That was the main reason to watch it – it was like crowd-sourced MST3K. I’ve seen it a few times with crowds in different cities, and it was kind of fascinating seeing what lines were well known in different areas, people bringing different flavors of jokes to the film.
I saw a community stage production around Halloween a few years ago with a terrific Frank, and it was definitely a lot more engaging than the film version. The crowd watched quietly for the first 1/3, but after a while people started yelling jokes out, which the cast would react to – very unique and lots of fun.
Bringing Zelazny in here - I just handed an Amber collection (of the first, best five) to my pre-teen son last week, he’s loving it!
Being busy living instead of hypnotised by this “Golden Age of Television™”. To each their own, but it saddens me that of the eight series you name in your very representative list, six of them are extremely violent, in fact violence is essentially their subject. Maybe seven, I don’t know what The Firm is.
See, that kind of audience participation, I can get behind: like a pantomime, where the performers give energy to the audience, who return it to the performers. It’s not suitable for, say, Twelve Angry Men, but for a show where the performers are ready for it, I can see that being enjoyable.
I just don’t see the point of yelling out lines at a screen that can’t react to them.
It was kind of awkward at first – they made it clear that it was OK to yell stuff, but nobody wanted to be the first. So after a little while some folks started yelling out jokes (I realized later they were cast members who’d snuck in and ‘planted’ the audience) and things picked up quickly.
For the same reason that MST3K / Rifftrax is funny. Mocking a movie by adding onto it, commenting on silly things going on, etc. Riffing on a film is a time honored tradition!
I don’t know what’s wrong with you all, Rocky Horror is a brilliant and subversive film!
But granted it’s entire look is probably quite a bit dated by now. Just the fact that it’s a movie musical makes it dated.
Still, there are so many things I love about it: I love how everybody is so over-the-top, especially Tim Curry. I love how the plot is so bizarre and makes no sense at all, yet makes perfect sense within the odd world it exists in. And I love how Meat Loaf comes out to sing a song, then is axe-murdered before he even finishes singing it (then later served as dinner)!
And most of all, I love how it was clearly made by lovers of old horror and science fiction movies. It takes all of those old tropes from monster films and sends them up in such a fun, goofy, un-self-conscious way. If you’re not a lover of those old horror films, or cheesy musicals, you’re unlikely to love it as much.
You have a point, but I think the idea is that it gives you a sense of community with others in the audience that you don’t have when you watch it at home.
I was really into that aspect of the film for a while: as a teenager in the 80s, I had a vinyl album that had been recorded in the NYC theater where they yell shit at the screen during the film. The album had the entire movie along with the audience participation lines in it, and it also included the transcript to the audience’s part. I listened to that album and read the transcript so many times that I knew all of the audience’s lines by heart! It was fun but after a while it got boring and repetitive to do it during the midnight movie showings.
Eh. Sounds too much like Mass for me. Don’t get me wrong: I loved the singing bits, and somewhat enjoyed the storytelling bits, but chanting back the same words as everyone else, because that’s the part that’s supposed to come next, didn’t fill me with a sense of community, but rather a sense of having any earnest response subsumed into the rote recitation of the collective.
