In a newly written proem for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the American Gothic farm couple stand by the door of a country church to tell us that the movie is groovy, but literate. And when Brad and Janet … drive off to their rendezvous with worse-than-death, Nixon resigns, totally ignored, over the car radio….

The hero's camp ineptitude is amusing at first: 'We'll just play along and pull out our aces when the time comes,' he soothes, as he and Janet are brutally stripped by divers bizarre aliens, while [Frank-N-Furter] slithers and lisps 'What charming underclothes' as if praising hybrid tea roses. But it's all cumulatively unendearing, the pansexual lust-rock and choreography too like a sustained bombardment with heavy marshmallow, and the innumerable references to Fay Wray pass from whimsy to obsession…. [The] plot is decerebrate, and altogether the film wriggles between too many stools: you can't...