The Fishnet Delusion

I haven't written any criticism since my Master's, so I'm really grateful for the Overrated Challenge for encouraging me to do so. I have thoroughly enjoyed the process. Having always held reservations about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it feels great to finally get them off my chest!

The Fishnet Delusion: Why The Rocky Horror Picture Show is Cinematic Trash Masked as Cult Treasure 

Let’s get one thing straight before the toast starts flying: there is a massive, irreconcilable difference between a great piece of cinema and a great after-the-pub party. For over five decades, Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) has enjoyed a religious-type immunity from genuine criticism. Protected by an impenetrable, thick armour of fishnets, flying rice, and midnight subculture, it has been widely canonised as a masterclass in camp and a milestone of sexual liberation. But cult devotion is a powerful hallucinogen. To ensure that time, maturity, or a shifting cultural lens hadn't somehow vindicated this piece of intellectual property, I recently strapped myself down and forced myself to sit through it yet again. I went in as an open-minded researcher, hoping a fresh viewing might reveal some hidden artistic depth or directorial genius I had previously missed. Instead, watching it in cold, clinical isolation, stripped of the collective energy of a live crowd, only exposed the rotting frame of a fundamentally broken movie.

When you remove the audience participation, the illusion completely vanishes, leaving behind a disjointed, poorly paced, and structurally chaotic slog. The Rocky Horror Picture Show does not tell a story; it simply holds the audience hostage with aesthetic shock value, substituting cohesive narrative arcs and basic filmmaking competence for glossy but low substance provocative posturing. The hype, quite simply, has spent fifty years masking a deeply mediocre movie.

The beating heart of the film is the worship revolving around Dr. Frank N. Furter, portrayed with undeniable charisma by Tim Curry. Curry’s performance is electric. He commands the screen with a fierce, magnetic energy that pulls the audience in. It is easy to see why his performance became iconic. However, sitting through the film with an analytical eye reveals that an iconic performance cannot save a fundamentally broken and toxic character arc.

Pop culture often celebrates Frank N. Furter as a liberating icon of sexual freedom and queer autonomy. This interpretation requires ignoring virtually everything the character actually does on screen. Frank N. Furter is not a champion of liberation. He is a predatory, manipulative, and deeply abusive tyrant. His entire philosophy is rooted not in mutual freedom, but in the total control and subjugation of everyone around him.

This toxic dynamic is most glaringly illustrated in the back-to-back bedroom scenes involving Brad and Janet. Frank N. Furter uses deliberate deceit and impersonation to seduce both characters. He preys on their confusion and vulnerability in near-identical setups. In modern cinematic terms, these actions are not expressions of radical sexual liberation. They are textbook instances of predatory coercion. The film frames these encounters as an awakening for Brad and Janet, but the underlying text is dark and non-consensual. 

Frank’s tyranny extends to his domestic life. He treats his loyal servants, Riff Raff and Magenta, with cruel contempt. He treats his literal creation, Rocky, not as a living being with agency, but as a sexual toy to be locked up and monitored. When the film reaches its climax, it attempts a massive narrative pivot. During the poolside Floor Show, and the subsequent I'm Going Home musical number, the film asks the audience to feel deep sympathy for Frank. It frames him as a tragic, misunderstood romantic who is too beautiful for this harsh world.

This emotional pivot fails completely. It is impossible to mourn a character who has spent the prior eighty minutes acting as an unrepentant monster. His final downfall is not a tragedy. It is the logical consequence of his own unchecked cruelty. By attempting to force a sympathetic ending onto a predatory villain, the script proves itself incapable of handling its own dark themes, leaving the climax feeling unearned, hollow, and emotionally manipulative.

The script’s structural carelessness and reliance on cheap shock value are perfectly encapsulated in the character of Eddie. Played by rock legend Meat Loaf, Eddie represents one of the biggest narrative misfires in cult cinema history, a fact made painfully obvious when watching the scenes unfold back to back.

Eddie is introduced with an explosive burst of energy. He crashes through a laboratory wall on a motorcycle, launching into the musical number Hot Patootie, Bless My Soul. For three minutes, the movie suddenly finds its pulse. Meat Loaf delivers a raw, high-octane rock-and-roll performance that injects genuine excitement into the otherwise sluggish pacing. Eddie is positioned as a grand, chaotic counterweight to Frank-N-Furter’s gothic sci-fi aesthetic. He represents the rebellious, gritty spirit of 1950s rock-and-roll. He is a character bursting with narrative potential.

Yet, before Eddie can establish any meaningful stakes or interact with the plot, Frank N. Furter brutally kills him with a pickaxe. The murder is motivated by nothing more than a childish fit of jealous rage. The scene then takes an even more grotesque turn later in the film. Eddie’s corpse is secretly carved up, cooked, and served as dinner to his own grieving girlfriend, Columbia, and the unsuspecting Brad and Janet.

This sequence highlights the fundamental laziness of the screenplay. Eddie is not a character, he is a transient plot device. The writer, Richard O'Brien, built up a fascinating, rebellious archetype only to immediately slaughter him for a cheap, stomach churning twist. Meat Loaf's immense screen presence is completely thrown away. The film demonstrates a total disregard for narrative investment. It chooses to value sudden, grotesque shocks over genuine character development or structural cohesion. Eddie's entire existence in the film is a middle finger to the audience's attention, proving that Rocky Horror prefers cheap gimmicks over storytelling.

The screenplay’s fundamental structural weakness is further exposed by its treatment of Columbia and Dr. Scott. During my research screening, these two characters stood out as profound storytelling failures. They exist primarily to pad out the runtime and vocalise exposition that the director failed to convey visually. Like Eddie, they are introduced with narrative promise, only to be reduced to static background scenery.

Columbia, portrayed by Nell Campbell, is a tragic waste of character potential. In the first act, she is presented as a crucial link to the castle’s history. She is the former groupie, the abandoned lover of Frank N. Furter, and the deeply grieving partner of the slaughtered Eddie. This complex web of relationships should make her a volatile emotional anchor for the film's second half. Instead, the script completely abandons her emotional arc. Following Eddie's brutal murder, Columbia’s grief is briefly played for dark laughs during the dinner scene, but she is then stripped of all narrative agency. She is reduced to a high pitched cheerleader for Frank’s whims, screaming in the background while doing tap dance routines. Her sudden rebellion during the final act feels completely unearned because the screenplay spent the preceding hour ignoring her existence. Her ultimate fate, being casually vaporised alongside Frank, is treated as a minor footnote, proving the filmmakers viewed her as furniture rather than a living character.

The arrival of Dr. Everett Scott, played by Jonathan Adams, pushes the film's narrative incoherence into total self-parody. Dr. Scott is introduced as the ultimate plot catalyst. He is Brad and Janet’s old high school science teacher, a government scientist investigating UFOs, and Eddie’s uncle. He represents the outside world crashing into Frank’s bubble of hedonism. He should represent the voice of logic, tension, and authority, yet, the moment he crashes through the laboratory wall, any semblance of a structured thriller completely collapses.

Dr. Scott is immediately subjected to the film's trademark tonal whiplash. He is wheeled into the dinner scene to deliver the painfully slow exposition song, Eddie's Teddy. This musical number serves no purpose other than to awkwardly tell the audience facts they already know. Soon after, his status as a serious government agent is completely humiliated during the Floor Show climax. Here, he is inexplicably dressed in fishnets and a corset, dancing along with the rest of the cast. The film entirely throws away the ideological conflict between the conservative outside world and Frank's alien counterculture. Instead, it chooses to humiliate its only authority figure for a cheap, visual gag. Dr. Scott stops functioning as a real character and becomes a prop, highlighting a lazy script that values brief visual shocks over coherent thematic resolution.

When people praise The Rocky Horror Picture Show, they inevitably point to the soundtrack. The music is widely regarded as a flawless collection of rock ‘n’ roll anthems. But if you take a step back and analyse the soundtrack as a cohesive theatrical score, the illusion quickly shatters. Beyond its few big hits, the music of Rocky Horror is surprisingly hollow, repetitive, and narrative stalling.

A great musical uses its songs to advance the plot, develop characters, or explore complex emotional shifts. Rocky Horror uses the majority of its songs as sonic wallpaper to pad out a razor-thin storyline. Consider numbers like Planet, Schmanet, Janet, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-Me, or Eddie's Teddy. Lyrically, these songs are incredibly weak, often repeating the same basic phrases over and over. Musically, they are stagnant, relying on basic, uninspired chord progressions that drag the narrative to a screeching halt.

Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-Me, while visually memorable due to Susan Sarandon's performance, does nothing to move the story forward. It simply hits the pause button on the plot so the film can indulge in a more sexualised camp. Eddie's Teddy is a narrative disaster. It is a slow, plodding exposition dump disguised as a musical number, delivered by Dr. Scott to explain a backstory that the movie failed to show visually.

Even the late-stage numbers, such as Rose Tint My World and the rest of the Floor Show sequence, suffer from extreme pacing issues. The songs bleed into one another in a dazzling array of feathers and corsets, but they lack any real musical progression. They feel like filler tracks designed to stretch a thin, short stage play into a feature-length film. Strip away the nostalgia, and you are left with a soundtrack that has about fifteen minutes of brilliant material stretched across an agonizing hour and a half.

Any honest critique of the music must eventually confront the elephant in the room: The Time Warp. It is an undeniable masterpiece of popular culture. The track is infectious, brilliantly structured, and bursting with theatrical joy. It captures the madness of the genre it parodies, and the instructional dance steps make it universally accessible. It is, without question, the best part of the entire film.

But herein lies the ultimate proof of the film’s overrated nature, you do not even need to see the movie to enjoy it.

The Time Warp has completely transitioned away from the film from which it was born. It has achieved a much better, more vibrant life entirely independent of Jim Sharman’s movie. It is a mandatory staple at wedding receptions, Halloween parties, and school discos worldwide. People who have never seen a single frame of Rocky Horror know exactly how to jump to the left and step to the right.

Watching the actual film adds absolutely nothing to the experience of the song. In fact, seeing it in its original cinematic context actually diminishes it. In the movie, The Time Warp occurs early on, acting as a massive spike of adrenaline. But because the rest of the film is bogged down by sluggish pacing, murky editing, and a crumbling narrative structure, the high of The Time Warp quickly fades. You are far better off listening to the track on a party playlist than sitting through the cinematic trainwreck that surrounds it.

Ultimately, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is celebrated for the community culture it created, not for its objective quality as cinema. The midnight screenings and the safe spaces provided to generations of marginalised fans are beautiful, valuable things. But we must not confuse the community's brilliance with the film’s quality.

Enduring another screening of this film proved definitively that time has done nothing to warp its structural wounds. The movie itself remains a poorly constructed, narrative mess. It features a hypocritical and predatory protagonist, wastes its best characters for cheap shock value, and relies on a soundtrack bloated with repetitive filler. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a cinematic masterpiece. It is a brilliant party trapped inside a mediocre ninety minute movie. It is time to take off the rose-tinted glasses and admit that this cult classic is severely overrated.