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The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again (2016)
A rocky horror. Period.
Contrary to popular belief amongst Hollywood producers, there are certain films that simply can't be remade. Works of art that has such an enormous impact on the audience that any attempt at tinkering with them are doomed to fail miserably.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show represents an era and a mindset so alien to the made-by-committee entertainment of today, it exists in a time warp – no pun intended. Not only did it feature rare talent in the cast and writers, but the music is solid gold – a superb set of rock'n'roll musicians performing some of the best glam rock anthems of the era. And the era truly was Glam. Platform shoes, screaming guitars and hedonism. The echoes of Freddy Mercury, David Bowie, Slade and Marc Bolan can all be heard in the halls of Rocky's mansion.
Along comes Kenny Ortega. A musical director who has branched off into movies, and has done fairly well for himself making High School Musical a hit for the talent-show generation. Surely, the producers thought, this must be the man to bring Rocky Horror to the current generation? The problem of course being that Rocky Horror doesn't have a generation. When you see the film for the first time you either get it, or you don't. Age doesn't matter. That is why the film is untouchable.
Ortega proceeds to tick all the right boxes, to please the American Idol-numbed audience. Bland actors with questionable talent try to perform their iconic parts to the best of their ability. It doesn't work, but it's mostly not their fault. The soundtrack is the main offender, with the choreography coming up second. Songs that once rocked with face-melting, foot-stomping, anthemic power, has been reduced to flat, lifeless, plodding sugar pop. The sound production is utterly bland and nondescript, the instrumental performances even worse. My teenage garage band did The Time Warp better than this. What the hell happened to running a guitar through a tube amp? This doesn't rock, and it sure as hell doesn't roll.
Then there is the dancing. From the moment actor Reeve Carney tries to channel creepy butler Riff Raff like an 80s hair metal relic having a seizure, you know the whole thing is gonna suck. Rocky creator Richard O'Brien infused the original character with gleeful suppressed malice, while Carney comes across as dangerous as a wet puppy. This goes for the entire production. The magic of the original production was a talented cast of misfits cutting loose, having fun and getting their freak on. The 2016 version is a music- by-numbers third-rate cabaret act.
The next time Rocky Horror is due for a remake, start with a good band, find some actors with a hefty dose of crazy in them, and stop taking everything so damned serious.
Aftermath (2016)
A failed opportunity
The idea of supernatural forces awakening to wreak havoc in our world has been exploited many times over the years, with varying degrees of success. SyFy's new series Aftermath is sadly one of the most poorly executed attempts in recent memory.
Remember Anne Heche? The actress had a brief moment getting high profile parts in the 1990s, then claimed her career was ruined because of her much publicized relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. In Aftermath she plays the main part as a mother and "former Air Force" soldier, trying to protect her bumbling academic husband and obnoxious teenage children from the newly awakened supernatural horrors. The husband is played, badly, by Heche's real-life partner James Tupper. This is quite frankly remarkable, since the couple seem unable to dig up an iota of chemistry between them.
The initial idea of a tough-as-nails mother is quickly abandoned by the writing team, and by episode two, Heche's character is reduced to staring glassy eyed out the window, and making astronomically stupid decisions to keep the plot moving. Ah yes, the plot. It goes something like this:
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD:
A family of extremely unlikable and unbelievable stereotypes live on some sort of farm in the state of Washington. The mother is a retired US Air Force pilot and homemaker, carrying herself with all the military backbone of a tulip. She is married to a parody of a bumbling academic, so inept it borders on the offensive. Together they have three absolutely horrible teenage kids, who look nothing like siblings, and couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag. The family displays a collective IQ barely above room temperature, which is necessary for hogwash like this to work.
They start experiencing natural disasters and supernatural phenomenon, and get reports of cannibalism and mysterious plagues in nearby communities. The family, ex-military mother and all, decides to take no precautions what so ever. None. In fact, they don't even lock their doors. Mom digs in the garden, her revolting daughters bicker, and dad drives to work despite observing machine gun-toting hillbillies in drag along the road. The son sulks and broods because he's leaving for college. Or something. Who cares? Definitely not the audience.
When bratty daughter #1 is abducted by a flying "skinwalker" in broad daylight, it's time to get this nonsensical freakshow on the road. It's also blatantly clear that we're in for yet another crap YA-interpretation of traditional myths and folklore. Brat #1 wakes up in the woods somewhere, and calls mom on her ever present mobile phone - phones are a major plot vehicle in this mess. Anyway, this is when the train of logic leaves the station, and goes directly off the rails.
Bratty daughter #1, for some inexplicable reason, knows exactly where in the woods she is stranded. Ex-military mom, instead of telling her to head for home, decides to pick her up in a nearby town that we know has been quarantined. Ex-military mom gets her entire dumbass family into a old Winnebago and hits the road, leaving their perfectly defensible farm behind. It takes remarkable talent to come up with drivel like this, and actually sell it.
I have a hard time describing the mess that follows. Suffice to say it makes an average DTV teen slasher movie look like Inception. This is a series that fails on almost every level. The writing is downright bad, the acting is mostly atrocious, and the direction is erratic. Worst of all is the sense that the characters aren't real, because nobody can possibly be this stupid.
After the brilliance of The Expanse, I had hoped SyFy would be able to produce more high-end material. Aftermath is a disaster which will be fed to the sharks after one season, unless they completely revamp the production.