With Halloween reaching full throttle, scores of sweet transvestites will be traipsing about Chelsea this week—even more than on a normal Tuesday night. The holiday’s always ripe with Rocky Horror Picture Show rip-offs: One local gay bar, XES Lounge, has even made Rocky its de rigueur Halloween tradition.
Other than Star Wars, has any film generated such a rabid following during the past 30 years? In New York, birthplace of the audience-participation phenomenon, you can still catch screenings of the flick every weekend, complete with costumed characters leading the sing-along and folks throwing toast at the screen—though open flames are now prohibited. (Flamers, luckily, are not.)
But the Show didn’t end when those Transylvanians got air-lifted back to their homeworld. Shock Treatment, the movie’s lone and less successful sequel, only recently arrived on DVD, part of a three-disc anniversary package apparently aimed at the folks who play Frank-N-Furter year round.
This oddball musical can scarcely be called a continuation: Gone are Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, with an inferior Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper playing dorky duo Brad and Janet. In a high-concept conceit that almost works, Brad and Janet’s marital woes play out over a series of TV programs: first as unwitting contestants on a game show, then sucked into a soap opera starring psych ward doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley (Rocky alums Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn).
Unfortunately, ongoing script revisions left the plot in tatters, and the ample music often sounds like the first movie’s leftovers. Shock Treatment mostly deserves its fate as a footnote, even if the making-of doc on the new DVD inflates its importance. Talking heads ranging from director Jim Sharman to fan club prez Sal Piro would have us see the film “not as a sequel but as an equal”—a stab at revisionist history that would make even ballsy Frank-N-Furter blush.
As the press notes point out with glee, Shock Treatment presupposed our current obsession with reality TV, and its commentary on instant celebrities feels just as timely today. But it ain’t The Truman Show: While RHPS was a polished send-up of science fiction B-movies, Shock Treatment ends up being a circular (and fairly pointless) project that can’t hold a Bic lighter to the first film’s timelessness. No wonder those Frankie fishnets come out every October, though the few brave souls who don Cosmo and Nation costumes this year should get props for originality.
