The recent episode of Glee centered around The Rocky Horror Picture Show sparked an interest to watch the film itself again. I haven't seen it in at least a decade. I've never seen it in a theater with the rice and the toast and the squirt guns and so forth. Some would argue that means I haven't really seen the movie at all.Perhaps they're right. No doubt, the film is a completely different experience on those terms. Looking at it just for itself, watching it alone in a quiet living room, it's very much a mixed bag.
One thing the film does brilliantly is parody classic B sci-fi movies. The effects are silly, the acting outrageous, and the tone mindless. And somehow, all of this is pulled off with a tongue so perceptibly planted in cheek that you know it was all intentional. If it's possible to make a bad movie in a good way, this movie pulls it off. Thousands of movies come off worse for their lack of this self-awareness.
But frankly, the "joke" wears thin somewhere around the halfway point. For a while, the characters are outrageous and fun, the music is catchy and strange, and the threadbare nature of the plot is endearing.
Yet there's a reason why all the most recognizable songs from Rocky Horror come from the first half of the movie -- Sweet Transvestite, The Time Warp, and others. The songs in the back half are forgettable when they aren't amorphous shadows of songs from the first half. The characters' stubborn refusal to stop being caricatures starts to become boring. The procession of unexplained and unexplainable plot developments (that still somehow manage to add up to less than a coherent plot) seem like a bridge too far. Yes, we get it, this is just like a bad movie. Too much like a bad movie.
I can understand how the audience participation came about. The film is tailor-made for it, full of unnecessary and long pauses just begging to be filled with quips. And of course, once the "show" about the show developed, I believe people fell in love with that, not the film itself. Well, that, and love of the awesomeness of Tim Curry. (And perhaps marveling at how Susan Sarandon managed to not throw away her illustrious career before it even got started.)
Perhaps one day I'll get to experience the "Rocky Horror Picture Show Show," if you will, and I'll have a different opinion of that. But just evaluating the movie itself, I rate it a C+.
4 comments:
My situation is the opposite: I've never watched the movie in the comfort of my own home, but I've seen it several times in the theater (with varying degrees of audience participation). And in that context, it was a total blast.
I've always found the movie itself to be pretty bad (even when it knows it's being bad), but the theater experience brings so much to it that the whole thing never gets boring.
(The fact that some of the jokes get repeated so much means that, even as a first timer, you get to participate with the others before long, shouting replies like "Asshole!" and "Slut!" And then there are classic lines that, although they only happen once in the movie, are so simple and funny that you'll easily remember them and will be able to throw them at the screen the very next time you sit down to watch the movie in a theater. One of my favorites, just before the narrator is introduced, is "The man you're about to see has no fucking neck.")
I just wouldn't want to be the guy cleaning up the theater after a show.
FKL
It's an interesting idea -- the DVD version of the movie has an optional version of "audio commentary" that has a crowd doing the full Rocky Horror routine for you to listen to. A really good IDEA, I think. Except the execution is terrible. The crowd is SO raucous, and the audio recording of them so poor, that you can't understand half of it. I think I've tried listening to that version of the DVD on two occasions, and bugged out in frustration both times before the lips even leave the screen.
Ah, that's just too bad. There are wonderful audience performances out there that they could have recorded for the DVD.
Audience participation is a strange phenomenon: sometimes you get a crowd that's completely chaotic (like what you describe finding on the DVD) and impossible to follow.
But sometimes you hit upon a remarkable group of people who "perform" so well that it sounds like those guys rehearsed ahead of time.
My first ever Rocky Horror Picture Show audience was like that. So good that I could hear every single line as if it were spoken by a single person (and there were about 200 people saying those lines in unison).
Another interesting tidbit: the audience "script" is slightly different from one place to the next, because a line might become popular in one city and not in another.
So the first time I saw it in a theater in the States, I was surprised to hear many lines that were different from what I'd always heard in Montreal.
Oh, and there's always someone who'll try a new line on any given evening; if the line is good, you can bet it'll get picked up and incorporated into the local script in no time.
I've heard it happen a couple of times.
It's all part of the thing's bizarre charm.
FKL
The audience participation is definitely what makes the experience great. I have to agree that the movie loses steam halfway through and completely peters out 2/3 through. And it's not a good movie, but its themes encourage people.
I went to a showing here in New York after not having been to one since I graduated high school. There were some fun new ones (for me, anyway). "Is it true you had an affair with Tiger Woods?" "Let me show you my Pokemon."
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