Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: Newly engaged Brad Majors (Ryan McCartan) and Janet Weiss (Victoria Justice) are on their way to announce their engagement to their former science teacher, Dr. Scott (Ben Vereen), when their car breaks down. Seeking shelter from the rain, they enter the the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Laverne Cox) on a rather special night: she, along with her cohorts Riff-Raff (Renee Carvey), Magenta (Christina Milian), and Columbia (Annaleigh Ashford) are preparing to create life. The creation comes to life as Rocky (Staz Nair), a semi-mute muscle man who kicks off a crazy string of events involving aliens, mad science, a jump to the left, and a step to the right.

Review: The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do The Time Warp Again was a downgrade from the original in every conceivable way, which is putting it mildly. Apart from the lackluster performances, both acting and musically, there was a sense of cheapness about the whole thing. Frank-N-Furter’s castle no longer has scores of guests that the made it feel in the original like the greatest party you’ve ever seen, instead having barely twenty people in attendance. The sets and effects are equally lackluster, like the set designers were just going through the motions and trying as little as possible.

The performances are cringeworthy through and through. Laverne Cox and Ryan McCartan seem like they’re doing impressions of the ones who came came before without any of their own charisma. Victoria Justice sounds like she’s straining to hit reedy vocals that are out of her range. Ben Vereen comes off like he went off his meds and has all the wrong reactions to everything around him. By far, though, the absolute worst is Annaleigh Ashford as Columbia, who reads her lines with an astounding level of disinterest and lack of emotion.

And then there’s Tim Curry, who brings a rather… uncomfortable elephant in the room. For those who don’t know, Tim Curry suffered a stroke in 2012 which left him in a wheelchair and with slowed speech. While it’s a neat callback to cast him as the Criminologist (a narrator type figure), it serves as an uncomfortable reminder of his condition when he has trouble with his lines or when he can’t do the Time Warp during the song. Because of that, of course, they added the very unnecessary role of his assistant (Jayne Eastwood), who adds nothing and has no character, therefore is a waste of money.

The astonishing lack of energy brought the whole affair further down. At no point did I feel like dancing to any of the songs, which came at a rapid fire pace since the filmmakers decided to remove the pauses that let audience members shout things at the screen, as is custom at many Rocky Horror events. The choreographer is Kenny Ortega, who worked with Michael Jackson, but also choreographed the High School Musical movies. It seems he brought the mindset from the latter because these are some truly uninspired dancers in numbers that were equally listless.

This is the most pointless remake since Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho; at least an argument could be made that the latter was done to show the pointlessness of remakes. It feels more like an insult to the original rather than a celebration, fraught with lazy decisions throughout. The Rocky Horror Picture Show will endure onwards as it has, playing around every Halloween on some network and being shown at midnight to interactive audiences, many of which I attended in college. This, on the other hand, is destined to be forgotten, lost in time and lost in space… and meaning.

Fun Tidbit: Attempts to do a remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have been going on for decades. Fox wanted to get one done by 2003 for the film’s 30th anniversary and even MTV tried their hand at it in 2008. The scary part is that this version was the one that made it off the ground.