Tuesday, June 24, 2008

They got the "Horror" Part Right.

Be Advised: Really long blog with strong usage of parentheticals and hyphenates ahead. The MPAA would rate this PG13 for brief language and adult situations.

Who: Molly, MFB, & Bex

Where: Clinton Street Theater, Portland, OR

When: Saturday night.

What: Midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"

Why: Molly thought it would be less awkward than a house party, at which she knew none of the people so felt like a tool playing flip cup with water. (Molly was WRONG!)

I was anticipating people being dressed up and singing along. What I was not anticipating was an hour of pre-movie puerile escapades of horny exhibitionists. When we entered the theater there was a young morbidly obese man, with a guitar and a scantily clad young woman next to him. He was singing an ode to strippers whilst the young woman danced next to him, doing the same 4 moves over and over again for the duration of the way-too-long song. There were a couple other songs with a lot of really bad stage banter, and then he exited the stage, but not before he announced that he was "someone's fetish." Finally, the movie, oh, no, wait, what’s that? It’s another guy getting up on stage. He has hair longer than all of the women in the theater, and you can tell that though he doesn’t maintain it, it is his pride and joy. He yells directly into a microphone, and yet mumbles at the same time.

He thinks he is charismatic and funny; he is wrong. He brings all of the people celebrating their birthday to the stage, 7 people, ranging in age from 15 to past legal, and he has them grab their ankles whilst a line of people, the not very cleverly called the “Mega-Ass Slap Train,” you guessed it, slapped their asses. We think this is strange, but surely the movie will start soon and everything will settle down. Unfortunately for us, the movie did not start quickly. Instead, we had to suffer through the emcee bringing dozens of people for which it was their first time there to the stage. (MFB, Bex, and I did not go up; not because we aren’t fun, but because we're not stupid.)

The poor schmucks on stage were put through a series of wildly inappropriate games, i.e., “Best Chest Contest”, (during which, one of the girls actually shed her top, just like she would in the very popular ‘Girls with Low Self-Esteem’ videos,) “The Pants-Off Dance-Off”, “Kama Sutra Combat” “Pin the Dick on the Douche-bag” and the “Fake an Orgasm game” (which, Chicken would have won had we had him with us). What was most disturbing was the emcee’s several not-so-subtle allusions to pedophilia. He had all of the minors (and there were several) stand facing the back of the stage and grab their ankles. Then he wanted the audience to yell an expletive starting with “f” at them, which of course they did, and then the emcee said, "now you can go home and say you were [effed] in the ass by the entire audience." SO EFFED UP!

I’ve always felt that there is a certain segment of society that needs to remain asexual. I don’t care whether or not these people have sex, I just can’t think of them as sexual beings because I get grossed out. All of the people in charge of this show were people who probably have never even had sex, (certainly not without slipping their date a Forget-Me-Now) but who were absolutely obsessed with it.

At around 1 a.m. they finally started the movie, I thought things would quiet down, and everyone would pipe up during the songs. DAMN! I was wrong, YET AGAIN. Throughout the opening credits, instead of the ECU of the mouth, we were presented with the scantily clad young woman from the ode to a stripper. She had a chair now, and started to strip. (Let’s just say that Jessie Spanno could teach her a thing or 80. She could at least buy the Carmen Elektra video…) We thought that she clearly can’t strip because of the several minors present, well, she didn’t get naked thanks to cleverly placed X’s made out of electrical tape. It was SO UNSEXY. The best part of the night might have been MFB saying something like, “I wonder if I was straight if I’d be attracted to that.” (He wouldn’t; she was gross.)

(I should take this opportunity to say that I have only seen the R.H.P.S. on Comedy Central, and Bex and MFB had never seen it.)

The action of the movie started, but we couldn’t see Susan Sarandon and the guy from Spin City because there was a homemade spotlight shining on people dressed up in vaguely similar costumes and walking around mouthing the words. And every few seconds people from all over the theater would shout not-quite-unison-so-therefore-completely-unintelligible-phrases at the screen. There was no singing along with the songs, except for shouting “Brad” and “Janet”. The rest were things they made up as if they were huge fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 but never got any of the jokes Crow and the gang made from lack of intelligence. We left after Tim Curry’s second number knowing that this is not the way he would want the film to be viewed. A sing-a-long with costumes would be fun, but the Clinton Street gang is butchering that movie, and subsequently exponentially increasing their chances of never getting laid by hanging in that asocial scene.

6 comments:

errin julkunen-pedersen said...

oh dear molly,
had i known this adventure awaited you i would have warned you. i have seen it live twice, the first i was mortified, but 18, so tried to pretend it was cool. the second time, i thought maybe i was too young to understand it, so i opted to go again. every time i am disgusted and wonder why i went. though, it is some FINE freak watching. though the last time i went, i saw a dude's junk, and it was frightening.

let us make a no-more rocky horror picture show pact. it is not fun, under any circumstance, unless you are a freak or so drunk you don't get how awful it is, so let's just stay away.

michael said...

seriously, were you taking notes? you got all of the game names down. somehow that whole part of the evening is like a drunken haze for me, and sadly there was no alcohol even involved. perhaps it was dizziness from traveling through the alternate universe portal.

Britt said...

i feel like you need a hug!! picture my arms outstretched 3000 miles, give or take a few. and then we can go to eternal sunshine and get your memories of that night erased.

joojierose said...

o.m.g.

o.m.g.


o.m.g.

b.lowe said...

ahahahahaha! Oh, that's just too bad. I always thought that a live showing would be fun, but thanks to your story, I'll know to avoid it.

However, your note about how the chicken would have won the fake orgasm contest brought a smile to my face... one of my favorite memories.

lulu123 said...

rocky horror picture show and trekkies, two groups of fanboys that should NEVER, NEVER engage in anything sexual in public...or in private. i'm on your side friend 100%