The Rocky Horror Picture Show is now 50 years old, a B-picture horror-schlocker campfest extravaganza based on Richard O’Brien’s original stage musical from 1973; it has carried on as an international theatrical touring phenomenon ever since. That live show, with the vital element of regular audience participation and dress-up, may in fact now have a bit more energy and point than the movie itself, which (whisper it) perhaps suffers a few longueurs.
The undoubted star is the sonorous and feline Tim Curry playing Dr Frank-N-Furter, a vampirically queer alien sex god, proselytising here on Earth for borderless pleasure and describing himself as a “sweet transvestite transsexual from Transylvania”. Dr Furter toys with the affections of the many followers and servants at his giant castle in middle America, including his butler Riff-Raff (played by O’Brien) and tearaway Eddie (played by Meat Loaf). Dr Furter is actually focused on his Frankensteinian project of creating Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood), the ideal hunky blond male to service his needs. Even Dr Frankenstein didn’t actually want to have sex with his monster.
One stormy night, while Dr Furter is presiding over another of his regular hideous debauches at the castle, a wholesome young all-American couple, saving themselves for marriage, turn up rain-drenched, and ask for help because their car has broken down – in which they had actually been listening, sadly and sympathetically, to Richard Nixon’s resignation address on the car radio. They are Brad, played by Barry Bostwick, and Janet, played by Susan Sarandon; her white bra and slip ensemble is incidentally the sexiest thing in the whole film. Dr Furter relieves both of them of their virginity, individually, and Brad and Janet finally get turned on to sensual pleasure, with the film reaching an orgasmic climax of eyeliner-and-fishnet-stocking-wearing musical theatre naughtiness.
It is a genuine one-off, a movie whose own identity has now overshadowed its ostensible purpose: to spoof the classic movie chillers of yesteryear. There are pious invocations of Fay Wray in King Kong and Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, although Rocky Horror itself has long since become a spoofable mainstay and in any case cinephilia isn’t the point; the point is sex, the pervier and freakier the better. Don’t dream it, be it, says The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with all the fervency that Hair once sang about the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It seems a little quaint, but there’s still a high raunch factor.
