The biggest fear in revisiting your past is that you'll find the things you used to like have lost their ability to amuse. The novel you liked so much when you were twenty seems childish, the music vapid, and the movie boring. Memories are sometimes best left alone, and not revisited lest they become damaged beyond repair.
So it was with some trepidation that I sat down on Christmas Eve with my wife and friends to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The real big plus I figured was that I'd be able to finally actually watch the movie and hear the dialogue, something I was never able to do back in the seventies when you couldn't walk into a showing without running into a wall of fishnet stockings and black corsets.
Released in 1975 The Rocky Horror Picture Show was adapted from Richard O'Brien's (who plays the role of Riff-Raff) musical. It became an almost instant cult classic and a staple of midnight showings at second run movie theatres.
Audiences would show up for performances dressed as their favourite characters prepared to act out the whole feature in front of the screen as the show progressed. At various points in the movie the audience would respond to cues by throwing rice, the opening wedding scene; calling out responses to lines, and generally becoming a major part of the experience.
For those of you who missed out on it, the plot of the movie is a send up on every B horror and science fiction movie that you can think of. We start off with an innocent young couple Janet (Susan Sarandon) and Brad (Barry Bostwick) who get lost one dark and stormy night and are stranded by a flat tire.
Fortunately they had just happened to pass an old castle on the road a ways back so they, obviously never having seen the right movies, head on over to use the phone. They find that they've walked in on a party in full swing. Their host turns out to be the mysterious cross-dressing, switch-hitting Dr. Frank – N – Furter (Tim Curry) who cordially invites them "to come up to the lab, and see what's on the slab".
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1 - Webbie
"Don't dream it,.... be it..."