Shock Treatment (1981)

I first heard about the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a movie magazine or book back in the mid to late 70s.  During my sophomore year of high school, some of my fellow members of the SC Chorale had seen the movie and loved it.  I assume they saw it at a midnight show in Huntington, because the film had not yet played Charleston.  At one point it was going to be brought in as part of the WV Cultural Center’s film festival, but somehow a bunch of politicians allowed themselves to be deceived by some local religious leaders into believing that the film was a porno.  The truth of the matter is that these moral guardians, who later decided to also protest Monty Python’s Life of Brian, didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.  They were fresh out of the recent textbook burnings where schools were picketed and children pulled out over textbooks that these people found offensive, and they had heard the film had some g-a-y themes and a song called Sweet Transvestite.  The Cultural Center ended up caving in and pulled the film from its festival.

The same friends that had seen Rocky Horror also carried with them the cassette of the original soundtrack album, so long before I ever got to see the movie, I knew all the songs.  I eventually go to see the film on one of the last nights I was attending a workshop for student journalists in Athens, Ohio.  A little theater in the college town was playing the film and a group of us who had come to call ourselves The Unicorps got in line and had the time of our lives.  There was Pat Murphy, Steve Bates, Kurt Kleiner, Linda Inman, Gena Gallagher, and several others screaming along and singing with the movie.  It was an amazing night in 1980.

I don’t recall when or where I first heard about the sequel to Rocky Horror, but one week I found out that Park Place Cinema 7 was going to be playing Shock Treatment on their midnight movies.  I was ecstatic.  Then I saw the film.  It was nothing like Rocky Horror in many ways.  The plot and the setting and most of the characters were completely different.  It was brand new, so there wasn’t a loyal cult following and no one had any clever lines to shout at the screen.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it because it wasn’t what I expected and wanted.  I did pick up the soundtrack album once I found a copy, but the movie only stayed one more night before it disappeared.  It wasn’t until years later that Key Video finally released the film on VHS.  I bought a used copy and gave it a second viewing.  I liked it a little bit better.  Several years passed and I pulled it out again and watched the tape.  The film still wasn’t available on DVD, so that was my only option.  I watched it and liked it a lot more.  Knowing not to expect Rocky Horror Strikes Back, I was able to enjoy the film for just what it was; a fun film with a great soundtrack.

I think one of the other reasons I may have been more taken with Shock Treatment on these later viewing might have had something to do with the fact that Jessica Harper was one of the stars and had several musical numbers.  I was a fan of her work and songs in Phantom of the Paradise, so this was like a hybrid sequel for me.  It was part RHPS sequel and part extension of Phantom.  Either way, I was hooked.  Eventually 20th Century Fox decided to release the film to DVD.  They released it as a single disc and as part of a 3 disc Rocky Horror/Shock Treatment box set.  The box set was all I could initially find, so I snapped up a copy.  Later I found the single disc edition at Wal-Mart for $5 and I grabbed it as well. 

I had been thinking a lot about the songs in Shock Treatment, and so I decided to make it one of my last of the year DVDs.  I popped in the disc from the box set and settled in.  I know the film uses color saturation and video style footage, but it seemed a little off for some reason.  I think my television may be going bad or need adjusted. 

The plot concerns Brad and Janet (Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper) returning to their hometown of Denton after being married.  The town of Denton has now been turned into a big television studio where all the residents either appear in the shows DTV broadcasts, or they sit in the audience watching it live.  Richard O’Brien, Patrician Quinn, Nell Campbell, and Charles Gray all return in different roles.  Jeremy Newson returns as Ralph Hapschatt although with a different actress (Ruby Wax) as his now estranged wife Betty Hapschatt.  Imogen Claire who played a Transylvanian in Rocky Horror also has a small part as the wardrobe mistress.  In addition to Janet’s parents, two British celebrities, Barry Humphries and Rik Mayall, also join the cast as Bert Schnick and Ricky.  It’s a little odd getting used to the new characters at first, but they are all easily as eccentric as the characters in Rocky Horror.  Another important character is Farley Flavors, also played by De Young.

Farley engineers for Brad and Janet to be called down as contestants on the Marriage Maze.  Once on the show, Brad is taken to Dentonvale for psychiatric evaluation while Janet is groomed to become a star as the host of Farley’s new show Faith Factory.  Who is Farley Flavors?  Why does he want to destroy Brad Majors and take Janet away from him?  The answer is that he is Brad’s long-lost twin brother who took a different turn in life.

I have grown to love Shock Treatment over the years and like others have stated, I actually find I prefer the music in Shock Treatment over the music from Rocky Horror.  It is definitely one of my all time favorite soundtracks along with Phantom of the Paradise, Streets of Fire, Magnolia, and Bugsy Malone.  I don’t think there is a bum song in the entire movie.  Shock Treatment gets 3 1/2 stars and one of those stars is purely for the music.

Brad and Janet

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (2005)

I can’t recall if I had heard of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before I saw the book or not, but I remember exactly where I purchased the book.  It was in the book department of the old Diamond department store in downtown Charleston.  The Diamond was across the street from the J. C. Penney.  The Diamond didn’t have a toy department as far as I can remember, but they had a book department, and it was on the shelves of said book department in 1980 that I first found a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  It was a slightly undersized hardcover book with a dust jacket featuring a smiling green planet sticking out its tongue and waving its hands beside its head like a pair of antlers.  In the foreground was an extreme closeup of a hand with its thumb out in classic hitching form.  The hand was much bigger than the planet, but the planet is what really stuck out in my mind.  I paid the $6.95 plus tax and took the book home with me to read.  I was delighted and quickly recommended the book to my friends Pat Murphy, Kurt Kleiner and Steve Bates.  They returned the favor by introducing me to Venus on the Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout, Titan by John Varley, and Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.  All four of these books are still in my library.  The one thing I regret never picking up was the Starship Troopers bookcase game.  I remember watching Pat and Kurt play it, but I never did figure it out.

Sometime after reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I also picked up The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  It didn’t make nearly the impression on me that Hitchhiker’s Guide had.  Our local PBS began airing the television series which I also enjoyed.  As a Doctor Who fan I was especially pleased that Peter Davidson had a small role in the series as The Dish of the Day.  A few years later I found the record albums of the radio show at Camelot music and snatched them up.  Fast forward ahead about a quarter of a century and Hollywood was getting ready to release a major motion picture based on the book.  I was initially very excited, but initial response that I heard was less than enthusiastic.  I wasn’t happy with some of the designs I had seen (Zaphod’s two heads), and Mos Def as Ford Prefect seemed a very odd, and to my mind, incorrect choice.  Ford Prefect was an English guy, not a hip hop guy from New York.  I really hadn’t pictured Ford as a black guy, but if they wanted to go that route, then why not cast Lenny Henry?  I ended up not seeing the movie and it was even quite a while before I found a copy of the DVD and bought it.  The DVD went on the shelf and I never brought it out to watch.

I’m not sure what caused me to start thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I decided that it might be time to pop it in and give it a chance.  It had Sam Rockwell in it, and he hadn’t let me down yet.  I had also gotten to become a little more acquainted with Mos Def thanks to Chappelle’s Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.  I also saw where Zooey Deschanel was in it, and she is so cute she brightens up any movie she is in.  I popped in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and tried to keep an open mind.

Martin Freeman was quite good as Arthur Dent and Mos Def surprised me at how perfect he was for Ford Prefect.  Hearing Stephen Fry as the narrator and voice of the guide worked nicely for me as well.  I remembered the early parts of the novel quite well with the demolition crew showing up followed by Ford and the Vogons.  I wasn’t really happy with the change in how Ford solves the problem of the bulldozer, but have to admit that the change is actually more logical if slightly less absurd and therefore less funny. 

I had forgotten a large portion of everything that happened after Ford and Arthur left Earth which really bothered me.  I used to love that book.  I read it.  I watched the television show.  I listened to the records.  I even got to play the computer game once at Robin Breeden’s apartment.  How could I forget everything about the second half of the story?  Perhaps that was a good thing though.  Since I didn’t recall every detail of the original, it kept me less focused on the changes and the new material.  There were several things I was fairly certain were constructs just for the movie (like the fly swatters for when people have an idea on the Vogon home planet), but I couldn’t truly be certain.  Eventually I just had to decide one thing; how well did I enjoy the movie itself. 

To be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the movie.  The fly swatters bothered me, not because I thought they were added for the movie, but because I thought they were too silly.  I also wasn’t as pleased with the reunion of the crew and the discussion of the ultimate question.  I seem to recall this being much more satisfying in the book.  The rest of the ending with Marvin and the POV gun was enjoyable enough despite being telegraphed a mile away.  All in all, I liked the film and wish it had been successful enough to have the other books adapted as well.  I give The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 3 stars.  I’m sure it deserved at least 2 1/2, but the other 1/2 may have been nostalgia talking.  I miss The Diamond and the downtown Charleston of my youth.  I miss Pat, Steve, Kurt and all the rest of The Unicorps.  And I miss a time when a book like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could just pop up and surprise me.

Dark Star

Dark Star is a film that I can’t remember when I first heard about it, where I first heard about it, who first told me how great it was, and when I finally got to see it for the first time.  I recall seeing a few stills from the film in Starlog and I remember a couple of my friends carrying on about how funny the scenes were with Pinback feeding the alien.  Despite being made in 1974, I am certain I didn’t see Dark Star until high school.  I know it was definitely post Star Wars and Alien both of which were Junior High film going experiences.  My best recollection is that Pat Murphy and Steve Bates were the ones telling me (and fellow Unicorps member Kurt Kleiner) about the film during my sophomore year of high school.  I know I bought the Alan Dean Foster novelization and the edition I bought had a 1979 printing date as well as a blurb promoting Foster as the author of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.  The greater mystery is when did I actually get to see the film.  My best guess is that it was probably one of the films I rented from Tronix or Captain Video when I first got my VCR.  What ever the official time, place and circumstances were, one thing I know for sure is that I went nuts for it.  

In high school, I went to a lot of movies and ran around with the S.C. Chorale.  But there was one other activity that ate up a bunch of my waking hours and that was playing D&D.  Dungeons & Dragons was my generations XBox 360.  Several of us played at least once a week, usually more.  One of the guys named his characters after characters from Lord of the Rings.  My characters were for the most part named after Dark Star.  I had a Pinback and a Boiler, but the character I loved to play was an Elven thief named Darsktar.  The name came to me while staring at the spine of the paperback on my book shelf.  Dark Star had inspired me.

It had been several years since I had last watched Dark Star and I had forgotten it was a John Carpenter film until I was watching the bonus features on Cigarette Burns.  I started thinking back on Dark Star and decided to revisit it.  The DVD I have features both the Special Edition and the uncut theatrical edition.  It seems that Dark Star stared as a student film that ran 68 minutes long.   Producer Jack H. Harris had the crew shoot an additional 15 minutes and then released that cut theatrically.  Later the filmmakers were given the chance to edit a Special Edition cut.  They did this by excising most of those 15 minutes.  I opted for the longer 83 minute cut for my viewing pleasure.

Dark Star is the story of five men in space blowing up unstable planets.  The captain ends up getting killed during a freak mishap, which was bad enough, but then an asteroid storm damages the communications systems and Bomb #20 starts getting false signals to detonate.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, another malfunction is preventing the crew from being able to actually eject the bomb.  Eventually it’s up to Lt. Doolittle to teach the bomb the concept of phenomenology to keep it from detonating and blowing up the ship.

Dark Star is a simple film with some amazing concepts.  Dan O’Bannon would take inspiration from parts of Dark Star when writing Alien.  Many of Carpenter’s musical cues are eerily similar to his later work on Halloween.  It is amazing to look at this film and remember that it was made by film students before Star Wars.

One other thing that I can’t forget when discussing Dark Star is the faux country western song Benson, Arizona.  I actually special ordered the vinyl soundtrack album from Varese Saraband while I was in high school.  I ordered it as well as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.  I listened to Dawn’s soundtrack incessantly, but I also became hooked on Benson, Arizona.  To this day I can not get that song out of my mind, and why would I want to? 

Dark Star is a 3 1/2 star guilty pleasure.