B Plus Movies

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the queen mother of all midnight/cult/b movies. Combining the elements of sci-fi, kinky sex and rock and roll, watching this movie is a religious experience for some, a point of self discovery for others. The addition of audience participation rose it to a new level, but even on its own, RHPS is a gem of bizarre cinema. Reviewing it would be like reviewing the Bible as literature: praise it and I’m preaching to the choir, rag on it and I rankle the fanatics and get agreement only from those who already do not hold the work as sacred.

But did you know it had… a sequel? It’s called Shock Treatment, and that’s what I’m reviewing today.

Richard O’Brien wrote a couple of sequels to The Rocky Horror Picture Show that never got made, due to some of the original cast not being available. My guess is also that the studios involved were reluctant to try to market O’Brien’s mind onto the general public. This is probably why Shock Treatment was released straight to the “midnight movie” circuit in 1981.

The cast of Shock Treatment has a lot in common with the RHPS even if the roster of characters doesn’t. Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff of the first film) plays a demented doctor and Patricia Quinn (Magenta) plays his assistant while Nell Campbell (Columbia) plays a nurse. Charles Gray (The Criminologist and bond villain Blofeld) plays a Judge. The characters that do return include Brad and Janet, but they are played by different actors, Cliff de Young and Jessica Harper, respectively.

The story begins with Brad and Janet getting on a game show called Marriage Maze. Brads nerves are shot because of his experiences from the first movie and very soon, the couple finds out the show is more than they expected. Brad ends up in a padded room wearing a straitjacket while Janet gets whisked away under the promise of stardom, fame and the freedom to be as self centered as she wants to be. Eventually they learn this is all orchestrated by the head of the studio and soon Brad must confront that unseen hand directly.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was written by O’Brien as a result of him questioning his sexual identity. While not always apparent on the surface, the RHPS carries this subtext throughout and has subtle layers to explore behind the music and fishnets. Likewise,  Shock Treatment seems to be a commentary on life in the late 70’s and early 80’s, when shallowness was promoted as lifestyle and suburban sensibilities were starting to butt up against the culture of New York and LA in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Shock Treatment takes a look at topics as varied as celebrity, drug use, traditional gender roles and televangelists, presenting these commentaries to both the audience in the theater and the audience within the movie, the film mostly being set in an expansive TV studio. There’s a lot of surreality to this film and for people expecting an extension of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment is a bizarre jolt that is at the same time less controversial yet more challenging.

The film’s music is not quite as infectious as “The Time Warp” or “Sweet Transvestite”, staying more pop than rock and even flirting with country and western. The songs work well to move the narrative along but with a few exceptions, you won’t find yourself humming them afterward the way many did after hearing “Dammit, Janet”.

This movie seemed to be built with the hope that the audience participation that sprung up in front of it’s predecessor would grow in front of this one, too. Pauses are left after easily twistable phrases are spoken and often the actors are framed looking straight at the camera, prompting the audience for a response almost. The problem with that is the live portion of the Rocky experience  started organically and of its own; you can’t force lightning to strike twice.

Shock Treatment  can stand alone, though even if you’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the sequel is a little confusing. While I didn’t think it was a waste of time and I was happy to gain the movie geek status point of being able to say I’ve seen it, Shock Treatment isn’t a must see for the film fanatic but more of an interesting note in the saga of the Midnight Movie phenomenon in general. For a while, it was available in a 2-pack with the RHPS and if you see them together, I definitely suggest picking them up. I’m just not sure I’d tell anyone “Dude, you have to watch this.”

Shock Treatment gets a C from me, which may be slightly lower because of the high standard against which I think it is set. If you lived through the early 80’s, you’ll get more out of it than otherwise and if you’re already the sort that dresses up in fishnets and cries “slut” every time you see Susan Serandon, then you’ll see this flick on another level as well. It may not be your favorite movie, but the only way you’ll walk out of this feeling completely disappointed is if you expect it to be like seeing Rocky all over again.

Because after all, you can only be a virgin once.

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, mostly revolving around the idea of society reacting to technologies coming at us so fast that we’re unable to comprehend their impact fully before we have to become proficient in their use. Generally, cyberpunk drew upon dystopian visions of the future along with the symbolism of replacing body parts, either with bionic or artificial organic parts, representing man’s descent into inhumanity when confronted with the pressures of living in the modern world. Cyberpunk was also declared dead by one it’s finest authors, Neal Stephenson.

I have to wonder what he thinks of Repo: The Genetic Opera.

The world of Repo: The Genetic Opera is one in which organ failure is a common and ubiquitous problem, the same as bad vision or wisdom teeth might be today. Necessity being the mother of invention, a company is born which produces designer organs which first are a medical miracle but soon become a fashion statement. The problem is that organs are expensive and most have to buy them on credit. If you default on too many payments, they do more than wreck your credit rating: they send the Repo Man to come collect their property.

Enter Shilo (played by Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids trilogy), a young girl who has grown up to the age of 17 constantly hampered by a blood disease, inherited from her mother. She is guarded by her father day and night (played by Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). As a parent and doctor, he provides as safe world as he can for Shilo, but cannot tell her that he has another occupation. He is a Repo Man, the one the company calls directly when important organs must be taken from important people.

Adding to this melodramatic tragedy in the making is the family who runs the organ making company, GeneCo. They are composed of the cruel family head, the rage filled eldest son, the face-stealing younger son and the scandalous, wannabe singer daughter (played by Paris Hilton… what a stretch). There’s also a grave robber who gets drugs out of the brains of corpses, an opera singer (played by Sarah Brightman) who has effectively sold herself to GeneCo and a whole parade of scarred, gun toting figures to fill out this violently surreal setting.

Did I mention it’s a musical?

With its Wagnerian scope, Shakespearean themes and George Romero-esque imagery,  Repo: The Genetic Opera was either going to be awful or awesome. I prepared myself for awful. Which may be why I got awesome.

From the first moments actors start taking the screen, I couldn’t look away. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t believe what they were showing me. Sometimes it was because I couldn’t wait to see what was next. But scene after scene, the movie kept throwing visuals at me that stunned and amazed backed by music that flowed with the story and didn’t, as it does in so many musicals, seem tacked on.

The highlights for me were Blind Meg/Sarah Brightman, who played her role flawlessly as well as the Grave Robber, who serves as the story’s narrator in addition to being a playful yet morbid in-story purveyor of recycled drugs.

This is a movie bound to produce strong reactions, the sort of film that must have the right sort of gallows humor to enjoy or at least have a strong stomach to experience. There were some choices that the director made that might lose those not attracted by the imagery: the pace of the movie is a little off in the first third of the film, for instance. Part of the story is also told with flashbacks and drawings where one might expect a movie with “opera” in the title to tell these plot points in song. The movie is not flawless, sorry to say.

But I wasn’t hoping for flawless. I was hoping for B+.

Repo: The Genetic Opera may not revive cyberpunk as a genre, but it certainly does suggest that it lives on in the sick imaginations of at least two screenwriters. If the movie gains the cult status that it truly deserves, those imaginations have suggested the possibility of a prequel and a sequel. I hope this movie gets the attention required for those projects and that, like this one, they hit that perfect balance of bizarre and watchable that so many would-be cult films fail to achieve.

To make a long commentary one question and answer longer, is Repo: The Genetic Opera B+? You bet your mortgaged liver it is.