Word: alienation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EVERY FRIDAY and Saturday nights, the entrances of hundreds of theaters across America are clogged with people who are there to see an obscure low-budget movie that features a mad scientist transvestite alien named after a hot dog (Dr. Frank N. Furter), a cryogenically-preserved '50s greaser (who escapes from his refrigerator and is, of course, hacked to death), an imitation Dr. Strangelove (who says things like, "This is, I presume, some kind of audio-vibratory molecular device"), and a narrator who has no neck. Besides a few of the uninitiated--called "virgins"--the audience has seen the movie...
...only veteran from the movie is costume director Sue "Yay Sue!" Blaine. Frank Gregory undulates admirably as Frank N. Furter, but the image of Tim Curry's entrancingly seductive performance remains etched in memory as the real thing; Pendleton Brown plays a fine Riff Raff, Furter's alien sidekick--although his dark hair seems somehow un-Riff Raffish to those accustomed to O'Brien's bald-eagle blond cranium. Rocky fans, who recognize the slightest deviation from the standard film version, will perhaps cringe at each "revisionist" inflection or gesture; but, unless in a savage mood to begin with--distinctly...
...film is quite another matter. John Hurt, last seen giving caesarean birth to a malignant Alien, plays Merrick in a grotesquely authentic foam latex mask that leaves the actor almost unrecognizable. Yet he captures Merrick's humanity through his eyes and his gestures, the way he reflexively straightens his tie when a nurse enters the room, the way his voice rises and falls in the fruity arpeggios of a Covent Garden tenor. Treves described Merrick as having "the brain of a man, the fancies of a youth and the imagination of a child," and Hurt inhabits this sweet-souled...
...scene, of course, was a rip-off of Alien, and it might even have been meant to parody the insufferable delivery scenes in other movies where everything comes out all right. But joke or no joke, how can anyone dissociate him/herself from the all-too-real pain? How can anyone with the slightest parental urge--or human decency--laugh at a delivery that ends in bloody death? And, given that laughter is a complex entity and could signal distress as well as pleasure, why was the reaction to the movie overwhelmingly, ecstatically favorable...
...scene, of course, was a rip-off of Alien, and it might even have been meant to parody the insufferable delivery scenes in other movies where everything comes out all right. But joke or no joke, how can anyone dissociate him/herself from the all-too-real pain? How can anyone with the slightest parental urge--or human decency--laugh at a delivery that ends in bloody death? And, given that laughter is a complex entity and could signal distress as well as pleasure, why was the reaction to the movie overwhelmingly, ecstatically favorable...