe it seems like a dumb joke, but the sight of that much flying bread is pretty impressive.
A few years after the ROCKY HORROR culture was dead, I visited a friend at her home in Switzerland. She had been with us in California for one of our fully-costumed ROCKY HORROR outings, and had always told her parents about it. Next thing I knew, these parents of hers who didn't speak any English, plunked me down in front of their TV and fired up ROCKY HORROR in the VCR. It made me sad, and worse yet, I couldn't communicate that this wasn't the kind of movie you could appreciate on video. I ended up claiming jetlag. I sure as hell wasn't going to yell "Asshole!" at the screen in these nice people's house.Sometime, someone will probably stage a big ROCKY HORROR reunion and get a big crowd. I might even go, at the risk of seeming old.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1616&reviewer=71
originally posted: 02/25/99 19:47:07
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USA
29-Sep-1975 (R)
DVD: 05-Sep-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Feb-1976 (R)
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