The Shocking Truth About SHOCK TREATMENT
ROCKY HORROR’s Sequel Might Just Appeal Most to a Different CrowdReview by Rogan Marshall
By the time I first saw Richard O’Brien’s towering cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW in 1986, everyone already knew that’s what it was; in fact, it’s one of the pictures that pushed the phrase “cult classic” into our mainstream cinematic vocabulary. As a teenager, I saw ROCKY HORROR several times at midnight shows in a loudly participating packed house with an energetic stage show in front of the screen (back then it was not yet available on home video and even bootleg copies were rare as mescaline); these circumstances were, of course, ideal... except that they never allowed me any objectivity. The worshipful audience participation at a mid-‘80s midnight screening of ROCKY HORROR generated a joyous frenzy that would have overwhelmed any mere “picture show,” or anything else it accompanied, not unlike the way in which church services often overwhelm and ignore the intent and/or content of the book said services are supposedly inspired by.
ROCKY HORROR and its cult following had a profound personal impact on me, but I’ve never known whether or not the movie itself was actually any good. A few years ago when ROCKY HORROR came out on DVD I took a shot at watching it alone in attentive silence, an experience so uncomfortable I only suffered it for half an hour. I felt unpleasantly the odd continuous déjà vu caused by watching material memorized in childhood, coupled with the feeling that half the movie was missing, because there was no live audience around me screaming interactive jokes in sync with the dialogue. ROCKY HORROR seems to be a pretty neat weird movie; beyond that, I remain bereft of any settled personal opinion on the subject, and morally confident that I’m not the only one.
Those midnight shows, and the box office they generated, eventually allowed the studio to finance arguably the strangest sequel ever made: SHOCK TREATMENT, a lavishly produced Richard O’Brien musical which comes to us for the first time on DVD in a 25th Anniversary Special Edition. SHOCK TREATMENT went over like a proverbial lead zeppelin upon its initial release, and for most of the 25 years since, I never met anyone who had a positive thing to say about it; word on the proverbial street back in the proverbial day was that SHOCK TREATMENT plain sucked. I never bothered to check these reports out for myself until now; they seemed so widespread, and decisive.
As is frequently the case for imaginative Hollywood flops of the ‘80s, many of which have belatedly become cult or even mainstream classics (some of my younger readers will be surprised to hear that BLADE RUNNER, LABYRINTH and THE NEVERENDING STORY were all big-time box office losers when they first opened, just like ROCKY HORROR and SHOCK TREATMENT), this movie is an underrated oddball masterpiece. It sadly confirms that Richard O’Brien’s remarkable voice as a filmmaker is one we must always lament having heard so grievously little from. While Mr. O’Brien remains a regularly working character actor whose appearance always lights up a picture, he has (with one or two extremely minor and marginal exceptions not even worth naming) not written, directed or scored a movie since SHOCK TREATMENT opened and closed to boos, hisses and catcalls. (And though Jim Sharman, the director he worked with on SHOCK TREATMENT, provides a commentary track, Mr. O’Brien, most tellingly, does not.)
Jessica Harper fills the Janet Role
In fact, it’s only as a sequel to ROCKY HORROR that SHOCK TREATMENT does clearly fail. First, the casting issues: the absence of Tim Curry and his iconic Frank N. Furter is a serious problem, and though replacing Susan Sarandon with Jessica Harper is a fair trade in terms of star power (at this late date, when many of us have fallen in love with the sadly underexposed Ms. Harper as the lead in Argento’s SUSPIRIA), it’s not likely to endear this picture to ROCKY HORROR fans. (Though YOUNG ONES fans among them should be happy about a young Rik Mayall’s cameo as singer for “punk” band Oscar Drill and the Bits.) And while the songs in SHOCK TREATMENT are pretty good, none could ever inspire the kind of obsessive fascination that generates underground hits like “Time Warp” and “Sweet Transvestite.”
SHOCK TREATMENT also sheds the Gothic nudie stylings that structurally guided ROCKY HORROR to satirize larger targets than sleazy cinematic subgenres; in SHOCK TREATMENT, American suburban society and values, and most particularly our television, come under direct and continuous comic fire (rather than taking it all at a remove, through cookie cutter everycouple Brad and Janet). O’Brien and company unfortunately seem to have failed to understand that the audience that unexpectedly fell in love with their first picture did so in part because of its distinctive in-references to cinematic sleaze that was no longer itself available for comparison. Nudie Gothic horror movies were way out of fashion in the mid-‘80s. For the most part they weren’t even available on home video, and they sure weren’t playing on TV, even on late night cable; and that huge unexpected recurrent midnight crowd, which I was a part of, took the whole proto-Goth aspect of ROCKY HORROR straight, and to heart. (To discover later that eroticized castle Gothics poured out of every corner of Europe into American theaters and drive-ins throughout the ‘60s and early ‘70s, a “cultural heritage” currently cluttering the catalogs of dozens of hip DVD labels, was one of the great pleasures of my life.)
"Are You Comfortable?"
But SHOCK TREATMENT has strengths that outweigh any flaws, starting with a script built on one of the weirdest and most advanced narrative conceits I’ve ever seen sustained at this length. The whole movie takes place on a soundstage, where all the programming for small-town TV station DTV is produced before a live audience. This audience always remain in their seats, while the cast members move from show to show, or rather the show being taped and broadcast before the audience rapidly changes, predicated by the changing circumstances of the characters/cast members, who make various “guest appearances” in each show. Various phases in the story place Brad and/or Janet in game shows, medical dramas, variety shows, etcetera, each of which we glimpse as the narrative, um, drops by or travels through. (For instance, when Brad as a mental patient is transferred from one hospital to another, it’s actually a new “series.”)
It’s very hard to explain how this joke works, or how well it works; the only thing it really reminded me of was the Firesign Theater’s early work—nothing else is so intelligent and rich, so careful and advanced, as satire and comedy and yet so thoroughly and obviously drug-addled (like Altman’s POPEYE, this movie’s tone maintains a cocaine stridency that could easily annoy someone else as much as it amused me). Many elements recalled that cultish comedy troupe: the dazzling wordplay, the radio show music cues, the touches of maniacal surrealism. The Firesign Theater once notoriously cited their primary influences as the Marx Brothers and James Joyce, and some similarly eclectic equation is at work here—though the comparison occurred to me so frequently and forcefully, I have to assume O’Brien and Sharman rank The Firesign Theater high on their own roster of common influences.
HMO's have CLEARLY lowered the standards of healthcare.
This is another reason the ROCKY HORROR audience are the last people who are likely to embrace this sequel: the clarity of its sharp intelligence and satirical agenda. ROCKY HORROR is also advanced satire, but part of the ROCKY HORROR “joke” was that its imitations of Gothic nudie clichés and other bad filmmaking reflexes were so accurate, the intent of the filmmakers was hard to gauge. We liked to invest the movie with a certain self-awareness, but ROCKY HORROR is quite coy, really, when examined from this angle, and none of us could be quite sure whether O’Brien and company were really winking at us; they might have just gotten something in their metaphoric eye. By stark contrast, while the manic tone is similar, intent in SHOCK TREATMENT is firm and steady, clearly the work of a mad genius but one in full control. (Serious satire for some reason always flew right past American audiences in the early ‘80s, which is strange because it was a time rich in specific examples: PENNIES FROM HEAVEN and BUCKAROO BANZAI occur immediately to my mind.)
In SHOCK TREATMENT, O’Brien and his collaborators (including co-writer and director Sharman, who must be really sick of getting shouldered aside in the rush among critics to auteurize O’Brien, whenever we write about this movie) operate heavy narrative machinery with a dizzying deftness of touch that left the entirety of the huge hip audience that flocked to its opening weekend befuddled (not unlike the wild shift from violent electric noise to quiet moody acousticisms between their second and third albums that utterly alienated The Velvet Underground’s first fledgling cult following).
The way this piece I’m writing has developed an ungainly structural skew toward a different movie that I’m supposedly not writing about, only emphasizes the issue SHOCK TREATMENT has always had in finding its own audience. Who are they, the ones who will love this movie? Maybe it’s the “cool” people with “good” taste who never loved ROCKY HORROR; maybe what’s necessary is viewers who, like me, have sadly outgrown or mislaid their love of the original O’Brien picture And so the problem remains the same, 25 years later: how do you urge someone to see a sequel to a movie they don’t like, on the grounds that they’ll probably dig the sequel, because they don’t dig the original? I just can’t think of an analogous example anywhere in the cinema, which only underlines how unique and special this movie is. Taken together, the two Richard O’Brien pictures place him on an aesthetic pedestal that’s just not quite the same height as anyone else’s. 
[Pictures courtesy of http://www.rhps.org/]
