The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Posted on February 7, 2021 at 11:39 am by Jeff Kuykendall

2021 is the 10th anniversary of Midnight Only. To mark the occasion, this imaginary, rat-infested, leaky-roofed theater is raising the curtain on historically important midnight movies.

By now, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), like Monty Python and the Holy Grail released the same year, has been somewhat tarnished by overfamiliarity. At what point does a cult movie become so embedded in pop culture that “cult” no longer applies? Rocky Horror‘s more recent reincarnations, including its notorious appropriation for a 2010 episode of Glee, a TV movie remake/tribute (2016’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again), and a poorly staged political fundraiser livestream on Halloween 2020, have only contributed to the overall sanitization of what was once treated as forbidden fruit. One of the fascinating things about Rocky Horror is that you can actually pinpoint the moment when it was torn from the fingers of the midnight screening devotees and spread to the general public – when it was belatedly released on home video. Going by Wikipedia, the film was available for home viewing as early as 1987 in the UK; being an American, I can only attest that the initial 1990 US release on VHS was greeted with controversy, even a certain sense of betrayal by many. How could 20th Century Fox do that to the film? Rocky Horror was supposed to be a ritual enacted at midnight, where “virgins” attending their first screening would be initiated into a wild theatrical experience with character cosplay and audience participation including pre-scripted talkback, props like newspapers and wedding rice, and fans acting as amateur theatrical troupes performing scenes before the screen. How could one commit the sacrilege of watching the movie without all that and at any time of day? Someone could watch Rocky Horror at 8 in the morning! A frequent comment was that the movie wouldn’t survive it, that stripped of its atmosphere of a wee-hours Happening, it would be exposed as nothing more than a mediocre movie that was embraced and inflated into something much bigger than it ever was. Which was nonsense, as demonstrated by its subsequent popularity in the thirty years since, and its transformation into a cultural fixture – fawning, watered-down remakes and all.

“Dammit Janet” – Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon).

Following its video release, the cult of Rocky Horror might have slowly faded if the film weren’t an exceptionally strong musical at its core, supported by Richard O’Brien’s glam rock-inspired book/music/lyrics from the hit London stage show (The Rocky Horror Show) and importing some of the cast, including its phenomenally committed star, the then-unknown Tim Curry. The film was shot cheaply and quickly, produced by American record producer Lou Adler (who had purchased the US rights to the musical after being impressed by it in London) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail producers Michael White and John Goldstone, with Australian director Jim Sharman behind the camera. Sharman had previously made an outré science fiction film in 16mm black-and-white and color, Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens (1972), before directing the London stage version of Jesus Christ Superstar and, at O’Brien’s request, The Rocky Horror Show. The film is therefore a faithful expansion of the stage production. After giving Rocky Horror a tepid and very limited theatrical release in the US in 1975, distributor Fox consciously re-strategized to embrace the film’s inherent outsider appeal and began to program it in midnight slots, picking up a devoted following at the Waverly Theater in New York City before spreading to various venues across the US and playing somewhere nonstop ever since. The film’s story was well suited for the rituals that would take shape in midnight screenings throughout the country. Our two young lovers venture with trepidation into a forbidding place, join up with a wild party, and (literally) strip away their inhibitions – as the morning breaks, they’ve been transformed into something else, even if they’re unsure of what that is and where they’ll go next.

Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien) prepares to do the “Time Warp.”

Positioning itself on the surface as a tribute to B horror and science fiction movies, Rocky Horror was partly filmed at Bray Studios, a longtime home of Hammer horror – its stately exterior given a showcase when Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) approach for “There’s a Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place).” The memorable theme song “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” performed by luscious genderless lips, makes reference to everything from The Day of the Triffids (1963) to Forbidden Planet (1956) to Doctor X (1932) and Night of the Demon (1957), among others. (When I saw a live production of the musical a few years back, the director cleverly projected trailers for the referenced movies before the show began.) The narrative structure begins in the “old dark house” mold before moving into Frankenstein territory, and while the genre conventions begin to buckle beneath the exploding ego and boundary-free passions of interplanetary transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Curry), our narrator, “A Criminologist” (Charles Gray), is there to chart precisely how our story’s path has strayed, with helpful visual aids (including, at one point, a Weird Fantasy EC comic). Sharman follows through on O’Brien’s love for genre movies with a precise restaging of the bandage-wrapped creature in a water tank from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), though Frank-N-Furter brings his creation to life using colored dyes that form a rainbow pattern in the water, and when the bandages are stripped away, the monster is not Christopher Lee but a blond Adonis (Peter Hinwood), to Frank’s lustful delight.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) prepares to awaken his creation.

The rainbow water tank, as well as the rainbow that appears over the castle as dawn breaks at the film’s conclusion, would seem to underline the queer perspective of the film – in fact, the gay pride flag would not be created for another three years. (Even accidentally, Rocky Horror was ahead of its time.) But the film’s gender-fluid and teasingly bisexual personality feels more relevant than ever, even if “transvestite” is no longer in parlance. O’Brien and Sharman position Brad Majors and Janet Weiss as Young Republicans, listening to Nixon’s resignation speech on the car stereo like some ominous warning of what’s to come, and Brad’s cornball 50’s aphorisms echo hollowly once he’s inside Frank-N-Furter’s castle (that “hunting lodge for rich weirdos,” as Brad puts it). The Criminologist is deeply grave at what our young protagonists are about to encounter – as Riff Raff later puts it, a “lifestyle too extreme.” And so the film moves from the church-going, virginal, American Gothic world of Denton (“The Home of Happiness!”) into a cul-de-sac where motorcycle gangs gather and the sunglasses and party hat wearing Transylvanian “weirdos” (an appealingly random mix of character types) dance the Time Warp to Frank’s dictum “give yourself over to absolute pleasure.” In hilariously matching scenes, Frank seduces both Janet and Brad separately and with the same effective arguments. Ultimately, as musical theater dictates, tragedy ensues: murder, jealousy, cannibalism, the fall of Frank-N-Furter (in a coup by Riff Raff and Patricia Quinn’s Magenta), loneliness, smeared mascara and ripped fishnets, and becoming “lost in time/lost in space/and meaning.” But what’s important is that Brad and Janet, having tasted that forbidden fruit, will never return to what they were before.

Janet seduces Rocky (Peter Hinwood) to “Touch Me.”

Sharman stages his film as a sex comedy with an omnivorous sexual appetite and dashes of surreal staging reminiscent of both Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Ken Russell, as with an operating theater with a curved ramp to accommodate Meat Loaf’s motorcycle, or a swimming pool in which Frank-N-Furter floats in a Titanic life preserver above the Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel (right where they’re touching, as though Frank were the product of that spark). A giant recreation of the RKO Radio Pictures logo might have come straight from Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971), which perfectly sets up Curry singing “Whatever happened to Fay Wray?” before, ultimately, Rocky climbs the tower King Kong-like with Curry on his back. The sets are decorated with marble statues and cluttered esoterica; Columbia (“Little” Nell Campbell, who was also in Russell’s Lisztomania the same year) wears Mickey Mouse ears while in her nightgown; a stained glass window features not Christian imagery but Atlas bearing the world on his back, in a nod to Frank’s admiration of the Charles Atlas Bible. Only the famous “Time Warp” number feels a little chintzy (we need a dance hall full of Transylvanians, not the miniscule number here). But Sharman’s attention to comedic detail – Columbia’s fudging of her tap dance routine, Janet fainting on cue, Riff Raff’s and Magenta’s spider-like moves, the awkward silent pause as the Criminologist prepares to show us how to do the dance – sell the sequence. Throughout the film Sharman is focused on the actors and catching the little comedic gestures and lines perfected during stage performances. The King and Queen of course is Curry, twisting his lips into lascivious appraisals or condescending sneers, casually breaking the fourth wall, belting out his tunes as though trying to shove the camera back with his voice.

Frank-N-Furter as a “Wild and Untamed Thing” in the RKO Radio swimming pool.

It’s become fashionable now – post-Glee – to say that the film is just a rite of passage for theater kids and nothing more. This dismisses the obvious virtues that have led to that phenomenon: it’s an addictively singable musical with themes of sexual awakening, identity, and liberation that are bound to resonate with teens and college students. It’s also just fun to watch, from the performances – we should have talked a bit more about how Sarandon just kills it as Janet Weiss discovering her naughty side – to the jokes, both smart and defiantly dumb (“You’re a hot dog/But you’d better not try and hurt her/Frank Furter”). What shines is Rocky Horror‘s commitment to the message of “Don’t dream it/Be it.” Dress how you want, act as you will, be who you are on the inside even if others don’t get it. This is not a message that goes stale, which is why Rocky Horror is still revived on stage and – when this pandemic lifts – will again be playing in theaters at midnights to those who just want to lose themselves for a couple hours. It probably also plays well at 8 in the morning.

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The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Posted on January 30, 2021 at 3:31 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Horror – in color! The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the first Hammer Gothic and the prototype for all future Hammer horror, proudly bore the British X certificate as had its breakthrough predecessor, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), but now added a significant new element to the formula. Now you could see the red of the blood – as when Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing), in slicing open a cadaver, wipes his hands carelessly on his fine shirt – a moment that would have passed without significance in black and white. By modern standards, one can see that quite a bit is left to the imagination. More often than not, the slicing and the sliced are just out of shot, leaving Cushing’s talented miming (and some well placed sound effects) to fill in the blanks – all to get past the censors. But even then, the dialogue paints a pretty picture. “Well the birds didn’t waste much time, did they?” Frankenstein tut-tuts over one body lurking just below the shot. “Half the head’s eaten away.” Then – though he swaddles it in his arms and keeps the hideous head out of sight – he drops it into an acid bath where it can dissolve into nothing. This was heavy stuff for 1957, when true horror had all but vanished in the drive-ins, replaced by tepid teenage B-movies and Atom Age science fiction.

Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein

What’s more, despite all the grisliness, The Curse of Frankenstein looked like an A picture. It was still a low budget film, albeit with healthy financing and distribution from Warner Bros; Hammer had a knack for making a small budget go much further on screen. Filming at their cozy Bray Studios, a dream team organically came together to create a film to rival anything a major studio could conjure: producer Anthony Hinds, director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, cinematographer Jack Asher, set designer Bernard Robinson, composer James Bernard – all delivering career-defining work. The only thing it lacked were major names. (Unlike Quatermass and many of their other black-and-white thrillers, with Curse Hammer didn’t lean on an American actor to secure a Stateside distribution deal.) Though Cushing was already well on his way to a prolific acting career, he and his “monster,” Christopher Lee, were not stars. The Curse of Frankenstein made them stars. In the long history of the horror film, this was a seismic event, reanimating Gothic horror like Cushing’s young upstart Frankenstein, upping the quotients of sex and violence in a rebellious assault on older sensibilities. Its follow-up, Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula, 1958), sealed the deal.

Valerie Gaunt as the maid Justine

Yet as a Frankenstein movie – one in a long line, even then – the key innovation is the sheer nastiness of the Baron. There’s something genuinely stomach-churning about the pleasant dinner Victor shares with his fiancée Elizabeth (Hazel Court) after he’s murdered his maid Justine, with whom he was having an affair. When Elizabeth asks after the maid’s fate, he smiles pleasantly and speculates that she’s eloped with some villager – “After all, she was always a romantic little thing.” We realize that a “thing” is all she ever was to him. Earlier, when he’s confronted by Justine over his broken promise to marry her, he’s disgusted at the revelation of her pregnancy – repulsed, as though this method of producing life is the vulgar one – and casually accuses her of sleeping with every man in the village (“Why choose me as the father?”). In previous films, Frankenstein’s worst sins are grave-robbing and his creature. Here he murders casually to meet his needs, making clear the irony of the film’s epilogue, as the Baron pleads to his captors to believe his story of the monster, ignorant of the fact that the monster’s existence is an insufficient alibi to the crimes to which he’s just confessed. Cushing is perfect in the role: by turns brilliant, charming, seductive, coldly logical, callous, and smug. Only in the final act is he driven to desperation and panic as his grand plan spectacularly unravels. Often overlooked but also deserving of praise is the performance of Robert Urquhart as his mentor and co-conspirator Paul Krempe, who only gradually realizes the dark trajectory of their work: “All right, you can’t see the horror of what you’re doing. At first I was blind to it.” (Cushing’s answer to Paul’s objections always brings a smile to my face: “Oh come on, Paul, you haven’t shown any scruples up till now!”)

Elizabeth (Hazel Court) discovers Victor’s laboratory.

Phil Leakey provided the makeup, working under the big shadow cast by Jack Pierce. In contrast to Karloff, Lee performs his monster as a living rag doll manipulated by some invisible puppeteer. He stumbles clumsily and struggles to lift his head. He lifts his hands up in an imitation of the arms-extended monster caricature, but just as quickly they drop limply in front him. He has no squared-off head, but a mop of damp black hair above his jagged scars that looks even more unbecoming when it’s been half shaved following a second resurrection and some brain surgery. He looks, more than anything, assembled – carelessly, despite the Baron’s Nazi-like ambitions for creating the perfect human specimen. The grotesque design, much more realistically corpse-like than Pierce’s, further advances this film to stand on its own, and not to be seen in any way as a remake. In fact, it’s hardly even an adaptation, bearing little resemblance to Shelley’s book in Sangster’s efforts to subvert it – as with Hammer’s Dracula films, more elements of the source material would be sprinkled across sequels, including the idea of an intelligent monster. Yet there are nods to the original Frankensteins, from the use of electricity in reanimation to the presence of both a blind man encountering the creature and an innocent child kneeling before a lake – these two iconic Frankenstein moments brought together in one scene as the monster, efficiently, kills both characters. (The child’s death is implied. There were the censors to be dealt with at the end of the day, after all.)

Christopher Lee as the Creature.

In 1957, much of this film must have seemed shocking or even crass; but the compelling direction of Fisher, the brilliant and pointed use of color, light, and darkness by Asher to enhance the storytelling, and the swirling romantic score of Bernard all act in concert to disarm viewers with more delicate sensibilities. It’s a poison pill, but it goes down smoothly. The new Blu-ray from Warner Archive is an important one, presenting a long-necessary (4K) restoration that brings back the lush color which is so central to the film’s impact. To silence all arguments over which is the proper aspect ratio, three are included (1.85:1, 1.66:1, and an open matte 1.37:1, though you may just want to stick with the first), along with a new audio commentary by Constantine Nasr and Steve Haberman, and featurettes diving into the film’s history and major players (including the welcome contribution of Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine’s Richard Klemensen). Here it is, the one that truly kicked off Hammer horror as we know and love, in a definitive presentation.

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Fade to Black (1980)

Posted on January 30, 2021 at 9:31 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Movie-obsessed Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, Stephen King’s It) lives with his wheelchair-bound aunt (Eve Brent), spending most of his time inside a womb-like room plastered with vintage celebrity stills and film posters, watching old films on a small black-and-white TV or through a battered film projector. Trivia obsessed and withdrawn, he often adopts the personae of his favorite film characters, in particular Cody “Top of the world, Ma!” Jarrett from White Heat (1949). During the day he works for an L.A. film distributor, surrounded by aisles of film cannisters and bullied by his co-workers (including a young Mickey Rourke). One day he meets an Australian actress (Linda Kerridge, Vicious Lips) desperate for her big Hollywood break, and he’s struck by her resemblance to his celebrity crush, Marilyn Monroe. Amused by his awkward sincerity, she accepts a ride on a rusty scooter on loan from his employer, and they hit it off through their shared love of movies. But when she accidentally ghosts him on their planned meet-up at a movie theater, Eric stumbles into a psychotic spiral. Fed up with his aunt’s nagging, he kills her by rolling her off a tall staircase, deliberately recreating the famous murder in Kiss of Death (1947). He makes himself up as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula for a screening of Night of the Living Dead (1968), and in this disguise stalks a street walker who’d teased him, driving her to an accidental death while images of Christopher Lee’s Count flash in his head. Isolating himself further, he crosses the line into the fantasy world in which everyone has always accused him of living. If he can’t step through the silver screen, he will let it swallow everything around him to get back at his tormentors – while a coke-snorting criminal psychologist (Tim Thomerson, Trancers) and a cop (Gwynne Gilford, Beware! The Blob) try to track him down.

Eric (Dennis Christopher) and Marilyn (Linda Kerridge).

One of the few films directed by Vernon Zimmerman (he also made 1972’s trucker movie Deadhead Miles, written by Terrence Malick), and certainly his best regarded, Fade to Black (1980) is usually framed as a meta-slasher movie, reflexively staging its killings in the context of other movies. But the superb new Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome – 4K restored from 35mm negative elements and featuring a slate of special features including a new interview and commentary with a justifiably proud Dennis Christopher – makes a strong argument that Fade to Black is really more of a dark character study and thriller that dons “slasher movie” like just another of Eric’s rotating masks. At times, this is a gangster movie – as with the grand, White Heat-aping finale at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, or in an earlier Tommy gun killing inspired by The Public Enemy and Little Caesar (1931). Certain scenes are played for pure horror, as when Eric transforms into Universal’s Mummy to stalk his boss through a dark warehouse, or in his alleyway confrontation with Rourke, which adds the Western genre into the mix as Eric hideously alters his face to become William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy before pulling the trigger. But black comedy is never too far from the surface, as with an obligatory nod to Psycho’s shower scene that here ends in a surreal little joke.

Eric as a deadly Hopalong Cassidy.

But the vampire-themed death, which climaxes with Eric impulsively planting his mouth on his victim’s impaled neck and emerging with his lower face darkened by blood, suggests a more modern and significant reference point: George A. Romero’s Martin (1977). Although Romero leaves the door open to the possibility that his protagonist might really be one of the undead, it’s more important that all the raw, sometimes clumsy murders in that film are distinctly un-supernatural in nature, and that his “vampire” is a troubled young man regardless of his origins. Fade to Black is similarly more concerned with Eric Binford than any of his disguises. Christopher, hot off Breaking Away (1979), is central in driving his performance to deeper and more disturbing places than the film’s premise would suggest – all while maintaining an important degree of audience empathy. He presents prototype elements of antisocial 80’s characters you’d later see played by the likes of Crispin Glover or Fright Night‘s Stephen Geoffreys, but there’s a sliver of charisma here which renders it sufficiently believable that he’d catch the interest of the gorgeous “Marilyn.” I suppose the very extended opening act, which takes its time introducing you to Eric and his world, may make or break those watching this film solely for its horror elements; but the investment of Zimmerman and Christopher in suggesting that this entire story may have gone another way – indeed, might have led to a happy conclusion – is pivotal to underscore the tragedy of what happens next. These passages are so well done that it’s easier to forgive a much more unbelievable subplot involving a Hollywood producer (Blade Runner’s Morgan Paull) who steals one of Eric’s ideas, or the fact that the Tim Thomerson storyline – as fun as Thomerson always is – offers nothing critical to the story, apart from a late-breaking, tossed-off revelation about Eric’s aunt. Over the years, Fade to Black has gone from being a VHS staple to an overlooked and forgotten title in the DVD era. Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray – like their partner label Fun City’s 2020 release of the exceptional, genre-blurring thriller I Start Counting (1969) – highlights the importance of small labels and the physical media format, battling cinematic amnesia and allowing a fresh look at films that were either unfairly dismissed in their time or simply lost in the shuffle.

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