Shock Treatment

You can file today's entry under movies that you didn't know had sequels. Once The Rocky Horror Picture Show achieved it's cult status, the filmmalers decided to cash in on it and make a sequel. The result was 1981's little seen Shock Treatment.

Our heroes Brad and Janet Majors, Cliff DeYoung and Jessica Harper stepping into the roles originated by Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, are now married. Their life is far from blissful, and they hope that appearing on the television show Marriage Maze might fix their marital woes. The host, a blind tv therapist named Bert Schnick, Barry Humphries, decides that it will be best to have Brad committed to an insane asylum on a popular soap opera on the same network, and to give Janet a makeover. Janet becomes an instant celebrity while Brad begins to lose his mind under the care of brother and sister doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley, Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn.

Brad and Janet's friend Betty Hapschatt, Ruby Wax, who's talk show on the network was recently cancelled, smells a rat. With the help of a Judge, Charles Gray, Betty does some investigating and uncovers a secret connection between Brad and the station owner, a fast food mogul named Farley Flavors, also played by DeYoung.

Not quite as entertaining as Rocky Horror, but still a lot of fun. I think the filmmakers tried to hard to recapture the magic of the first one. Plus Bostwick, Sarandon, and Tim Curry or sorely missed. Harper and DeYoung are fine, but it's a little unsettling when Harper, who is a bass, begins singing when you are used to Sarandon's high pitch. The actors who do return from the original, O'Brien, Quinn, Gray, and Little Nell are still fun to watch. Humphries, aka Dame Edna, fares best out of the new actors. He is a hoot as Schnick.

I will say that I love the soundtrack. O'Brien, who wote the music as well as the screenplays for both films, is a musical genius. His tunes in this are very lively and catchy.

A huge flop when it first opened, Shock Treatment has slowly developed a cult following, but not to the magnitude that Rocky Horror did. I think when it comes to a cult film, it's hard to recapture what made the original work a second time. That being said, I do really enjoy this and I would recommend it to any fans of the original.

It's available on dvd.