Let’s do the timewarp again! (Or not.)
Midnight movie staple THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is getting the remake treatment from Fox TV. In what’s being billed as a two-hour event special, the program will be directed by Kenny Ortega (the High School Musical franchise). It has tentatively been titled The Rocky Horror Picture Show Event and is described as a reimagining of the campy horror feature, which celebrates its 40th Anniversary this year.
While the TV remake is expected to stick faithfully to the text and the score of the original, it figures to “greatly reimagine the story visually,” as Deadline has it. No word on whether or not the network is planning to air it live.
The film, based on a musical by Richard O’Brien, stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf and O’Brien. Here’s the well-known plot:
On the way to visit an old college professor, the two clean-cut kids, Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and his fiancee Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon), run into tire trouble and seek help at the site of a light down the road. It’s coming from “the Frankenstein place,” where Dr. Frank N Furter (Tim Curry), a transvestite from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, is in the midst of one of his maniacal experiments — he’s created the perfect man, a rippling piece of beefcake christened Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood), and intends to put him to good use (his own) in his kinky household retinue, presided over by a hunchback henchman named Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien) and his incestuous sister Magenta (Patricia Quinn), and assisted by a tap dancing groupie-in-residence, Columbia (Little Nell).
No premiere date has been issued yet, but one would guess sometime around Halloween would be a sensible time to unveil it.