"The Rocky Horror Picture Show (2016)" is a remake of the 1975 movie of the same name. "Rocky Horror" tells the story of Brad Majors (Ryan McCartan) and Janet Weiss (Victoria Justice) who get lost in the middle of the road during a storm and come across the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Laverne Cox), a Transylvanian transvestite, who is building a creature, Rocky Horror (Staz Nair) with the help of Riff Raff (Reeve Carney), Magenta (Christina Milian), and Columbia (Annaliegh Ashford). This also stars Adam Lambert, Ben Vereen, and Tim Curry.
To me, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)" is one of those movies that works, because of its odd combination of casting, music, and the way it's filmed. It's my favorite musical, because of the things said in the previous sentence. This is also a movie I can watch around Halloween.
So, how is "The Rocky Horror Picture Show (2016")? This was bad, but not the worst thing I have seen. There are things that I liked about it.
First, Tim Curry was the best actor in the movie. Curry, recently recovering from a stroke he suffered a few years ago, was a good replacement for the late Charles Gray as the criminologist.
Secondly, The Usherette singing "Science Fiction/Double Feature" was great. She made an okay arrangement great. The actress looked like she was having a blast singing it and sang it well.
But that's where it stops for me. The rest of the movie was bad.
Besides The Usherette and Tim Curry, the rest of the acting was terrible. It felt like they were given the direction to act like their counterparts in the original movie. It also felt like they were given the direction to act poorly because this is a parody of horror movies of the 1950s. But, it came across as actually bad. The worst being Lambert's Eddie and Carney's Riff Raff.
The acting in the original was a little bit hokey, but it was charming and it was really good as well. It's a shame that I have to say that the acting was not good because Laverne Cox is a really good actress. I wanted Cox to blow me away and prove that she would be able to fit the shoes of Curry, but it felt like Cox was just doing a Curry impression the whole time.
The arrangements of the songs, minus "Science Fiction/Double Feature", were terrible. They felt more like pop songs than rock songs. It felt like the studio wanted to make this a rock musical, but realized they are the same company that made Glee. Glee was popular, they wanted to make it more popular with this younger generation. "Rocky Horror" is a Rock Musical. The stage show and movie was a rock musical. Almost every arrangement was awful. The worst song being "Time Warp", which is one of my favorite songs.
The design of the castle was terrible. It looked more like a studio set than a castle. Having the band during "Time Warp" through "I Can Make You A Man Reprise" was confusing and pointless. It was only used for having Riff Raff play guitar, which turned into a laser gun in the end. There was also no ice machine for Eddie to break out of.
If you are a fan of the original, you will know that Eddie did not enter through an ice machine. Making Frank's reasoning for having the surgery, which mixed Eddie's and Rocky's brain, to put in Rocky entirely pointless.
And finally, the callbacks to the original, I.E. the red lips, felt forced and made me want to stop at multiple points and watch the original movie.
I know this won't replace the 1975 movie, but this is bad. While there were good aspects of this remake, it felt like it was more forced, because "Grease Live" did so well earlier this year. If you are a die-hard fan of "Rocky Horror", don't watch it. If you want to get into "Rocky Horror", watch the original and then watch it for yourself. It's bad, but it's not terrible.
