Rocky Horror Picture Show Bluray Review

The Rocky Horror Picture Show has always been a kind of guilty pleasure dating back to my teenage days and featured in am-dram music magazines inspired by it because performance rights were always strictly reserved for professional productions until March 2000.

The original theatrical show opened in London in the summer of 1973 at the Royal Court’s Theater Upstairs, which ironically only had seating for 63 people, as the subsequent 1975 film adaptation holds the record for the longest-running theatrical release in the history of the cinema and must now have been seen by audiences of untold millions around the world ensuring its continued cult following.

Having watched the movie religiously as a kid on a worn videotape and owning at least 3 versions of the soundtrack on vinyl by the time it came out on DVD marking its 25th anniversary in 2001, I had turned 30 and now despised it a bit. , a dirty little secret from my past in which I was ashamed to have invested so much time; Simon Pegg expressed my feelings exactly in the second episode of Spaced: “It’s an excruciating perversion for sexually repressed accountants and freshman theater students” and for the better part of a decade I’ve forgotten. .

However, my wife is an occasional viewer of Glee and by chance I saw the recent Rocky Horror Show themed episode marking its 35th anniversary and its release on Blu-ray and found my interest curiously piqued enough to want to see if a hidef makeover would dramatically improve the notoriously low-budget, near-home movie quality of the movie. He also wanted to revisit him to assess whether he was truly morally unsuitable for the sweet, virginal members of the Glee Club, as the producers of the series would have them believe, or whether this was simply an assignment in an attempt to preserve his ‘wicked kudos’ for future generations of camp devotees.

I’m happy to report that the 1080p MPEG-4 AVC encoding is remarkable, considering the last time I saw Rocky Horror it was on video; What always strikes me is the impact of Patricia Quinn’s now signature reds and lips in the opening credits have never looked so luscious. The DTS-HD 7.1 soundtrack doesn’t fare so well, while it displays songs beautifully, the dialogue in comparison looks thin and metallic, but luckily there’s also a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track which I found preferable.

It’s worth noting the myriad of extras here, an excellent commentary from writer / star Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff), and all the feature films from the 25th Anniversary DVD are included, but the featured hidef exclusive is Picture-in-Picture. ‘shadowcast’ that recreates the entire program shot on a glorious 1080p / 24 HDCAM camera with the option to toggle the frame to fill the screen; that’s how the Glee episode should have been rather than a bland homage that seemed to lose all meaning of the original by replacing the songs’ bolder lines with banal alternatives.

I hope that the Glee version will inspire new audiences to discover what it was that attracted me to The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a teenager, it encapsulates both a sexual awakening and a loss of innocence and if nothing else it encourages young and inquisitive minds to think outside. the box and embrace diversity, ultimately living by the concise final refrain “Don’t dream, be it.”

It also captures Tim Curry’s prominent charismatic turn as the alien Dr. Frank-N-Furter and benefits from the inclusion of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the naive All-American couple, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss. I suspect it’s yet another symptom of hitting 40, but after having rejected it for so long, I felt a genuine warm glow of nostalgia as I watched, but not enough to make me want to get up and do the ‘Time Warp’ again.