Film Review: The Rocky Horror Picture Show memorial screening
A special screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gives fans a chance to mourn Tim Curry in true cult style.
Technically all films belong on the cinematic reel of our historical consciousness, but some stick out more than others, existing under an assumption that they’ve been around forever and everyone knows them. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one such film, thanks to a killer glam-rock soundtrack, the ‘midnight movie’ marketing phenomenon, and its outrageously talented protagonist, Tim Curry.
I’m pretty sure when Curry died on August 25, the image that entered most people’s minds – instantly – was of him dressed in satin black underwear, garter belt clipped to fishnet stockings, glittery top and elbow-length gloves, ‘Boss’ shoulder tattoo with a dagger through a love heart, a thick string of pearls around his neck, his face painted with garish, drag-queen style make-up and that unmistakable bushy mop of black curls. This is Curry as we knew and loved him best: Dr Frank-N-Furter, aka Rocky Horror’s Sweet Transvestite, hands down one of the most iconic roles ever to hit either the stage or screen. To be clear, The Rocky Horror Show was first a stage musical production, opening in London, 1973, and the film adaptation in 1975 is called The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Curry starred in both.
The film didn’t make an immediate splash, despite the 1970s being known as a time for risky cinematic explorations of rebels and outcasts. But a musical about a group of aliens from Transexual Transylvania that turn a lost and unsuspecting, straight-edged couple into pansexuals? It might have been pushing it.
It started screening in 1976 as a midnight movie in the US, time slots generally reserved for low-budget, B-grade absurdist films, and it quickly gained a cult following. Fans showed up to theatres dressed as the characters, they heckled and talked back to the screen, they used props like squirt guns to simulate rain. It’s even true that someone once rode a motorbike down the aisle of a New Orleans cinema at the same time Meatloaf’s ‘Eddie’ rides his in the film. As time moved on, midnight movies lost their vim, but not so for Rocky Horror. Basically it’s showing in some city in the US every Friday and Saturday of the year. Here in Adelaide, the Capri and the Palace Nova hold screenings regularly on Halloween and Friday the 13ths. If you’ve never been, you’d be outed as a ‘virgin’, but the crowd of regulars will take good care of you.
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On Saturday night the Palace Nova Eastend screened The Rocky Horror Picture Show in two theatres (sadly at 7pm, not midnight). They provided guests with party bags that held various props, and at the beginning of the show, a cartoon figure told the audience what to expect, how to participate, how to behave and misbehave.
There were some ‘virgins’ in the room, but my guess is they’d seen and loved the film elsewhere and were in attendance, just as the regular offenders, to farewell Curry, a man who not only played one of the sexiest villains of all time, but who also saved lives. Imagine being a trans person in the 70s or 80s or any decade, hiding, feeling misunderstood or somehow wrong, and then seeing Curry in a corset, floating on a swimming ring in a pool singing ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’. Well, that’s the part in the screening where I cried, and I wasn’t alone. Still, the bawdy call-outs kept coming, even after he sang the song that accompanied most tributes to him on socials, the ‘sad song’ of the film: ‘I’m Going Home’.
In a way, being part of that audience was a like attending a local, public wake for Curry, and those two songs near the end of the film presented his fans with an opportunity to grieve while watching his art – how perfect! As the call-outs just kept coming, there were moments where some might think, Can you just please be quiet and let us have this moment?, only to remember that this is what the heart of Rocky Horror is. The movie is more than a movie, and that’s due to the fans who keep the rituals alive, show after show, year after year, costume after sequined costume. Would Curry have wanted the fun to stop just because his life had? How are we to ever know such a thing, but one thing I do know is that I’m completely stuck as to how to file this review away. Will I place it under film? Cabaret? Theatre? Art? Event?
Timothy James Curry, born in Cheshire, England, died at age 80 in Los Angeles, of coronary artery disease. He had kidney cancer, and spent the last twelve years of his life in a wheelchair following a major stroke. His final gift, despite some loss of control over his speech, was voicing the audiobook of his memoir Vagabond in October 2025, proving that he was a true performer until the end. His bio will read that he left no children behind, but having seen the generations of fans in attendance at the Palace Nova screening and recognising that this is only one small city in a world full of cities with devotees, young and old, I beg to differ.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was screened at Palace Nova Eastend on Friday September 4
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