Happy Halloween! Prepare yourselves for a late night double feature picture show. I’ll first whet your appetite with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, before I fully satiate your hunger with Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Rocky Horror has a good amount of cult-like fans, so I’m going to tread really lightly on this one. I don’t want to yuck someone’s yum, and there’s a lot of yum in here to start.
I love a good introduction song setting up the stakes of the movie. I am not an American horror movie fan, or really a sci-fi fan in general (Two notable exceptions: Stargate and the John Dies at the End book series), so listening to this song was like when I taught myself all the words to Madonna’s “Vogue” when I was 8. I don’t get the references, but it bumps anyway.
We’re then introduced to Brad and Janet, a couple of hunky closeted sexual deviants. They are doing their best heterosexual cosplay by getting engaged after a touch-free courtship. They decide to take all their pent up excitement and… head to their professor’s house to celebrate, because he introduced them. Way to be, guys.
The background singers will never fail to make me crack up, as it is the perfect external representation of how I feel about anybody who revels in getting married.
On their drive in the woods during a thunderstorm, Brad and Janet get a flat tire and have to hoof it to a hunting lodge for rich weirdos in the middle of nowhere to use a phone to call for help. They stumble upon this castle on a very auspicious night, as a ceremony is about to take place. They are invited inside, but don’t feel entirely comfortable with the pure sexual energy radiating off of everybody.
Honestly, Magenta and this Igor looking weirdo can get it. I would probably fuck the majority of the people in this movie. I don’t know how much of that is quarantine talking, though.
They’re led to the ballroom where several guests are engaging in a strange dancing number that needs to be explained by some old dude in a library.
I don’t know what the time warp is. I don’t know how this remotely fits into the plot of the movie. But it’s so catchy, and without fail, anytime it is played at a wedding or a party, it’ll get the whole 5 Rocky Horror fans that actually know the dance on the dance floor, so I’m not going to argue with it.
After the attendees complete the horny hand jive, the host with the most, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, makes his grand entrance.
Tim Curry is unbelievably extra in this. It almost makes me sad that our first exposure of him on this list was a backhanded, drugged up pirate instead of a slightly rape-y mad scientist. How he struts down the red carpet and pronounces visual gets my motor running.
The Doctor tells Brad and Janet he’ll get someone to help fix their car, as long as they stick around for his freaky experiment. Magenta and Columbia, his beautiful face mask wearing queens, assist him in creating himself a living, breathing sex doll, Rocky.
This is quickly followed by a weird detour where Dr. Frank-N-Furter has to murder Columbia’s boyfriend Meatloaf because he is a petty queen who needs all the attention on him at all times.
Even though Rocky was running around trying to evade the Doctor’s advances, he is escorted to a “somber bridal suite” to spend the night with him, which says everything that I want to say about the general consent issues in this movie.
Brad and Janet watch all of these events unfold and still stick around to be coerced into fucking the doctor afterward, getting his sloppy seconds and sloppy thirds. Janet likes sex with not-Brad so much, she also decides to fuck the monster boyfriend.
This pisses Dr. Frank-N-Furter off, because while he wants to have sex with everyone, nobody else can have sex with each other. This tension culminates in a fucking awkward dinner party where the Doctor puts on a tacky ice skating costume and reveals the corpse of Meatloaf to his father mid-bite.
Then the end of the movie happens and like, honestly, I fell asleep during it 4 different times. I think Tim Curry is revealed to be an alien, gets murdered, and the castle does an actual time warp somewhere else to presumably deflower a couple more innocent teens. Also, stocks in fishnet nylons and garters go through the roof, so get in on that early.
The majority of the songs in this movie are iconic and amazing. However, the movie itself really failed to capture my attention. This would have worked better as a 45-minute scandalous music video instead of a full-blown feature film.
Prepare yourself for some jaunty cannibalism, because Sweeney Todd is next!
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