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!

The post #75 The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) appeared first on Welcome to Oaty McLoafy!.

OK, look.  I’m burnt out.  I was a different person when I started Muppet-palooza: I was on furlough, and I naively thought I could stream all of these during the 7-day free trial of Disney+.  The Muppet Movie was so glorious that my expectations of the other 6 movies were… I’m not going to say high, but I was fairly optimistic in the direction this was heading.  After all, I watched 7 Fast and Furious movies in 7 days, and while I thought that would be torture, I came out the other side an indoctrinated member of the Toretto family.

It’s been several months and 2 Disney+ payments under my belt and I just want to be free of this project.  But, I made a commitment and goddamn it, I’m going to follow through.  

This movie is not bad by any stretch, and it has a lot of redeeming qualities, including this melodramatic death scene like 5 minutes into the movie:

I’m not going to bore you with the plot of this, because I’m guessing most people know the basic touchstones of Treasure Island.  This is actually by design, because the team aimed to create another “classic” movie, riding on the coat tails of A Muppet Christmas Carol.  Orphan gets a treasure map, recruits a crew of pirates to go and find the treasure, and is swindled by the kindly cook to give up the map and lead the bad guys to the treasure.  A sword fight between the bad guys and the good guys ensues, and the good guys get the treasure in the end.

Let’s dive into what works about this movie:

• My first thought during the opening credits scene was oh wow, this sounds like Pirates of the Caribbean.  I shortly discovered this is because Hans Zimmer composed this.  It is canon that Muppet Treasure Island walked so Pirates of the Caribbean could run.  There are few more iconic movie scores than Pirates.  Blah blah Star Wars blah blah Harry Potter blah blah Jaws Indiana Jones blahhhhh…  Pirates is better than anything John Williams ever did, don’t @ me.

OK, I’m clearly kidding about John Williams, but you can’t tell me that 17 years after Pirates came out that this isn’t still a bop.

Sorry, I got distracted, what was I talking about?  Right.  Muppets.

• The songs are fairly good, but this is the obvious standout:

The costumes, the choreography, and the humor – it’s the perfect Muppet movie song.  This song is why The Muppets Take Manhattan makes me so mad, because it illustrates the kind of excellence the team is capable of.

• The cast is pretty great.  Tim Curry is doing his best Tim Curry impression, and has enough makeup in his eyebrows that it’d make a drag queen blush.  NOT TO MENTION FUCKING EDINA MONSOON IS IN THIS FOR A HOT MINUTE KICKING ASS AND TAKING NAMES.  Also, the kid who plays Jim looks like he’s thrilled to be there, which showcases what happens when you cast someone who wants to be in a movie, as opposed to the sad children they forced in front of the camera emotionally dragging down Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

• The sets are truly impressive, as always.  The scene where they burn down the tavern after shoving a bunch of bad guys through broken windows and walls was a joy to watch.

The ship is also pretty cool, which they show in more detail in this behind-the-scenes clip.  There is also a fairly amusing story where the director admits to drugging Tim Curry with Dramamine so he wouldn’t get seasick, which had the side effect of making him almost comatose. 

• The running gag with Rizzo and the cruise ship rats.  Stupid stuff like that is my aesthetic, but the line about the midnight margaritas sent me.

• Sam Eagle.  I feel like I haven’t adequately expressed my love for Sam Eagle in any of the other movie reviews.  He is perfect – the side eye, his curt and earnest statements, and his inability to get caught up in the silliness of the Muppets…  We should protect him at all costs.

I am 100% certain when they cast Jack Davenport as Norrington in Pirates, it was because he did the best Sam Eagle impression.

…I had no idea that this review would just lead to me gushing about another, slightly unrelated movie.  Damn you, Hans Zimmer!

• Miss Piggy’s costume on the island is fabulous.  I’m not joking when I affirm that Miss Piggy is a fashion icon and we should bow down to her.

I also enjoyed she had relationships with almost all the men in this movie, leading her to utter, “I’m beginning to see a pattern in the men I date.”

Also, Kermit has an embroidered Miss Piggy tattoo, which made me giggle.

Things that didn’t work for me:

• The movie is extremely predictable, so there aren’t any stakes, which is probably why I found it hard to keep my attention.  Jim is a kid, so even if his house burns down, or he’s being threatened by pirates, no harm was ever going to come to him.  There was a 0% chance Kermit and the crew wouldn’t end up with the treasure, excited to embark on their next adventure.  I recognize this movie, more than any other Muppet movie, was targeted toward kids, so while this might not have been captivating for me, it very well could be exciting for a younger audience.
• Green screen flipping Kermit.  Physical effects always play better with the Muppets, and the CGI just looked strange.
• There was this terrible trend in the 90s where a pop rendition of the big emotional ballad would play during the ending credits of a movie.  The most famous ones are probably from Beauty and the Beast and Titanic (Thank you, Celine Dion), but we get “Love Led Us Here”, covered by two country stars I’ve never heard of.  It’s so of-its-time, and it has not aged well.  The song in the movie is passable, mostly because it’s cut between scenes of the pirates throwing treasure all over themselves. 

This movie is perfect if you know a kid who loves pirates.  If you’re looking for a Muppet movie filled with more adult-ish humor and touching emotional moments, maybe skip this one. 

Now, we jump forward 15 years to The Muppets.  Jason Segel, here I come…

The post #93 Muppet Treasure Island (1996) appeared first on Welcome to Oaty McLoafy!.