The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

The musical numbers feel a bit overproduced. There’s a rough edge to the classic film, the sense that anything could happen, which is fundamentally missing here.

Think of this, maybe, as a "Glee" version of "Rocky Horror." The musical numbers range from entertaining ("Time Warp" gets a big, loud production) to fine. The pretty young cast struggles with the tone, except for Justice, who takes her role so seriously, she seems to be in a different movie.

Fox’s creaky re-imagining of the cult classic “Rocky Horror Picture Show” misses the point about what makes the original so beloved.

Although it’s moderately entertaining at times, it never makes clear why it needed to be attempted.

Dueling impulses—wanting this to be as bad as the script, but also wanting everyone to do a good job—make for a bifurcated experience. The spirit is there among performers, but they’re almost too good, calling attention to the fact that the fun of Rocky Horror seems to be the camaraderie among fellow fans, not the doggerel that’s up on the screen.

This Fox remake is briskly staged and competently done, but it's haunted by a sterility and a forced cheerfulness that goes against the show's grain.

Ortega and company could have risked sacrilege and messed around more with “Rocky Horror,” not only trimming its length and improving its plot, but perhaps also teasing some new relevance out of the material. As it is, they’ve made a fresh copy, but it plays very much like a copy and nothing more.

The Rocky Horror purists will (and should) certainly turn their noses up at this sanitized Hot Topic version. Newbies won’t understand the enduring appeal, given that there’s almost nothing worse than a bad attempt at camp. And while Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox--who as Dr. Frank-N-Furter is the main attraction--comports herself well, she fails to yield anything particularly stirring or remotely iconic.

The storytelling, clearly, isn’t the point. It’s about the feeling of Rocky Horror and, as the film took on this cult second life, the audience who is feeling it. But with this Fox production, it’s unclear who the intended audience is.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again is a sterile facsimile of Rocky Horror’s original camp, filtered through the lens of Party City’s least inspired Halloween aisle.

There isn’t much to laugh at in this production, which has taken its arch irony and presented it with an earnestness that works against the nature of the material.

By casting Cox, easily the best-known transgender actress in Hollywood, as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Fox is clearly angling for contemporary relevance, but instead, the result feels uncomfortably dated. Directed by Kenny Ortega, the filmmaker behind Disney’s squeaky clean “High School Musical” trilogy, this is an overly slick remake that scrubs away the messy, low-budget charm of the original while throwing its glaring flaws into relief.

The costly Fox production robs the tale of its underdog status, replacing the artistry and vision of the original film with a flat attempt that never stood a chance to recapture lightning twice.

The new cast is certainly game, expecially Cox, who has some terrific moves in her dance routines. And Adam Lambert crashes through a window on a motorcycle to perform a rollicking number. But what plot there is goes sideways in the last half-hour, just as in the movie. At that point, I just wanted it to be over.

Let's Do the Time Warp Again suffers from suffocating staging and an utter lack of reflection on the source material--but also from the source material itself, as what little energy it possesses is gone by a second half that turns into a real slog.