Monday, November 3, 2008

Shock Treatment

The Rocky Horror picture show was by far one of my favorite (If not, the favorite) films of all time. I've loved it since I was a small child, probably too young to be watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show but there you go...
It has it all! Thrills! Chills! Laughs! Susan Sarandon in leather!
A true classic of a film, no doubt about it and would easily get 5 smiley faces if I ever chose to review it...
I know that many people reading this might be wondering why I'm going on about The Rocky Horror Picture show and I know this because I myself would have wondered, had I read this review a mere week or two ago for you see I, like many of us, was blissfully unaware that The Rocky Horror Picture Show spawned a sequel and it's name was Shock Treatment!

No, no, don't click on the link I only put it there as a hellish temptation.

Some sequels really fuck up the original film.

Some sequels are just so phenomenally God-awful that they take any sort of point that the first film made and take a giant crap all over it.

Some sequels are so mind-numbingly terrible that they make you feel nothing but an enormous amount of pity for the poor saps who were roped into reprising their roles from the original.

Some sequels are so drastically vomitous and pleasure-destroying that merely trying to recall them makes you wish you could rip out your own brain through your ears just to forget they ever plagued your life.

Fortunately, Shock Treatment is so far beyond all that, it is so awful and so despicable that it has thankfully been long since forgotten, allowing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to essentially retro-actively abort it's offspring. Praise the Lord above for the fact that this film is very little known and is rarely, if ever, associated with it's far far superior first.

You want a plot summary? Fine.

It seems Brad and Janet, having completely and miraculously forgotten anything that happened to them in the previous film find themselves in the audience of a strangely unappealing and boring musical gameshow. Having no recollection of the events which preceded them however, seems to have ABSOLUTELY NO SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER, as ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happens in this film which has anything to do with the original in any way whatsoever, except that it stars Brad and Janet, both of whom are played by completely different actors. Janet doesn't look a thing like Susan Sarandon and she can't lip-sync for shit

Check it fucking out?!!?

Sure, she looks like she's whispering the correct words but it doesn't look a thing like she's singing them...

Whatever... basically this film has none of the appeal of the original, the songs are cringe-worthy and irrelevant and the whole theme of the film (Something about how Television controls our lives and minds, maybe?) is so completely un-backed up and lost in a mindless bubble of shit-acting and poor singing that what Shock Treatment ended up looking like is a movie, how it would appear, if Uwe Boll decided to remake a Terry Gilliam movie.

Awful.

Save yourselves and don't ever try and seek out this pile of trash as I did...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I seem to remember there was a rumour this was being made back when we were in school - but apparently this movie was made in 1981, so that doesn't really make any sense at all...

Spike Vicious said...

I think this movie really got lost in time somewhere because I remember hearing a rumor of Richard O'Brien working on a sequel.

I'm somewhat glad that this movie managed to stay out of my life for so long though...

Rik Mayal was even in it, being an embarrassing wreck!