The Rocky Horror Picture Show has always been something of a guilty pleasure going back to my teenage days and appearing in am-dram music magazines inspired by it because performance rights were always strictly reserved for professional productions until March 2000.
The original stage show opened in London in the summer of 1973 at the Royal Court’s Theater Upstairs, which ironically only had a seating capacity of 63, as the subsequent 1975 film adaptation holds the record for the longest running theatrical release in the history of the cinema and must now have been seen by audiences of untold millions around the world ensuring its continued cult following.
Having watched the film religiously as a kid on worn videotape and owning at least 3 versions of the soundtrack on vinyl when it came out on DVD marking its 25th anniversary in 2001, I had turned 30 myself and now despised it a bit. , a dirty little secret from my past that I was ashamed to spend so much time on; Simon Pegg articulated my feelings exactly in the second episode of Spaced: “It’s a boiled-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and drama freshmen” and for the better part of a decade I’ve put it out of my mind. .
However, my wife is an occasional Glee watcher and I happened to watch the recent Rocky Horror Show themed episode marking its 35th anniversary and Blu-ray release and found my interest oddly piqued enough to want to see if a hidef revamp would radically improve it. the notoriously low-budget, almost home-made film quality. He also wanted to review it to assess whether it really was morally impropriety for the saccharin-sweet virgin members of Glee Club, as the show’s producers would have you believe, or if this was simply an affectation in an attempt to preserve his ‘perverted praise’. for future generations of camp devotees.
I’m happy to report that the 1080p MPEG-4 AVC encoding is remarkable, considering the last time I saw Rocky Horror was on video; what always strikes me the most is the impact of the reds and Patricia Quinn’s now characteristic lips in the opening credits have never looked so luscious. The DTS-HD 7.1 soundtrack doesn’t fare as well, though it shows off the songs beautifully, dialogue seems thin and tinny by comparison, but luckily there’s also a mono Dolby Digital 2.0 track which I found preferable.
It’s worth noting the plethora of extras here, an excellent commentary from writer/star Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff), and all of the 25th anniversary DVD featurettes are included, but the standout hidden exclusive is Picture-in-Picture. ‘shadowcast’ which recreates the entire show shot in glorious 1080p/24 HDCAM with the option to toggle the frame to fill the screen; that’s what the Glee episode should have been like instead of a bland homage that seemed to lose the whole point of the original by replacing the songs’ racier lines with banal alternatives.
I hope the version of Glee inspires new audiences to discover what it was about The Rocky Horror Picture Show that drew me in as a teenager, epitomizes both a sexual awakening and a loss of innocence, and at the very least encourages inquisitive young minds to think off. the box and embrace diversity, in short, living by the concise final refrain “Don’t dream, Be it”.
It also captures Tim Curry’s charismatic standout starring role as the alien Dr. Frank-N-Furter and benefits from the inclusion of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the naïve All-American couple, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss. I suspect it’s yet another symptom of turning 40, but after putting it off for so long, I felt a genuine warm glow of nostalgia as I watched, but not enough to make me want to get up and do ‘Time Warp’ again.