There’s nothing like a good B-rate movie, amiright? And there’s no better purposely made B-rate movie than Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I always heard my mom talking about going to see Rocky Horror every Friday night in her small town in Upstate New York. In my mind, that what every high schooler did in the 80s. This wasn’t helped by my middle school obsession with Perks of Being a Wallflower.
But growing up majority of my life, Rocky Horror just wasn’t a thing. So when I finally got see the movie in a tiny theatre when I was 16, I was overwhelmed. There were people dressed up, holding bags full of random objects. I felt very young and small compared to the die-hard fans there that night.
When the movie finally began and those red lips began singing “Science Fiction/Double Feature”, I was hooked.
The show centers around the newly engaged couple, Brad and Janet, as they get lost in the rain when their car breaks down. They stumble upon the mansion of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, his servants Riff Raff and Magenta, and their groupie, Columbia.
Rocky Horror Picture Show started off as an adaptation of the musical stage show, Rocky Horror Show. The film stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, and Barry Bostwick, along with casting from the original stage productions. The movie came out in 1975 with a budget of $1.4 million.
On October 20, FOX premiere Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, a tribute to the film using the original script. It’s starred Laverne Cox, Victoria Justice, and Ryan McCartan. The remake beat out the budget of the original movie, costing $20 million in total.
The TV special opened with some of those die-hard Rocky fans all dressed up, ready to go into the theatre to watch the movie. I thought at first that this was a really cool idea, giving the general audience an insight on what Rocky Horror culture does. However, I don’t think the idea of the audience was pushed enough to make any sense. They chose random call backs and props for the audience in the theatre to engage in, and they were few and far between. I realize some of the more common callbacks people know were probably too inappropriate to be said on TV, but it seemed like a bunch of people yelling at the movie instead adding something to the experience.
The TV special in general seemed too Pop-y sounding versus the original. The original movie stayed more true to the roots of the show,
which began on stage. The raunchy, low quality feeling of the film was gone, most likely to appeal to a wider range of people, but also from restrictions of the cable network. A lot of the very sexual actions between characters were severely cut back.
A big problem I had with the TV special was the character Eddie. Eddie is my favorite character in the entire show, and when I saw Adam Lambert was going to be playing him, I was excited to see what he would do with the character. While I feel like he did a fine job, nothing too remarkable or unenjoyable, I was very upset about how they changed the plot of his character. Originally, Frank was an ex-lover of Eddie, the current lover to Columbia, and Frank used half of Eddie’s brain for Rocky, before putting his body into a deep freezer. In the TV special, Eddie just kind of burst into the scene through the window, and it seemed like Frank wanted to kill him on account of crashing the party. In the original movie, Eddie bursts from the deep freezer, caused mayhem, and distracts Rocky from Frank, causing Frank to kill Eddie.
My least favorite representation of a character in the TV special was of Rocky. In the original movie, he is experiencing everything new for the first time, almost like a small child. As the movie progresses, you can seem how his character matures in no time. The TV special, however, didn’t pull off the same thing. They made the character of Rocky seem slow. A lot of what he was doing was just stomping around, with a lot of the other characters patting or pointing to areas that they wanted him to come to. He was continuously treated like a small child or a dog and the character was not able to have the same development.
I will probably always love Rocky Horror, whether the movie, the stage show, or a shadow cast. It would take a lot for me to forget the call backs and the prop ques. The lyrics pulse through my veins. But the newest version isn’t something that I would happily watch or recommend.
