Anyone Seen The Remake?

Unfortunately.


Okay, to be fair, they TRIED. The opening number was nice and it was cute that they tried to inter-cut some audience participation into it. They had an occasional bit of cleverness (at the dinner scene they have Colombia comment "I hope it's not meatloaf again!" It was nice that they got Tim to play the Criminologist/Narrator, but it was just so horribly miscast. Brad, Janet, Rocky and Riff-Raff were the best of the lot. Magenta and Colombia were just painful to watch/listen to. And Frank.....

*sigh*

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Laverne Cox. And I know no one could ever compare to Tim Curry's Frank. But it was just a pale, feeble shadow of the original. There were moments when she was funny, but despite the production value it just came off like a community theater version of Rocky Horror, and not even a good one at that. It was too sanitized...for lack of a better word. The raunch was very toned down, and they even explicitly stated Frank to be a WOMAN. Which is weird, since they kept the lyric "I'm not much of a man, by the light of day.", but outright refer to Frank as she/her...thereby completely eliminating the male/male aspects. Frank X Rocky, Frank X Eddie, Frank X Brad is thus now a heterosexual relationship in this version, and Frank X Janet is lesbian and thus the only gay content (because I guess on public television lesbians are hot, but two guys together are icky....) Though we got a 'near' kiss between Brad and Rocky during Rose Tint my world.

There were some amusing moments; the original parts were good. They revived the usherette character from the musical that was dropped for the film. She was inspired. They kept the song, Superheroes which was edited out of the original after a few showings but it was still superfluous. Didn't like a characterization of Columbia; she came of as bored and 'emo' which was not the Columbia we all know and love. Finally, I thought Laverne Cox as Frank N. Furter didn't make much sense to me. She's a fabulous personality but a female drag queen is not who Frank N Furter is. I couldn't get past that, honestly.

I watched it and was actually kind of excited to see what they'd do with it, but throughout most of it I was wrinkling my nose up in distaste.

A woman as Frank doesn't work. A woman could play Frank if she was pretending to be a man dressed in drag. But that's not what they did. In the second half of this thing they kept calling Frank "her". The problem with that is it invalidates the song lyrics for Sweet Transvestite and for Columbia's part of Time Warp. "A snake of a guy gave me an evil wink. He shook me up, he took me by surprise, he had a pick-up truck and the devil's eyes."

The costumes were another problem. The corset and stilettos is iconic in this movie, yet I doubt "Frank" ever wore a corset even once throughout the entire thing. When she makes her entrance it looks like she's wearing some kind of showgirl outfit. Then there was having Rocky dressed in basketball shorts that went down to his knees. They finally had him dressed the way he should have been dressed throughout the whole movie in the floor show when he should have been wearing a corset and stilettos. I think Brad may have been the only one who was actually wearing one but it was gold. Everyone was wearing different gold outfits in the floor show.

The casting was pretty bad. Ben Vereen [who I didn't even recognize] played Dr. Scott and he was terrible. He acted like he was sniffing glue before he went on stage to perform. Columbia was a walking corpse. Magenta was awful. And while a lot of people seemed to think the guy playing Brad was good, to me it sounded like at times he was stumbling over his words as he read his lines off of a cue card.

I thought the guy playing Riff-Raff brought the creepy factor to the role. And Victoria Justice had a much stronger singing voice than Susan Sarandon. And it was sad to see how bad Tim Curry's health is.

Yeah, I was against the very idea for all of the many years it's been proposed, so I went in very prejudiced! But I also said in my comments that I would admit if I was wrong, if I liked it even a little bit. I actually couldn't've imagined it was going to be that BAD!

First off they couldn't get past mis-casting a woman as Frank. Period. It was cooked then.

I agree the Usherette opening, although tweaked from what she did in the stage play, was about the only clever bit of the whole thing. And the "meatloaf" line. But I could sit at this keyboard all day and not really find anything else convincingly positive to say.

Cox was atrocious, singing and over-acting, accents and enunciation and even dancing, except for the Tina Turner bit at the end. Everyone else tried to IMITATE almsot every line and nuance of the original actors, except as said elsewhere, the mopey Columbia and the spastic Magenta. Columbia's classic "You chew people up and then you spit them out again..." scene was jaw-droppingly BAD! Painful.

You know how people say "I'll watch the original again to wash this out of my eyes."? I literally did that!

I tried, but it was so terrible I had to turn it off. It completely missed the point of the original. I hate how Frank is now a transgender instead of a transvestite and my favorite scene from the original was completely wrong: Frank being lowered on a crane and wearing that stupid mask was just ridiculous. I couldn't sit through anymore after that, seeing a beloved classic that I've watched for so many years being butchered before my very eyes. Ugh... they should have just left it alone.

Horror_Metal

It sucked.

I thought it was ok. A remake was never going to be as good anyway. I wasn't a huge fan of the casting. Laverne as Frank was mediocre. She definitely tried to put her own spin on the character. Keyword "tried" but you could even tell in certain scenes she was just imitating Tim Curry. The guy who played Brad was fine I guess. Victoria justice was actually somewhat better than Sarandon as Janet and it helped she could already sing not that Sarandon doesen't have a good voice it's just a bit too Minnie Mouse for me when she sings I feel like. Riff Raff I thought was horrible. Mainly due to the fact he was literally trying to be Richard O Brien and that really irked me. I kept wanting to yell at him "you're not Richard stop trying to be". Magenta wasn't very good. The actress played her very strangely and I really didn't like it. Columbia was ok as well,but when she did the wide eyed thing it looked like she was scared of something. Adam lambert was pretty good as Eddie I thought and it helped I liked his music already. Ben vereen was fine,but I felt like he was trying to be more Einstein than Dr Scott. Tim curry was fantastic as always even though he couldn't do much. Rocky was fine too I guess. My biggest problem with it was it was almost literally a shot by shot remake. They did nothing new to make this one stand out.

It was awful. Just awful. More than that, it was a bad idea in general. There are some things you just can't touch, and RHPS is one of them. The 1975 film is iconic, particularly Tim Curry's performance. Nothing can touch that - the movie has a cult following for good reason and one of the most disappointing things about the remake was, in my opinion, Tim Curry's involvement because he knows that, and I was really uncomfortable watching his "post-stroke" performance because it left me wondering if he'd be doing it otherwise. The creators of the remake did him no favors by casting him in that train wreck and if they'd had any respect for him, they wouldn't have involved him at all. They obviously didn't understand what the original was saying and didn't take into account, not only how formidable the original performers were, but the time in which the film was made. Every aspect of RHPS is a product of the mid 1970s, from the visuals like the clothing, lighting and color scheme to what was (at the time) an envelope-pushing, cardiac arrest-inducing spectacle. That movie took the long, hard road to acceptance, it did not happen easily or overnight and I really felt like the remake shouldn't have happened solely because of that. There's no way to make another that's as good, it's not possible to make another that's better, so the only alternatives are to make something that doesn't measure up (which is what happened) or make nothing at all (which is what should have happened).


.........

I was just wondering what your thoughts were.I know it won't be a patch on the original.