Oh, it’s just your regular old glitter rock transvestite musical that pays homage to classic horror and sci-fi films. It’s the world’s preeminent midnight movie. It’s playing somewhere this weekend in an American city near you where you’re sure to find an excitable audience dressed up in lingerie and maid outfits and ready to sing and dance and have a party in the theater aisles. No other movie has a reputation like this. It’s such a cult item that it’s become more notable for its cult than for its actual content. It’s more famous as a phenomenon than it is as a film. Writing about it without mentioning its audience is like writing about the Arctic without mentioning ice. It’s the closest a movie has come to being like one of those rock bands whose reputation rests on their live spectacle rather than on their raw music.
The good stuff: Tim Curry is easily the best scenery-chewing gay mad scientist in the movies since Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein and Richard O’Brien’s songs are clever and memorable.
The bad stuff: It’s camp-by-design that doesn’t hold up all the way through. Halfway through the film, it stops surprising you and it runs out of gags. It’s wild, but it’s not witty. It’s no wonder that many of its devoted fans prefer to spray water pistols and throw hot dogs at the screen rather than sit and watch.
It started life as a stage musical (and new productions of it continue to start up all the time) in 1973. When the film adaptation came out in 1975, it bombed just about everywhere except Los Angeles. 20th Century Fox eventually re-marketed it for the midnight movie circuit and the film began a seminal run at the Waverly Theater in New York City on April Fool’s Day 1976. Less than a year later, it became a sensation.