Regarding Fox’s Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
TL;DR: I enjoyed the shit out of most of the film while I was watching it. Some parts I merely enjoyed the heck out of. There’s one thing I enjoyed less after I thought about it for a while.
Consider this a review in 3 short acts:
Pt. 1) A summary of RHPS history and my 25 years of fandom
Pt. 2) A Short review of the 2016 Fox Production
Pt. 3) A Difficult and awkward after thought that should probably be a seperate thing.
====================Part 1 ====================
Right up front, I’m going to give it 3.5 stars out of 5. About 1/2 of that 3rd star is me acknowledging that I am among the worst of all possible audiences to be reviewing this.
Once upon a time there was a musical called “The Rocky Horror Show” written by Richard O’Brien. It played in London, starting in June of 1973 through 1980. The play ran in LA and New York, and was Tony Nominated in 1975, in which year the film adaptation, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was produced, flopped, and then saw a rebirth as a midnight movie, shortly after which, the audience began to meddle and the world shook, forever dividing society into two groups: those who have seen the Midnight Showing and those who have no soul.
I saw RHPS when I was 16. Since then, I have seen the film between 450 and 500 times, performed in the floorshow in 3 cities around 50 times, seen it all over the east coast and been involved in stage productions on two continents. When I was 18, I knew the show well enough that when the company that published the book and music publisher in Europe fucked up the order, I was able to type the entire script — with stage directions — from *memory* to deliver to the cast in time for rehearsals. I ran two VHS copies into the grave, and my DVD copy isn’t all that healthy these days and wants replacing.
There’s another part of the equation to address, and that’s that the audience participation culture around the film means that the long-term audience for the original has two scripts in their heads which run in a very tightly timed interactive dialog. The canonical audience participation lines, plus the ever changing ad-libs cover nearly every moment that a character isn’t actually speaking in the original film. You can read about RHPS Culture all you want, but if you haven’t been to the RHPS Midnight show in a place where they do it up right, you will never understand the experience of it. It’s interactive vaudeville on acid, and no amount of explaining will ever get you into the trip.
To say that I approached this production with great trepidation, then, is understatement. It would be more accurate to compare my reception of the news that this was forthcoming to learning that GG Allin had been invited to my nephew’s christening. So, I made the decision to watch this like I would a stage production — to acknowledge that it’s not the same film, but an original production of the script. It was the right choice — because there are several aspects that didn’t quite translate to the TV format. For one thing, consider that the entire stage show was played in a single act without intermission for most of it’s run — It’s that hectic, frantic and tightly paced. If you have a chance to see it, particuarly without commerical interuption, choose that option.(FOX really screwed up add placement, and it’s disruptive as all hell.)
====================Part 2 ====================
So, let’s start talking about the 2016 production apart. I want to talk about the cool stuff first, and save my complaints for the end.
“Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” is a mix of tribute to the film and culture, remake, translation of a stage show to the screen, and star parade. It’s also thick with in-jokes and cameos that make it very clear that, if nothing else, there were souls whose intentions were pure and unsullied involved and that they worked to make the right choices. That they managed to get the project off the ground is nearly a miracle.
Rather than do a straight remake, the production attempts to capture something of the culture around the Show, combining elements of the original stage score, the film score, and the staging and performance requirements of both, while simultaneously breaking the 4th wall and bringing in the audience. That’s ambitious as hell, and comes very close to succeeding.
The musical score and choices used throughout are much closer to the theatrical production than the film score in feel, and in several places, I found it a little startling — in that I expected to hear a particular thing from the film version, and then it was something else.
The opening credits of the 1975 film feature a distinctive set of lips on a isolated on a black background, but in the theatrical and shadow show versions, the RHS is introduced by an Usherette in a dodgy theatre (and trust me, every theatre is dodgy at mignight). The other thing to note is that the film version of the track is more orchestral, and at a slower tempo than the stage version, giving it a slower, more sentimental paen-like quality.
Ivy Levan’s usherette performance splits the difference between : Levan’s vocal is reminiscent of Jamie Donnelly’s in character, but takes the slower, sentimental ballad tempo of the film score. Had no other part of the film ever been released, the world would be a better place for having this performance in it. Levan is an absolute *KILLER*, and gives a very throaty classic film 1930s enunciation that just completely sold it.
What you really need to know is that the next couple of scenes is that they are a pretty straight up remake of what you know, with some nice touches like the funeral party hauling the coffin around during “Dammit Janet”, and the fact that the rain during “There’s a Light” follows the same start-stop patterns and raining on one-side of the screen only glitches as the original film. It’s adorable. Get hung up on the details and meta-stuff, if you’re a die hard — it’ll make the few things that didn’t come off the way you hoped they would hurt less.
I was debating running this scene by scene, but really, it’s not useful to do so — neither version is going to benefit from so direct a comparison. What you need to know is that the dance numbers and musical performances are all really well done, most of the performances are really solid, with only a couple dipping so low as to meet the standards of fairly decent community theatre.
For cool stuff watch for the original cast cameos. There are more of them than most folks seem to notice. Sure, Tim Curry is the Criminologist, but why is no one noticing who his assistant is? or the projectionist in the opener? Seriously. Or the fact that some people in the audience are wearing hairstyles or clothes that pretty specifically reference particular 1975 Transylvanians?
One of the things that is cool is that they actually move a couple of the traditional audience lines into the mouths of the core cast, notably in the dinner scene, but I noted at least two other cases.
Almost everyone does a solid job in their role. I think it’s worth pointing out a couple of really surprising standouts: First, Ryan McCartan absolutely kills as Brad. Victoria Justice as Janet is also excellent. Both of them clearly invested time in the material, and while they make the roles their own, there are select moments when they echo the 1975 performances of Bostwick and Sarandon very closely – and those are moments that defined the characters in both films.
One performance that I’m afraid is going to be overlooked is Annaleigh Ashford’s Columbia. She fucking steals the show. I suspect she’s been to more than one midnight show in her life.
On the other hand, there’s a really clear line between Those Who Get It and Those What Don’t. Reeve Carney, playing Riff Raff, totally got it, and chews through the scenery. Unfortunately, Christina Milian playing Magenta, is so fucking lost and clueless in her performance that the character swings between being a useless prop and better forgotten, rather than the manipulative, incestuous headcase we’ve come to know and love.
One of the things that defines that line is acting style. The 1975 is over-acted for film, in a way that echos early talking film, and B-movies for decades after – that is to say stage performers who haven’t quite adapted to film. In 1975, everyone who watched movies was familiar with what that looked like and could emulate it. It seems that some of the cast of this version, either by lack of exposure or by training, can’t pull it off. It creates a noticable un-evenness in the cast’s collective performance.
It also seems to me that they tried to make the performance more family friendly, and tone down some parts of it. I can cope with the (very few) swears being written out. But considering that most of the original movie is PG if you ignore a nip-slip or two, a cleanup job is really unnecessary, and negatively impacted the performances. “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” was a great performance, and parts were funny as hell, but with weirdly little actual contact between Janet and Rocky, and what contact they had was felt more like square dancing than messing around. And it’s a shame because Justice and Nair had some good chemistry in the scene. The same goes for Riff and Magenta’s relationship. They manage to gloss over the whole incest dynamic that’s been a part of the characters since the original stage show. Seriously. That relationship is the thing that establishes their creepy credentials. Without it, they’re just shitty housekeepers. I wonder if it’s just that Ortega is too used to directing pre-teen oriented content.
While the film is mostly faithful to the source material, the tone is radically different. I understand and approve of wanting to go big and use up the budget. But the new sets are… sanitary. Ask yourself what “Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Alice in Wonderland” would look like if Burton was getting ripped on mood enhancers and anti-depressants and that’s what large parts of this film looked like. The castle is supposed to be an aging relic, redolent with creepy vibes – Mad Scientists are shit housekeepers, and their housekeeping staff exist to make visitors uncomfortable.
The seedy, degraded opulence of the setting is a character in it’s own right in the story of Rocky Horror. I’ve always seen it as a symbol for the world in which Frank and the Transylvanians – all colorful, vibrant characters — are trying to escape from. In the 1975 film, strong colors are are associated with sexually and culturally transgressive moments. In 2016, there are strong colors everywhere — which in contrast to RHPS-75 implies that either universally indulgent queerdom is a fait accompli … or nothing at all. But it’s all very clean and neat, and somehow, that just doesn’t feel right.
====================Part 3 ====================
Which brings us to The Political Thing where I ended up when I had time to think about it. I’m treading on touchy ground here, and I know it. So take a deep breath and let me run this out, then you can yell at me. I’m about to suck the fun out of this for some of you, so “sorry in advance.” I’d also like to make it clear that I’m laying this on the directors and the producers, not on the cast.
Transgressive transformation of identity — the performance of queerness — as a path to liberty has always been a central theme of the 1975 film, at least for me. The 2016 version gives Dr. Frank-n-furter a much different dynamic as a character, and one whose story makes, I think, less sense.
Disregarding for the moment that he’s both a) an alien and b) camp-as-fuck, we need to look at what Frank-n-furter represents as a person. In the original script, Frank is male, is referred to with masculine pronouns and doesn’t suggest that he’s anything other than male. He’s also self-identified as a transvestite, which makes him gender transgressive, and thus in contemporary terms, in the gender queer family.
His sexuality is pretty all encompassing, which supports welcoming him into the sexually queer family. When building an ideal mate, he chooses to build Rocky, who represents a certain kind of ideal masculinity and I think affirms that Frank inclines toward M-M primary relationships.
It’s hard, I think, to make this really clear without extensive historical context, but until recently, being a bi/pan-sexual, enpeckered genderqueer person was basically a special trifecta of social and sexual isolation. And that’s fundamental to Frank’s character: Frank is too femme to be respected in the gay community, too gay to be accepted in the het community, too queer for squares to accept. He’s a poor sod who knows he’s destined to die lonely and alone. The whole Mad Scientist trip is Frank trying to make someone he can love safely. Frank is in a very specific kind of pain, and the fact that he has a penis really is a factor here. Bi/pansexual people with vaginas, at present, seem to me to be more socially accepted than those with penises. (Or possibly just easier for squares to ignore, because vaginas don’t come with actual people attached or whatever bullshit it is that they think.)
I think that this production makes a mistake in analogizing the some abstracted or imagined part of the performer’s life with the character’s story, and a worse one in that it asks the audience to make those same mistakes.
– That the performer and the character are in some way informing each other’s narratives.
— That a transexual actress is at some level equivalent to a transvestite.
The former is an error of conflation, but the latter is a much more serious factual error, and has ethical implications that should be pretty damn obvious, since making that distinction has been a huge part of the discourse for decades.
The result is that it seems to me that when the character of Frank-n-furter is presented as female-bodied person, many of the things that define the character and motivations disappear, and the story becomes, strange as it seems to say about the Rocky, awkwardly heteronormative. Lady Mad Scientist Builds Perfect Man in Basement is not the same story, and I think it uproots the implicit backstory of Frank-n-Furter. “Sweet Transvestite” becomes meaningless nonsense when a woman in a dress is singing it. (Although the performance is great. Cox is awesome.)
The 2016 version consistently emphasizes that the character of Frank is female – right down the consistent use of she/her pronouns. I can only speak for myself, but it changes the story and it’s lessons by replacing a still widley uncomfortable queer-male narrative with an arguably more comfortable Hot-Bi-Babe one.
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