by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the
Time-Warp Again, a 2016 TV-movie remake of The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, a 1975 film of
the gender-bending musical by Richard O’Brien that premiered in London in 1973.
When it was new, it was treated as another manifestation of a growing cultural
awareness and acceptance of Queer people that also showed up in David Bowie’s
1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Mars and the androgynous persona he adopted for that album and the tour he did to
promote it. As most people probably know by now, The Rocky Horror
Show — the word “Picture” was added to the
title when O’Brien and director Jim Sharman filmed it in 1975 — is a spoof of Frankenstein in which normal couple Brad Majors (Ryan McCartan)
and his fiancée Janet Weiss (Victoria Justice) drive off from their friends’
wedding, run into a rainstorm and have a blowout in the middle of nowhere.
Hoping to find a telephone so they can call for help (which Charles noted was a
very anachronistic plot device
for 2016 — these days they’d be carrying cell phones and the only way to show
someone lost without a phone connection of some sort would be with an
establishing shot about how they left their phones behind, they were out of
tower range or the batteries had died — though given that the framing scene
features the cars and clothes of the 1950’s one can argue that the film is a
period piece taking place before cell phones existed), they walk towards a
sinister castle that turns out to be the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter (Laverne
Cox), a self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.”
Dr. Frank is busy in his lab creating the ultimate stud muffin, Rocky Horror
(Staz Nair), and to celebrate this occasion he’s throwing a party (billed in
this version as the “41st Annual Transylvanian Convention,”
reflecting the 41 years between the original film and this remake) with a
varied assortment of servants and hangers-on, including his butler Riff Raff
(Reeve Carney, playing the part Richard O’Brien wrote for himself in the
original stage production and the 1975 movie), maid Magenta (Christina Millan),
“groupie” Columbia (Annaleigh Ashford) and others. The party is crashed by
Eddie (Adam Lambert, playing the part Meat Loaf had in the 1975 film), who
sings a song called “Hot Patootie” in 1950’s-rock style and then gets himself
dispatched by Dr. Frank — in the 1975 film his sudden appearance was totally
inexplicable but in this version it’s specified that he’s Dr. Frank’s
ex-boyfriend who’s jealous of the newly created Rocky (and in the remake his
song is also moved up so it happens considerably earlier than it did in 1975).
There’s a lot of sexual coupling and recoupling going on, and Brad and Janet
both get sucked (figuratively and
literally) into Dr. Frank’s polymorphously perverse world — they’re both the
recipients of Dr. Frank’s amorous intentions and Janet also flips for Rocky,
pissing off Dr. Frank since he intended Rocky as his boyfriend — until at the end Riff Raff turns out to
be, not a servant, but a morals enforcer from Transsexual, a planet in another
galaxy called Transylvania from which Dr. Frank came to Earth. He announces
that Dr. Frank will be executed on the spot — Riff Raff’s guitar turns into a
laser rifle for this purpose — and he also takes out the rest of the
hangers-on, whereupon the castle turns into a spaceship to take him and Magenta
(the only one he’s spared) back to Transsexual, leaving Brad, Janet and their
high-school science teacher, Dr. Everett Scott (Ben Vereen, looking ridiculous
in a white straight-haired wig) behind to wonder what’s happened to them and
what they’re going to do now that Dr. Frank and company have exposed them to a
far greater range of sexual stimuli than they were ever expecting. (O’Brien
wrote the song “Super-Heroes,” the show’s one genuine moment of pathos, for the
ending, but some prints of the 1975 film omit it and substitute a repeat of the
show’s big hit, “Let’s Do the Time-Warp Again.”)
The Rocky Horror Picture
Show got filmed in 1975 in England — where,
coincidentally, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder were making Young
Frankenstein for the same studio, 20th
Century-Fox, and as spoofs of the Frankenstein mythos go Young Frankenstein is by far the better movie — and O’Brien and
director Jim Sharman chose to open the film with a pair of bright red lips,
their owner’s face carefully shadowed so as to be invisible, singing the show’s
opening song, “Science Fiction,” an ode to such 1930’s and 1950’s horror and
sci-fi films as The Invisible Man, King Kong, The Day the Earth Stood
Still and Tarantula. When Rocky Horror was first released in the U.S. under normal
theatrical conditions the ads for it referenced the success of the film Jaws — they contained the “lips” logo from the opening
and captioned it, “A different set of jaws” — and the movie was a box-office
flop. But that wasn’t the end of it; certain theatres with highly
counter-cultural clienteles started booking the movie for special showings at
midnight, and eventually an entire cult developed around it; people began
coming to the screenings in costume, enacting the on-screen action in the
theatre, and developing a whole ritual of talking back to the screen, making
gestures (like waving their hands in windshield-wiper motions as Brad and Janet
drive through the rain to the Frank-N-Furter castle) and throwing things,
including hurling rice at the screen when Brad’s and Janet’s friends get
married and shooting water pistols into the air when the film showed rain. As a
result, The Rocky Horror Picture Show had the longest-running theatrical release in movie history, and at
least in isolated pockets of the world the tradition of midnight showings with
audience participation is still going on. I remember first seeing Rocky
Horror at the Ken Cinema sometime in the
1980’s, having decided I wanted to watch the movie at least once sans audience participation so I’d know what it was about
if I ever went to a midnight screening, and going to at least one of the
midnight shows before 20th Century-Fox first put it on TV in 1993.
Unclear as to what to do with a movie in which the audience was so integral a
part of the live experience, Fox decided on a dual presentation; they’d run the
movie but simultaneously show the film screening inside a theatre where the
audience would be doing at least parts of the live routine that had become
traditional.
Eventually the studio rather gingerly released the film on DVD and
gave you the choice of watching it au naturel or in the 1993 TV version with that particular
audience immortalized — and when Charles and I got this disc we double-billed
it with The Bride of Frankenstein
(the 1935 horror masterpiece by more or less openly Gay director James Whale)
as “the two Gayest takes on the Frankenstein story ever made.” That was four years ago, and
neither of us had seen the original since, which put us a bit back of scratch
in assessing how close this version came to it — though the two are close
enough that the only screenwriters credited are O’Brien and Sharman, who did
the script for the original. The director is Kenny Ortega, who’s best known as
a choreographer (he worked on the marvelous and underrated 1978 film American
Hot Wax, about D.J. Alan Freed and his role
in promoting rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s) and who did some quite nice dances
even though Charles was disappointed that the shock-cut that introduces the
“Time Warp” number wasn’t quite so shocking this time around. Whoever was
responsible for this film did add
some felicitous touches — notably having Brad propose to Janet in front of the
tombstone of Mary Shelley, author of the original Frankenstein — and Fox blessedly left in the sequence in which
Brad, having sex with Dr. Frank and having just learned he is not Janet, says, “Don’t stop, don’t stop — I mean stop, stop!,” which was censored from the 1993 TV showing of the
original film. The most interesting departure from the original was the casting
of genuine Transwoman Laverne Cox (best known for her ongoing role in the
Netflix TV series Orange Is the New Black) as Dr. Frank, which puts a quite different “spin” on the character
than when s/he is played by a guy in drag (like Tim Curry, who starred in the
original stage and film versions and turned up here as the narrator, “The
Criminologist” — his performance as the Criminologist seemed weak, but imdb.com
mentioned that this is his first acting role since he had a stroke in 2012 and
therefore I can’t be too hard on him). Assuming she didn’t have a voice double,
she’s quite good in the songs and acts the part with a marvelous degree of
authority and comfort in her own body that’s quite appealing to watch and helps
make up for the fact that, on the whole, this cast is considerably weaker than
the one we’ve been watching since 1975.
It was fun to watch Ryan McCartan as Brad wearing nothing
but a pair of white briefs and flashing an enviable basket, and Victoria
Justice was cute and properly perky as Janet but somehow I won’t be holding my
breath to see her develop a reputation as a serious dramatic actress and
political activist who eventually wins an Academy Award the way 1975’s Janet,
Susan Sarandon, did. Adam Lambert is certainly hotter than Meat Loaf, but
that’s not necessarily to the good — and though he’s openly Gay and narrowly
missed winning American Idol he’s
still not that interesting a performer, and if he has any reputation today it’s
as a sort of beta version of Sam Smith. Charles and I both found it hard to
judge the new version of Rocky Horror because, even though we hadn’t seen the original in four years, enough
of it was imprinted in our memories that we couldn’t help but make the
comparisons and find the new version falling short of the original — and while
the proposal between Brad and Janet in front of Mary Shelley’s tombstone was a
neat touch, other not-so-neat changes included having the show open in a movie
theatre that turns out to be called “Castle” and later appears as the
Frank-N-Furter Castle — Rocky Horror gets created in a huge ice chest of the
kind used in 1950’s movie theatres to keep the sodas cold (in 1975 he came to
life in a giant aquarium tank built by Hammer Studios in 1958 for their remake The Curse of Frankenstein, and indeed one thing I noted in my last go-round
with Rocky Horror is that whereas
Young Frankenstein was a spoof of
the 1930’s Frankenstein films
from Universal, Rocky Horror was
really a spoof of the Hammer Frankensteins). It’s one of those remakes that’s O.K. on its face but makes you
wonder why they bothered — why they didn’t just do an anniversary showing of
the original film instead — and I’d still like to see a Rocky Horror
that would follow the example of the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s live
production of the play (during which they had to solemnly instruct the audience
not to do any of the traditional
interjections because they would throw off the actors’ timing), in which,
instead of a nice little British voice doing the opening “Science Fiction”
song, they cast an African-American who belted it out in full gospel-soul voice
à la Aretha Franklin. Now that’s a thrill I could have used last night!
