[See Part 1 here.]
Subsections below:
A. Some looks at “gory” details—the first 50 minutes of the film, where
“horror” is prevalent
B. The last ~40 minutes of the film, with sci-fi additions, heading to
a final sex-theme set piece
C. The floor show,
and final thoughts
If you want to experience the
film—including audience hi-jinks—as a “virgin,” you can skip this Part 2. If
you read on, you can find links to some of the stars (when not given here) in
Part 1.
A. Some looks at “gory” details—the first 50 minutes of the film, where
“horror” is prevalent
[Advisory: Some of the details from the movie below may offend some
readers. I have redacted more off-color typical audience catcalls.]
Here is a walk through the film,
with notes in three categories: Catcalls—examples
of commonly used ones I saw, at an image or line, what a typical catcall was
when I used to attend the viewings; Trivia—some
little detail revealed either on the DVD or otherwise; and Passing opinion of mine, for whatever it’s worth. I won’t portray all typical audience catcalls or actions
I’ve witnessed.
1. The initial title sequence
shows a rosy-red made-up mouth singing the theme song, “Science Fiction Double
Feature” [I see this title done online both with
and without the slash in the middle],
and [Catcalls] people would shout “Lips!” to herald the appearance of the
mouth.
[Trivia] Patricia Quinn, who on the DVD
says she isn’t a rock singer but approached her singing here as a ’30s-era
torch singer or cabaret performer, says she was attracted to working in the
stage play by the theme song, but was advised (by her agent, I think) that the
part of Magenta only had a few lines. She took the job anyway. Later, she was
disappointed that, for the film, the recorded theme song was sung by Richard
O’Brien; she was eager to sing this song that she loved so much. But instead
she was incorporated into the film here in at least one narrow way: her made-up
mouth was used, with special masking of background so only her lips and teeth
would show; she mimed the lyrics as the visual correlate of O’Brien’s singing.
[Passing opinion] This song isn’t
bad, and you appreciate it more, the more you see the film. It’s one of the
most smoothly pop-ish things in the film. Ironically, when the opening titles
ran in the theater in 1980, audience members respectfully sang the song, one of
the few “reverent” things they did with a detail of the film.
2. Church scene: Brad and
Janet attend the wedding of a friend of Brad’s, with the post-ceremony question
arising of Brad and Janet’s eventual wedding. Hence another song flowers, which
includes the lyric “Dammit, Janet!”
[Catcalls] The very thoroughgoing
attitude the audience would have toward Brad was shown early, by the shout of “Asshole!” every time they could do it.
“Don’t drop it!” would be shouted just as he is showing Janet the engagement
ring—and of course he drops it. The audience response to mentions of (or
occasional remarks by) Janet was often, not very imaginatively, “Weiss-ss!!” When the couple is doing
awkward dance moves inside the church, and the song enters a corny
call-and-response phase, there is “Oooh, Brad!”—the audience shouts “Oh, shit!” Janet: “I’m ma-a-d!” Aud. repeats:
“Oh, shit!” [Trivia] Notice Richard O’Brien as the male half of a couple at the
church door, dressed like the farmer in American
Gothic. His female partner (as the female figure from the painting) is played
by Quinn, who later plays Magenta. [Passing
opinion] As an item of humor you don’t really appreciate when you’re in
high school, but pick up on much later: notice the billboard in the background
in one shot—it is tastelessly (for the fictional town) placed right next to the
church graveyard.
3. The narrator: Charles Gray, his narrating character identified as a “criminologist,” with
upper-crust British accent and manner, provides a B/genre-movie staple, plodding
narration, whose content actually fleshes out the story in some ways. He shows
that Brad and Janet have a common friend, Dr. Everett Scott, who once was their
tutor and now is their friend. They are on their way to his house when, on a
rainy night, they have a flat tire, and have to walk to get to a house to use a
phone. The house they reach, of course, is Frank-N-Furter’s castle.
[Catcalls] The two typical shouts about
Gray were “Boooring!” and the
intensely delivered “Where’s your neck?,”
sometimes with “f**king” inserted
before “neck.” It was too bad you
usually couldn’t hear Gray’s rather quiet speaking while the audience shouted
at him, because [Passing opinion]
his words are interesting to hear. [Trivia]
Notice that the transparency (an old-time type of media item) he is viewing
when we first see him represents the church-door view, with not only O’Brien
visible and with red handwritten mark pointing to him, but also Tim Curry
dressed up in civilian clothes, and with arrow pointing to him, too. Also, the
narrator says it was a November night
when Brad and Janet made their fearful journey, but the speech we hear on their
car radio, of President Richard Nixon on his resignation, actually was
delivered in early August 1974,
though production designer Thomson says the speech was included to root the
story in history. (Someone in our audience reached a peak of creativity by
calling out, “There’s an asshole at the wheel [Brad] but a bigger asshole on
the radio!”)
4. In the car: After
they’ve had the flat, Brad and Janet are talking, and [Catcalls] “Swat the fly!!” the audience would cry, and Brad slaps
the seat-back. They get out to go hike back to the castle, and “Kick the tire!” (Brad does) “Walk like a chicken, Janet!” and her
bare legs seem to accord with this directive.
“There’s a Light” (or maybe it’s
titled “Over at the Frankenstein Place”), the song accompanying the couple’s
approach to the castle, always seems to have a stirring quality to it, yet I’ve
always found it a bit tedious, too (and the scene is a little tedious, as well;
but that’s just me).
5. Entering the house: They
ring the doorbell, and the door creaks open at the hand of O’Brien’s Riff Raff,
looking ghoulish ([Trivia] A DVD
comment shows his look was meant to echo silent film director F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu).
[Catcalls] “You’re wet!” Riff says. “No shit, Sherlock!” the audience cries.
“Yes, it’s raining,” Janet half-apologizes. “No shit, Janet!” the audience calls. Riff: “I think you better both
come inside!” Audience: “[line redacted, concerning Brad]!”
[Catcalls, Trivia, Opinion] “Follow the bouncing thumb!” the
audience calls, as Riff leads the couple in, his thumb wiggling around. There
is a little exchange involving apparent housekeeper Magenta, who slides down a
banister (she gives the lines that comprised what her agent had apparently said
was about all there was to her part, though of course she has lines numerous
later times in the film).
Next start two songs, in fairly
quick succession, that are among the very most rousing in the film, and are
enough fun to check out in a YouTube video: “Time Warp,” sung mainly by Riff,
which really cuts it up with a strong show of the rock sensibility that the
film aimed for (and it is reprised as a “memory of fun times” near the film’s
end), with Brad and Janet whisked headlong into….
6. The ballroom, where
all the “Transylvanians” are having what we presume is their typically decadent
party at some kind of convention.
Little Nell (Nell Campbell), who
plays Columbia (with her sequined top hat here), according to the DVD worked as
a soda jerk in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when she was enlisted to play
Columbia because, as she did at work, she could do tap-dancing. (Some audience
members—though I don’t think I ever saw this in 1980, but it came later—would
enjoy a really exhibitionistic moment when, dressed like Columbia, they would
appear at the front of the theater and dance like her.)
On a production level: The
ballroom was built on a sound stage, with the film cutting cinematically to it (from
the foyer) and from it (to the foyer)—as the door in the actual house that “leads”
to the ballroom doesn’t really lead to so large a place. Also, the ballroom is
colored strangely; as Thomson or director Sharman says on the DVD, the original
plan had been to have the movie be black-and-white up until Frank appears on
the elevator, at which the movie would start to show color, somewhat as in the
color change in The Wizard of Oz. So
the sound stage was painted to accommodation B&W photography. But the
studio decided this couldn’t be produced effectively, so color the whole film
stayed. (But you wouldn’t notice the ballroom had odd colors unless I mentioned
it.)
The 45-single-length “Time Warp”
song literally winds down, with a tape-speed-slowing effect that makes the song
seem to grind to a creepy crawl. Brad and Janet try to back out, and end up at
the elevator [Catcalls: As the
background music thumps out a steady beat, and one of Frank’s feet on the
elevator is keeping time, the audience would stomp its feet along with this, in
anticipation], and—to judge from YouTube—we have the most famous sequence in
the film, Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s entrance, as he looks like a be-caped Dracula,
and Tim Curry does his full-on androgynous act (notice the level of detail he
attends to, including a flirtatious nose-crinkle at Brad).
If you like this sequence, the
rest of the film should go down OK. “Sweet Transvestite” is like a kind of
strip-club piece with bawdy saxophone, and when Curry takes off his cape and
shows Frank’s leather teddy (or whatever that item of dress is) and fishnet
stockings, well, we are at a crest of the film’s particular sensibility.
[Trivia] O’Brien, or maybe Quinn, in
much-later DVD commentary—maybe from the late 1990s—says that some female
audience members found (in the 1970s, presumably) that they were, surprisingly
to themselves, turned on by the sight of a male in fishnet stockings.
[Catcalls] Frank says, seated regally in
the ballroom, about to play with Riff’s hair, “I’ve been making a man—”
Audience: “With scummy hair and no tan!”
Frank: “—with blond hair and a tan, and he’s good for relieving my—” Audience: “[single
word redacted]!” Frank: “—tension!”
To skip ahead:
7. Laboratory scene: The
sequence of events in the lab goes on resourcefully for quite some time,
encompassing several songs: “Sword of Damocles,” the one song sung solo by
Rocky Horror himself (though I think the singing voice is someone else, dubbed);
“I Can Make You a Man,” Frank’s song of celebration of, and plans for, his new,
studly monster; and “Hot Patootie, Bless My Soul,” the rousing song sung by
Eddie (played by Meat Loaf), a local punk whom Columbia loves—and half of
whose brain was harvested for Rocky (notice the unsightly gash on Eddie’s
forehead) (the song contains words that are too numerous for the scansion in
places, but Meat Loaf could manage them better than anyone else the director
tried for the play version, hence Meat Loaf got the part, though I don’t know if
this was at the start in Britain, or only when the show appeared in L.A.).
Lastly, there is a sort of
reprise of “I Can Make You a Man,” starting at a slinky nightclub R&B pace
with “With a deltoid and a bicep….” Curry tears it up with some
stagy, sensual dancing.
[Catcalls] As the elevator arrives at
the lab’s floor, an audience member would intone (as if at Saks Fifth Avenue) something like, “Fifth
floor, bedroom accessories, ladies’ underwear, transvestites.” (Notice Frank
has a Nazi-type-stigmatizing pink triangle on his green dress.) Later, Frank
offers Brad and Janet, now that they’re mostly undressed, robes to put on: “Put
these on. They’ll make you feel less—” Audience: “Naked!” “—vulnerable.” Aud.: “Same
thing!”
As Frank asks Janet something, the
audience calls: “Are you a slut, Janet?”
Janet answers Frank shyly, “Yes I am!” Later, when Brad presents his
indignation and yanks off his horn-rimmed glasses, the aud.: “Superman!!”
During the sequence in which
Frank heads the process to make his monster come to life, with all the blinking
lights and colored ooze he’s pouring into the tank in which Rocky lies
bandaged, the audience at intervals, several times: “Is it soup yet?!” “Not yet!”
others would answer. Finally when Rocky’s hands start to rise quiveringly, the
aud.: “Now it’s soup!”
After Eddie has appeared on the
scene from a freezer, and does his song—and makes Frank jealous with his
appearing to excite Rocky with his music—Frank gets an ice axe and brutally
kills Eddie, inside the freezer. Frank totters out clumsily, in a bit of a
daze. Somewhere around here, the aud.: “That’s
no way to pick [punning on the assumption of “ice pick”] your friends!”
B. The last ~40 minutes of the film, with sci-fi additions, heading to
a final sex-theme set piece
8. Transitional scenes. [Trivia, Opinion, Catcalls] After the
initial stuff, which is largely modeled after 1930s-era-and-later Frankenstein
and haunted-house movies, the film then moves through a set of sequences that
are less horror/sci-fi and more reflective of the film’s eclecticism, and
involve more plot specific to the world of this film—especially including sex
(sexual experimentation, more precisely). All these scenes are quintessential Rocky Horror, and have their merits and
occasions for creative catcalls, but—while we are more than halfway through the
film—there is something a little more cagey or labored, if still original and
fun, about them.
A sequence has Janet singing “Touch-a,
Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” as she is embarking on a sexual affair with Rocky
after she has seen—on a TV monitor—her fiancé Brad having had sex with Frank in
Brad’s blue-hued temporary bedroom (Janet, as it happens, had been subject to
the same licentious-bisexual treatment by Frank in her pink-hued bedroom). The British provenance of the script is
shown in Janet’s singing, “I’d only ever kissed before”—“only ever” is a
British grammatical construction, which in my own little life I’ve noticed in
media products (from various periods) increasingly lately. Its meaning is clear
enough; instead of the British “I’d only ever done X,” Americans would say,
“All I’d ever done was X.” Meanwhile, the line in the song, “I need action!” is
a good ’70s expression, perfectly at home in the U.S. (An influence on this
sequence, according to designer Thomson, was the film “Valley of the Dolls.”)
Eventually the complexity of the
plot, crossbreeding sci-fi with horror, is revealed in a tiny throwaway—Riff
says to Brad, when Dr. Scott has appeared at the house’s front door (revealed
in a TV monitor), “You know this earthling?” and Frank stops him with an abrupt
swat of a riding crop or the like.
Further, Frank pulls out an ace
of sorts when he confrontingly reveals his knowledge that Dr. Scott works for
the “Bureau of Investigation” of some government agency concerned with UFOs (this
is an idea that would have flown better in the 1970s). It is on the basis of
this that Frank accuses Brad and Janet, or at least suspects them, of having
come to this castle to scope out the layout of the place for Dr. Scott.
Yet another plot twist has Dr.
Scott turning out to have been part of a scientific project that has aimed to
develop some (obviously weirdly fictional) technology concerned with
transporting matter through space (and perhaps time) in a way hitherto unavailable.
Dr. Scott’s relevant research group also has been on top of monitoring Frank’s
own efforts along the same lines.
And Frank is even aware of Dr.
Scott having an identity as an apparent German—“Dr. Von Scott”…. This portentous detail, not followed up, is revealed
in a satirical-seeming dinner scene (where, in passing details, the aliens
really don’t know how to be adept hosts). In this context, another fun song, “Eddie,”
appears, which includes the lines “When Eddie said he didn’t like his teddy /
you knew he was a no-good kid. / But when he threatened your life with a
switch-blade knife—” Frank: “What a guy!” Janet: “Makes you cry.” Scott: “Und I
did.” (I don’t show audience input here—if there’s ever been any.)
After Dr. Scott has arrived, I confess
that the talk about a transporter device and such seems like a bunch of pulpy
exposition tucked in, which really doesn’t advance the story much, and
certainly doesn’t cohere with a lot of the sexual aspects. Sci-fi fans might
find it more to their interpretive liking.
Things proceed to where Frank
has transformed the main guests—Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott—and even household
members Rocky and Columbia
into statues, formed by a “Medusa” machine. They end up in a stage area, where
they take part in the sequence Frank calls the “floor show.” The film winds up
in superficially climax-like-enough fashion, though I’ve always found this
sequence a bit labored and riding on wishful thinking that it brings the whole
story to a fulfilling conclusion—I think the best has gone before.
Anyway, by the time we got to
this point of the film in 1980, it was getting late, and I was usually tired
and wanting to go home. The final scene included some audience members’
throwing playing cards in the air when Frank references “cards” in the song
“I’m Going Home”—and one final audience move was when, as the view of the three
earthlings on the ground starts spinning, certain viewers would go up to the
scene and move their arms as if they were causing the spinning. (You had to be
there.)
C. The floor show,
and final thoughts
The final sequence, where the earthlings, Rocky, and
Columbia are set up to dance as in a Bob Fosse–like revue, is meant to parody,
or “lovingly” echo, certain stage elements, including a movie studio-trademark
display, an Esther Williams sequence, and so on…. And the audience (in 1980) was
ready with its moves (such as, when a crane shot shows Frank floating in the
pool, someone shouted, “Waiter, waiter!
There’s a transvestite in my soup!”).
The song line, “Don’t dream it, be it,” is taken by some
(such as a DVD commenter, trying to make sense retrospectively of the phenomenon)
to encapsulate the main point of the film, an approving nod of sorts to the
sexual revolution of the 1970s. Whether the film meant to celebrate this, or
just to incorporate it as a “found object” into its pastiche of various pop-art
“masks,” is hard to say.
Nell Campbell remarks that the film was released (to more or
less iconoclastic effect) when people were “conservative” about sex. As to what
the scene was like in Britain, I don’t know, but certainly there was a
“revolution” in the U.S.: sexual escapades, divorce, birth control, all were
involved in marking a liberalizing change in morés among some (mainly the
younger), while older generations did not approve. Even further than this,
sexual experimentation or variety, or deviancy as some would consider it, was a
focus of the film, for esthetic/provocative effect if not also to meet a
“liberal” agenda.
Campbell
says the film nods at the “AC/DC” potential of sexual life, which she says is
“in all of us.” Certainly Curry’s character Frank delivers some challenge for
us to address this, which most have taken as a cause for amusement. Indeed, I
think Frank’s character, and Curry’s performance, is the most potent feature of
the film—whether you look at it as merely a not unpredictable means of
adolescents’ irreverent and lavish midnight fun, or a cultural artifact to
dissect years later for what smarts there were behind making this film.
Director Jim Sharman, who seems nerdy and yet enthusiastic
and clear-headed in talking about the film on the DVD, remarks that Rocky Horror can be considered “a kind
of home movie [he means an amateurish but still worthy attempt, I think] about
pretty extraordinary people at a particular time, which ended up entertaining
the whole world.”
There’s probably more to say on this film, as to its details
and its meaning, but as those who’ve seen Rocky
know, its meaning seems a work in
progress—that is, as much a function of crowd input as it is a function of
the values of which generation is dressing up, throwing toast and rice, and
making it an “obligatory” weekend date. (As Tim Curry remarks in a DVD clip, “[With
this movie,] there’s always a party every Saturday night, whether you’ve got a
date or not.”)
