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

Cox not only plays the central character of Dr. Frank N Furter, but she also nearly takes complete ownership of the entire production and would succeed if it weren’t for terrific work by the other cast members.

Movie-izing the event showcases the vibrant production, but at the cost of spontaneous live energy, which would have better served this manic musical. The cast is nonetheless astounding. [21/28 Oct 2016, p.95]

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not freaky, or scary, or erotic, or even particularly weird. It’s just a kind of boring musical with a particularly nonsensical plot. The highlight is Laverne Cox, who plays Frank-N-Furter, the role made deliciously creepy by Tim Curry. Cox is the strongest performer in the production, and she has much of the necessary screen presence and vocal timbre to stand out in the middle of the mediocre spectacle.